thatmattbone.com

I had the chance to meet Richard Stallman on Friday.  He was speaking at the NA-CAP conference at which I volunteered.  All in all, very interesting, and last night I ended up joining the FSF. 

If you’re awake and you have cable, turn on C-SPAN2 and watch the historic all-night Senate session about Iraq. It really is quite interesting to see the Senators talking on their own without mass media spin. Unfortunately these things are usually only on during the day (though you can catch the last hour if you get home early enough).

Update:
At this time Fox News is talking about a WWE wrestler, CNN is rambling about the Brumfield shooting, MSNBC is showing a prison special, CNBC is showing Donny Deutsch and how you can GET RICH, and the same for Bloomberg.  If this frivolity is not enough, MTV, the shiny things network, is celebrating our national stupidity with ‘Scarred,’ a show with “user-generated videos of mishaps and wipeouts.”

It seems I’ve been in a LaTeX-chatter-whirlwind this past week: someone emailed me about TeX today, I discovered jsmath, this article was on reddit a few days back, and my boss and I were chatting about TeX on Friday. Since I haven’t actually been writing anything lately, I have no need for TeX at the moment, so I’ll just rant.

MS-Word is useless. When writing in word, you’re forced to think about ‘look and feel,’ but when it’s all done, your document will still look like crap (see the aforementioned article for something of intellectual merit on this). Take some time, learn how to use LaTeX (or something as simple as LyX or TeXmacs), and thank yourself later. You’ll write better when you aren’t constantly fretting over the appearance of your document, and it’ll look better when typeset by the brainy TeX algorithms.

Also, if you must collaborate on a document, use a wiki or Google docs, and then paste your nearly complete product into your TeX editor. Emailing a word doc to your colleagues or posting to a website is not collaboration. No one is going to read it, and if they do, they aren’t going to comment. It is too painful.