Out of my hat

So the sun’s shining today and the skies are clear. If this was back home, I’d be saying that the temperature reached double-digits today; that doesn’t make so much sense where I am, but it’s true nonetheless.

I’ve been getting a lot of people asking me if I’m doing anything special for Easter. This is, to me, something of an odd question: not just because I live a predominantly secular life (which my interlocutors may well not know), but also because I’d never realised that Easter as such is a big deal to your average American. The vibe I’m getting is that it’s a good time to be with family, but (and in sharp contrast to my homeland) it’s not like we get any extra time off around Easter to go visiting. Since I have no immediate family within about a thousand kilometers, no extra time essentially means no family time.

Some w00tastic news from ecogrrl today; that’s one more of my close friends on track to prepend “Dr.” to their name. For the rest of y’all: what are you waiting for?

Some moron in a minivan managed to reverse into the front of my car today. What happened was they realised that they were in a drive-through lane, or possibly they knew that already and realised that they didn’t want to be in a drive-through lane; in either case, their lizard-brain response to this was to throw it into reverse and advance to the rear as rapidly as possible.

In this case, of course, “as rapidly as possible” means “without regard for other vehicles that might have appeared behind them in the interim”. I was already in reverse at the moment of contact, since I was following my usual policy of trying to be courteous about such things, but apparently I wasn’t moving fast enough.

Being hit didn’t bother me particularly, since there wasn’t any damage done, but it did annoy me slightly that the driver immediately scarpered. I suppose that it’s technically a hit-and-run at that point, so I could have called the police and tried to make life difficult for 2K7304. I still maintain the illusion that eventually stupidity and selfishness catch up with one, though, so I’ve decided to let karma do my work for me.

In other news, I’ve got a proper bookshelf in my office now… and it only took two and a half years. I’m telling myself that this is the key element in a plan that will render my office relatively tidy, but you might have noticed that I lie to myself a lot.

Hey all. Back from Florida; I’d posted an entry from the conference (see below), but due to some quirk of Blogger it hasn’t shown up until now.

It was, I think, a good conference. I’ve got three new research projects to puzzle over, with three different collaborators, so that’s pleasant. Good response to my talk by the masses of mathematicians there; between that and getting an acceptance to a (fairly) prestigious journal, I seem to be building a bit of a career here. Nice.

The not-nice part had to do with my return flight… which was through Chicago this past Thursday, a day apparently fraught with weather-related complications in that part of the world. My flight to Chicago was delayed, due to some bizarre system of confliect resolution between airlines when a major airport is experiencing difficulties. I did manage to get into O’Hare barely in time for my connecting flight… or would have, had they not cancelled said flight earlier in the day. (The airport in Florida has free wi-fi, so I discovered this well before boarding my first flight for the day.)

The thing that annoys me most about the whole experience is the airline’s apparent attitude that information is on an immediate need-to-know basis. The folks at FLL refused to give anything more than a vague estimate for a departure time until about twenty minutes before boarding; further, I was told that no help with accommodations in Chicago would be offered (since the delays were not the airline’s fault) and so made my own arrangements over the internet… and then got to Chicago and found that no, actually cut-rate hotel rooms were available after all.

Just a quick update for anyone who’s started depending on regular Tuesday Nutshell fixes and were perturbed by the radio silence yesterday. Currently in Florida at a math conference; I’ll be posting a fuller account of my adventures here a little later.

One quick remark, though: more people have commented about my hat in the past four days than in the previous several months, I’m fairly sure. I suspect this is due to a ren faire that’s going on just down the road on weekends these days, and so people are sensitized to such things.

The spring is taunting me. Every time I think winter’s over, the next day there’s multiple centimeters of snow on the ground.

It’s a day of waiting, really. Next week’s my annual trip to the Southeastern Conference, which is (as it usually is) in Florida. This is not what you might call one of the most highly organized conferences in the hemisphere, or at least it hasn’t been recently, and so despite the fact that festivities start in less than a week they have yet to post a schedule of talks. I’m not terrifically worried that I’ll be scheduled to speak at a time when I won’t be there, since they’ve assured everyone that they take this sort of thing into account. I am worried that I might get an 8:00am slot, and I feel I can prepare myself better for this the more warning I have.

I’m also waiting for my most recent toy to arrive: a portable hard drive. It’s supposed to be about the size of an audio cassette tape, and holds twice as much data as my current laptop. I’m buying this with my honorarium for the talk I gave in Dayton last month. (“My God, how the money rolls in!”)

Given that I’m mostly getting this drive as a home for my music collection, it’s legitimate to ask why I didn’t go whole-hog into iPod-land or something. I’m not really looking for a player device, in that it’s rare that I’d particularly want such a thing. I have a laptop, which can play my music just fine when I’m in a hotel room; I don’t fly very often, and I’m on trains and buses even more rarely. And if I want calendar sync’ing I can always revive my old Visor (again).

So I’ve been asked to review a paper for a journal. This is not, in and of itself, a first; in fact, it’s the fifth such request of me in the past two years.

The journal making this request of me, however, enjoys a very good reputation in my field: if not one of the top two or three prestige-wise, then certainly in the top ten. Further, this is the first time that I know any of the authors (I know three, out of six); they, too, all enjoy very good reputations in the discipline.

I can’t help but think of this as a catastrophic reversal of the natural order of things.

Anyone else notice that I mainly seem to update this site on Tuesdays?

I got a paper through our library’s wonderful Document Delivery Service today. Rather than actually passing pieces of paper around, we get our documents on a website, which contains scanned images of the journal pages from wherever. (In this case, “wherever” is Fullerton, California; why the Cal State campus there is the most convenient library from which to get a twenty-odd-year-old article from an obscure Indian journal is left as an exercise to the reader.) This makes good sense to me.

I was hoping to just read it on my screen, but that turns out to be impossible; when I scroll past the cover page to the first page of content, I find myself looking at up-side-down text. Not feeling up to reading math up-side-down, I give in and print it out…

…to find that the second page of content is right-side-up… that is, up-side-down with respect to my inversion of the stack of paper. And the pages alternate thereafter.

While I admit that this makes sense in some ways, it’s a little annoying.

Clevermonkey pointed me to the Safari Bookmark Exporter, solving the main issue I was having with switching from Safari to Firefox. Huzzah!

So now I’m-a using Firefox. The great advantage it enjoys (aside from apparently being much less of a resource hog) is that Firefox exists cross-platform, and so all of a sudden things on the web look very, very different as I surf to sites with various enhancements. (For instance, the aforementioned Google Maps, which is indeed pretty sweet.)

As far as drawbacks go… the Firefox downloads manager is pretty stupid, at least as compared to its Safari counterpart. On a Mac if you download a file to a place where a file of that name already exists, the result is a file that looks something like filename-1.ext, and successive files get successively higher numbers. Safari will reflect this in the list of downloaded files; Firefox will not, and so if you try to open the file from Firefox you get the file of that name which was already there to begin with.

Some of the keyboard shortcuts don’t make as much sense to me in Firefox, though that could just be because I’m used to the Safari shortcuts. (I’m thinking specifically of navigating between tabs here; commands that use the left and right arrows seem more intuitive than ones that use Page Up and Page Down, even though I can see the logic in the latter.)

My first cup of kawphy in any given day is a freebie. Well, I still have to pay for it, probably, but I don’t have to exert myself unduly to get it.

If it develops that further kawphy is warranted, necessary, or just plain desirable, then I am required to walk for at least twenty minutes, that I might deserve it. (I say this now, since it’s such a nice day outside. The radio’s been threatening 3-5 inches of snow accumulation tonight, so it’s possible that this rule will be suspended until real spring.)

Further cups of kawphy beyond the second will require proportionately greater effort.

Note that, for the purposes of this rule, “kawphy” is defined as a caffeinated suspension: coffee, tea, hot chocolate, etc. I suppose I should really count caffeinated soft drinks (the only ones I generally drink these days, since good ginger ale doesn’t exist in this country), so let’s do that too.

An exception is made for weekends, when a bodum of coffee or pot of tea in a day is considered free.

As I’ve mentioned before, I work on a G5 iMac. Supposed to be blazingly fast, right? I mean, reasonably good processor, reasonably sleek OS, what’s not to like? And yet, I’m constantly seeing delays when switching between tasks. It could be argued that this is because I routinely have eight or more applications open at once, but these days who doesn’t?

I’ve figured out a couple of the bottleneck applications. The MS Office Suite is a problem sometimes, often taking longish periods to come to full consciousness. (Excel is a little worse than Word in this respect, but then I use Excel much more frequently so that’s a big problem.) My TeX editor seems suprisingly bloated. But recently I’ve been forced to conclude that the worst, most consistent offender is Safari: the web browser done it.

My main evidence for this is that switching to and from Safari takes a lot of work, even when there’s but a single web page (that doesn’t “do” anything) open. By contrast, switching between iTunes and iChat, or MSN Messenger and Terminal, takes about as long as it takes me to hit Apple-Tab. OTOH, this varies with how long Safari’s been open, so it might just be a case of bit-rot or something.

In any event, between this small epiphany and Elbie pointing out the existence of Google Maps — which does not, right now, support Safari — I figured that it was time to take Firefox out for a spin.

So, my first complaint about Firefox: while it claims that it will import your bookmarks etc. from IE “and other browsers”, the other browsers in this case seems to mean “Netscape”. Won’t import Safari bookmarks; if you tell it to import from a file, and point it at the .plist file from Library/Safari, it’ll blithely ignore you. And there’s no obvious way to export bookmarks from Safari into, say, and HTML file like Firefox expects.

Damn it.