LaTeX For Lazy People

When it comes to putting figures, equations, tables into Microsoft Word documents or OpenOffice Writer I find it to be a major pain in my head and ass. My head because I have to deal with equation editors, cutting and pasting, alignments and other formatting issues. Two weeks ago I was creating an exam for one of my data comm classes and getting very frustrated with the way that OpenOffice does numbering so I decided to try LaTeX since it seemed to not require any the use of menus, GUIs or other things that I am slowly having less and less patience for.

At first I used Lyx but that was limited in a number of ways, but by studying the source code it generated I started to get the hang of LaTeX
scripting. So in about a week I was just creating my tex documents in vim then converting them to postscript files. Now that I getting comfortable with LaTeX I wonder why I put off learning it for so many years.

It really does make writing easier for me, once I finish my typing lessons the only thing that will keep me from being more productive in my writing will be the time and effort it takes to express an idea well. And as usual that is the hardest part that only practiced discipline can bring.

To Ian Chang

To Ian Chang

We are all individualists who descend into Mos Maiorum's
. Just like the ancient mariner I stolidly
accept Egyptian divas who drink pearls like Shivas.
Next like Poe you will ask how many Gordon's dance on the head of a Pym!
Don't quote Atlas Shrugged when John Galt rally balked!
So now we can tell Ayn Rand where to get off!

As I & I drive by baobab trees I listen to Kropotkin's 25
theses on the conquest of bread.
but I am still unaware of what he said
Bakunin is nailed to my head
if you think my ideas spring fully formed
consult the Stepping Razor
otherwise let Jah can be praised.
In a chant to Elijah Muhammad with hands upraised.

The kill and go
block the road in this land not described by Wayne's
Western Philosophy.
I once wrote a song about youth even though
I am no childe roland who to the heart of darkness came.
there is nothing here postmod and tradition dates
from 1919 thought they sell you 1416

I am a stranger in my own land so I look to distant shores
beyond pellinore, though every day I thank Napoleon for importing revolution
even though he ruled without constitution in a little Italian car.
I remember staying at the bent prop inn
where the wretched made a hearth and chanted
"we are the good guys in the back of the real!
Who helped Casey to the bat so that he finally makes a steal".

The czars of hegemony challenged her.
The gari eaters live in fear
Maybe at the next road stop
Some OC who dreams of welding a bull pup
will spray me with lead so I must sufficiently beg

To Ian Chang Who Taught Me Elementary break dancing
I dream of smoke machines
with 9 millimeter beams.
Wally sacrifices metals for our lifeline,
a pipeline to the 42 warring states
who celebrate Christmas last with unpaid repasts
of fatted kine soaked in Atlantic brine.

Now that there is a tasty kitchen in Jimeta
maybe Momma will stop tripping.
But outside of St Cloud there is no cheap thrills,
though En Vogue promised me something I can feel.

I ate poundo yam with spinach soup
and danced with baker street runners
in the red hot summer while Skika played
the beats of east African drummers
Hip hop is universal and I am sending another
object of Ioconsicousstream
May developing in C++ be more than a goddamn dream

Cape Town beckons
to travellers who dead reckon.
What makes this an African verse is that is while snow flakes fall on Mount Kilimanjaro
the Beautiful ones, unborn, weep not for the brahmins who came to this world twice.
Like Ogbanjes loudly proclaiming their right to return,

Then again I am thrice blessed, twice in the east once in the west.
If you mark the twain there are no more innocents abroad
just folks who mourn for Denver,
Denver, where Hiram Abiff raised his Moloch
over his Mexican Radio to kill the big beat.

I will stop here since there is no where else to go,
Some will show art in Mayday in the meantime there is the didachae to give me tropic dreams
of eternal machines.

Schleping To Homer

One day after buying rubber boots for the wet and muddy conditions around here I decided to traipse from my mountain retreat to the bucolic town of Homer-by-the sea. I did not depart like Zarathustra, full of a light he wished to share with the world. Neither did I bound like a dog to whom after five seconds all scents, and sights are new, some say the first cynic was like that. No, instead I walked the way I always do, similar to a tourist surveying a new land while I carry a backpack of my previous places. I see the world with old eyes and the flowers are colored with the remembrance of the thousand flowers I saw before that is how I went down-going..

I went agoing like any other portly, middleaged man, who walks through a foot of mud for ten miles because he enjoys it. Maybe the picture below will you give an idea why.



After walking ten miles in my Neoprene Xtratufs I got onto a asphalted road and I saw this view. Some low lying clouds were around the cliff, the slight breeze was pushing them out to sea. In the distance I could see one of the many glaciers that are around here. Hopefully before winter I will be able to reach out and touch the head of the glacier and examine a crevasse. By the time I took this picture my feet, ankles, and hamstrings were quite sore. I sincerely hope gentle reader you never have to walk fourteen miles in my neoprene boots. Firstly because I am uncomfortable with lending out such intimate apparel as footware, secondly because it is very uncomfortable. Now I wonder why someone does not design Wellingtons with better support, I do not think the fishermen who stand in them for hours find them gentle on the feet either. Anyway I think the experience was worth the pain since I got to write about the pain of walking for miles with rainboots and take a nice picture. In the end Katya had to get me since I walked two miles away from town and my feet hurt too much to walk the five or six miles to her work.

Sunset Over Mount Augustine

One of the things that I like about living in a mountain cabin ten miles from Homer is that you can see the volcanoes around here. I was told by the SO that the one you can see easiest is active, on a really clear day its' possible to see Mount Augustine smoking. The other thing is there are some beautiful sunsets with the sea, the moutains, and the forest are all painted by the light of the eleven o'clock northen sun. There are many beautiful, wild places here and I am already trying to plan a hiking excursion to some of the mountians once I get a boat to take me.

After I read Call of The Wild & Two Against The North I imagined what it would be like to live here, I just hope I get to see a lot of the outdoors. Strange Death wrote about the sameness of the American commercial landscape. If he came here he would find that because of the many hippies and partial randites from the little I have seen of the architecture here its' a mix of; 19th century American homestead school, Native Alaskan design, fishing village chique, and Alpine lodge style. But then again I could be completely wrong since I am not by nature very taken to architetrucal critiques, however buildings are not designed in the same style as Minneapolis or Montgomery.

Tell me Starbuck is that a Bradley Fighting Vehicle I spy out of the Corner of My Unglassed Eye?

I hate science fiction. I hate it the same way a former lover hates you. They know you in some ways better than you know yourself and know what makes you tick, your weaknesses and strengths. And if they are very insightful they may even realize that your strengths and your weaknesses make you the person that they loved. Knowing this may make your ex respect and like you even though they do not want to be with you. Well I feel that way about science fiction but with a dash of disfunction as a chaser since, as, a famous person once said; "Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in!" And patient readers Battlestar Galactica has pulled me back in.

The show drives me teeth grinding crazy in the way so many tellievision shows do and it makes the same mistake I see made in books and film. That mistake is being too closely tied to its' own time and place. For example in one of Philip K Dick would imagine futures where people would fly to the stars, killer androids roamed the earth while people fled from them in flying cars decked out with vinyl record players. Nowadys the original Buck Rodgers comic book & serial newsreel do not seem futuristic at all, instead in someways they are sad, played out ideas of a swashbuckling uber man who travelled halfway across the galaxy in 18th century riding boots, with a zap gun and saber. But enough about the past let us see how well BSG travasses the muddy shore of psyence fiction.

Well, five minutes into Season One Episode one of BSG I wondered why Commander Adorno was wearing glasses in a universes that had created faster than light travel, and where hundreds of thousands of folks could live in space ships full of gravity and all the joys of 21st century American Navy and more why the fuck did the captain have to wear glasses? "Anyway enjoy the show", I said to my self, "fuggedaboutit", but then the people following the newsman and his boom mike wielding soundman made me think of Space: 1999 and lousy 1970s fashions. As usual the people in the future are mainly caucasian with a token of African & Asian Americans. Where are the ethnic New Guineans, the Desis, Amerinds and the myriads of ethnicities?

Anyway the exhibition of atrocities continued with things like:

• You would think that by then instead of having comms that look like phones everyone would have an implanted mike and receiver so that they could sub vocalize from anywhere in the ship.
  
• How come funerals use the same type of caskets & elevators in BSG as we do now?
  
• Anyone in our reality will feel right at home in a kitchen or restraunt in the Battle Star Galactica universe
  
• All the audiobook, ebook users as well as environmentalists will be happy to know that books are made with dead trees. Antienvironmetalists and religous zealots will be sad to hear that the tress have been sad to know that the book pulping industry does no environmental harm to the pristine forests of Kobald since their pulp in produced by vats of GMO bacteria, pineoplastics and some kick ass biochemists who go round the tweleve colonies in geosynchronous orbit.
  
• Lovers of military protocol will be happy to know that across the universe, thousands of years in time from us flags are folded the same way for fallen heroes.
  
• Great War vets will be glad to see the Sam Browne belt making a comeback among the Kobol's soldiers, and pilots.
  
• Lastly millions of women will be dissapointed that in the future their cigarette smoking doctor will give them shit for not doing their monthly breast exams.
  

I had been hoping that at the very least that humanity would be rid of cancer as a plot device in sci-fi but I guess I am naive. After all the skyscrapers in Kobald city should have told me that the future is already here just unevenly distributed in set designers & scriptwriters imaginations.

One Thousand Words

If historians were Rock Stars .....

Rick Perlstein would be Tom Waits & Fela to me.