Tinypliny's Journal

07/29/2009 14:41 #49408

A complete minimalistic reformat
Category: i-tech

I had a nice wake-up scare this weekend and lost some newer revisions of my dissertation. I am not sure entirely what happened but overnight, some of my revised copies went back to their earlier versions with all their glorious little ancient mistakes. It was a very painful weekend. My dissertation is now backed up in 4 more places. My laptop looks like this:

Source:

Yeah, it really does.

I am on a cleaning up and backing up mission and I think I want to go back to the bare-bones aggressively slipstreamed Win XP version that booted in 14 seconds in another life long long long back. I have so many programs here that I have no idea about. I have some piece of obscure software that simultaneously displays weather and forecast in 10 cities. For some reason that I don't have the faintest clue about, one of the cities is Kathmandu, Nepal. Really? What was I thinking??! That is insane, even for me. Did I plan an ill-fated climb of the Mt. Everest in one of my nightmares?? That .exe just went into oblivion trash.

I have no less than 6 Java updates installed! Innumerable re-installs of Firefox and Opera with stray shortcuts ALL OVER the place.This is a living nightmare.

I am whittling it down. Maybe I should just stick to these in the next install

Browser:
Firefox.

Documents
Word 2007
MikTeX

Books/Articles
Adobe Pro
CutePDF
PDF Unlocker

Citations
Bibtex4Word
Jabref

Statistics
R
G*Power3

Visual Media
MPC
ffdshow

Audio
Foobar2000
SRS Labs Plugin
RealAlt Plugin
Mp3Tag

Art
Paint.NET
ArtRage
IrfanView

IRC/Phone
Skype
Neebly

Utilities
Winkey
TaskSwitchXP Pro
7zip
CCleaner
FreeCommander

Do you have better alternatives? :)

NB: I think I might need to update this thread - I have so many random things on my laptop, its ridiculous.
: Wow that image is so tiny, the font became unreadable... I thought the width limit for (e:strip) was 600 pixels. Apparently not...

tinypliny - 07/29/09 19:23
Here is the fun part. I write everything is TeX and then instead of sitting back and gazing at the perfection in formatting, I see a stressful email from my committee asking me what latex is - "is it a rubber-grip gel pen"?

Other comments I have got through these years include: "Where is the .doc?" "I can't 'track changes' and mark up that PDF you sent". "Can you send the [underline, italic, double stressed]WORD [/u,i,ds] version. "Do you know how to make documents in Word?". "I only use Word". "Word works for other students, why can't you behave and turn in a Word .doc?". "Long document work perfectly in word, what is crazy software you use?" "Your TOC is very nice, but where is your word document".

It's pretty nauseating really. I can't quite get into the mood to actually laugh the last laugh. :)

zobar - 07/29/09 16:36
Are you seriously doing your thesis in TeX? I learned LaTeX on a whim twelve years ago because I thought HTML [comp sci] and Word [everything else] made my school reports look ghastly. They called me a lunatic, but who's laughing now? Nobody, because we've all forgotten about it.

- Z

07/19/2009 10:01 #49330

Noel Coward!
Category: music

Indeed. Hahaha...

07/16/2009 23:21 #49312

Niagara Falls is a Ghost Town

You want proof? Behold the hard annotated evidence!*

You begin to have your first suspicions when you see these random dinghies packed with people who wear a regimented attire of a blue flimsy plastic...

...in preparation of sailing face to face with a mighty waterfall that can crush your bones into powder if it crashed on you.

In the wild multinational excitement that surrounds this dinghy trip, you take leave of your senses, suspend your suspicions and pay $13.50 to be loaded on to a wobbly vessel wearing the cult attire.

The dinghy sails past this structure know

a.k.a the virtual Maid of the Mist tour captured enthusiastically through a soaked lens by a wildly excited 1st time tourist. ;-)

07/14/2009 21:26 #49293

Delaware and Summer
Category: e:strip

I was out grocery shopping and guess whom I heard honking at me while I was crossing the road?

Heh. That was funny, (e:enknot). :)

theecarey - 07/15/09 12:54
cute :)

lauren - 07/15/09 11:16
this is too cute.

tinypliny - 07/15/09 08:58
I didn't draw the rat and Tony!

I don't know if I would call the rest of it precise. You are too kind! :)

jim - 07/14/09 22:14
I'm kinda amazed at your drawings. They're very precise.

jim - 07/14/09 22:06
... ?!

07/12/2009 11:16 #49271

The obsession with sugar
Category: opinion

The Taste of Buffalo festival has a stall giving out samples of Fruit Simple - a fruit smoothie mix with no preservatives and no sugar.

I like the idea of not adding sugar and high fructose corn syrup to just about everything under the sun. I thought the smoothies were really good - they tasted like fruits should. The pomegranate-berry flavoured one had a nice tart zing to it. The grittiness of pomegranate pods came through and and I didn't feel as if I was getting short-changed when it came to the fibre-content. The strawberry-banana smoothie was smoother and sweeter and good as well.

While I was at the stall a number of mums with kids in tow sampled the smoothies and without exception, all of them said the smoothies were not sweet enough, were too gritty, were too thick and had too much pulp. Exactly what do these mothers feed their children everyday? Sugar syrup? Because that would fit all of those descriptions - sweet, completely devoid of pulp or any fibre of any kind.

I couldn't help asking one of the mums why she felt her children would dislike the taste of Fruit Simple. Her answer was very revealing. She said that her kids don't drink anything which was not as sweet as soda. Apparently, she sprinkled sugar on all of the fruit she gave them - otherwise they wouldn't eat them.

I don't think it should come as a surprise if a majority of the kids who are growing up today are diagnosed with chronic lifestyle diseases such as Diabetes Type II and Cardiovascular diseases in the future - the victims of an imbalanced ratio of adipose tissue to muscle. Why do parents feel the need to give in to whatever their kids "want to eat"? Why do restaurants have "kid menus" with greasy high-sugar items?

I am sorry if I sound like a parenting nazi (and perhaps I am not even justified in making these comments since I am not a parent) but children are what parents shape them to be. Sure, they have free will and independence but all of it is very much amenable to guidance and healthy example. Healthy habits only persist and bear results if they are started early. If parents are so indifferent and exhausted that they spare the proverbial guiding stick, they must also realize that they are almost entirely responsible for taking years of health off their kids' lives.

tinypliny - 07/12/09 20:52
So sugared cereals are the competition for fruits, eh? That's pretty scary.

I never had pre-made pre-processed cereal of any sort before I came to the US. I bought a pack of fruit loops in my very first month here and I couldn't finish it. It sat on my kitchen shelf for a year before I finally decided to toss it. It was too cloyingly sweet for me.

Even now, I don't regularly eat cereal. I sometimes get non-sugared cheerios as a snack for office.

metalpeter - 07/12/09 18:28
I thought it was pretty good to. I think that what a lot of people might do with that is mix it with ice or milk or use it to make there own version of a smoothie. In terms of the food stuff and parenting stuff there is one thing you have to remember Americans Are Sheep. Yes we are And I love and we don't have to change. But it is more complex then that. We pay of convenience. When you do that if often effects how you like your food. Families often work one place and live another and so between that and the internet and kids activities and TV. There isn't a lot of time. So often it is a quick meal and those have more sugar and salt and all that tasty stuff. If I kid grows up on fruity peables or Corn Flakes covered in chocolate then drinks the milk out of the bowl, I've done that, it tastes like chocalate milk so that is what they get used to.