Abney Park at DragonCon

Wish I had the money to go ... /sigh



So unfair. I have yet to experience their gleeful steampunkery in person. Perhaps someday. The last album was the best yet. I'm already impatiently awaiting the next!

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Geek Glee: LaTeX

Despite the deadline madness, I was able to attend the free workshop day of TUG 2009, the annual TeX Users Group conference. There were issues with the computer setup, so the presenters didn't have a working build of LaTeX to demonstrate for the first half of the day -- but that was okay, neither did I. Rather, I had the editing program but not the add-ons that allow you to actually "TeX" and view your formatted document. Still, after all the glitches, I did manage to get a full build on my laptop after lunch and then finally got to see what the coding I'd been faithfully copying down actually produced.

I am impressed and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of tags and such in the language. One of the presenters made a point of commenting that LaTeX is much better at handling auto-numbering for sections and subsections than MS Word, but I'd have to dispute that point -- they both seem to work equally well, if you know what you're doing.

Another staffer of one of the academic departments attended the workshop as well, much to my delight. I don't generally have much contact with them outside of answering dissertation questions and fishing for publication updates. She offered to send me some files to practice my TeXing, so I'm looking forward to that. I'm also looking forward to deconstructing the dissertation class files and such that we have posted on our website to see if I can figure out how to fix the most common glitches. Better hurry on that though -- I have a standing offer from one of the presenters to try to catch her over the next few days for help if I can't figure it out on my own.

Also: I've been reading up on Visual Basic in MS Office and dang ... I think I've found my next project. Apparently I could write a macro to auto-format all the tables in a given document.

Glee!

In other news, going to see Harry Potter tonight with Edige and his sister. Should be fun!

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Randomosity

Summer deadlines have me pinned firmly under the bootheels of doom at the moment. And so I present Things of Interest (to Me):

The Soldier in Later Medieval England: A database that tracks the careers and records of medieval soldiers; deployment, illnesses, military ranks, etc. Honestly, it just fascinates me that these records are still intact. But perhaps that's my American side showing; we tend to assume a certain degree of impermanence to these things. I mean, we tear down perfectly good buildings and build new ones at the drop of a hat, and these people have preserved military records since the 1300s? Dang.

BBC News is continuing to investigate the place and plight of Roma in Europe. Recent interesting offerings include Centuries of Roma History, Russian Roma Face Image Problem, and Roma in Sweden: Showing the Way?

The Wild Hunt's had a series of guest bloggers while Jason's moving cross-country. I've enjoyed the posts so far, a mix of familiar names and new ones. There are a handful of posts that have stood out for me, particularly because they concern topics that have been on my mind lately:

• Caroline Kenner's guest blog over at Wild Hunt -- taking on the topic of honoring ancestors not just at Samhain, but in every ritual and in our daily lives -- was a good one. I love the idea of the ancestor ladder; I've been trying to think of a good way to use one of my kitchen walls to display family photos, so I think she's on to something there.



• Cat Chapin-Bishop's commentary on community in Paganism struck a nerve, as well. While I'd love to be part of a real community and work towards the establishment of something good and solid and supportive ... I am a barebones Pagan at heart, and I find myself clenching my teeth more often than not when I'm dealing with the majority of others who also describe themselves as Pagan. But that's a topic for another post, I suspect.



• Brendan Myers examined what makes an "elder" -- how the example of Native American communities, in that respect, should provide inspiration and inform our actions and attitudes as Pagans. I thought it was a simple and elegant piece, and am glad he felt the need to address the topic.

More later, perhaps.

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