The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Bill Blum:

Well, as a physics major working on a senior thesis, most of the stuff I keep producing uses Computer Modern Roman... whatever would I do without LaTeX?

This book, by Robert Bringhurst, has been the answer to every typographic question I've ever had...


The idea of an entire book set in sans-serif frightens me... from a readability standpoint? I don't even want to consider the implications....

*shudder*

On a somewhat unrelated note: I apparently just ate an entire box of girlscout cookies while working on my thesis.

I have to get up from the computer now, and go ride my bike some more. (30 miles already today).

Therese wrote:
My brother, who's a font freak...


Hmmm. If I right-click on C:\Fonts, it shows 2900 items. (of which, only 90-100 are installed at any one time.)

I'm clearly well on my way to being a font freak.

Helvetica isn't useful anymore, for me at least. I'm partial to Officina Sans, or ITC Conduit. Gill Sans is another favorite.

Paint Shop Pro works well enough for me--- but in the rare instance I need heavier-strength image processing, I'm likely to just use MATLAB and the Image Processing Toolkit...


Although, after graduation, and I get a "real job", buying Photoshop might be fun, just to try my hand at writing plugins.

Vera:

Thanks for the link to the Dark Courier font... looks like it'll be useful.


John:

I hid your composing stick underneath my case of 10pt Cheltenham type. You can't have it back. Sorry.

I'd rather try and get my short stories (or a novel, if I ever had time to write something that long) published than go through the review process for an academic journal again.

Oh wait, I'm applying to grad schools, and my boss wants me to finish this abstract for a conference this fall... and there are two more journal articles to read... and I just printed draft #2 of chapters 1-3 of The Thesis....

I'll never escape peer review. Arrgh.

( on a side note: I honestly can't remember the last time I saw an issue of Asimov's, Analog, or F&SF.... I've been a busy little student. I have, started a Pile Of Books to read after graduation: 84 days and counting.)

.... what color is the sky in his world?

For pete's sake....

Jonathon-

Few things are more satisfying than solving a problem via the fine art of mathematical overkill.

After taking a math proofs course, I thought that was the heaviest piece of intellectual artillery I could bring to bear on my problems... then, I wound up getting an internship doing radar signal processing.

Now, my life revolves around the Fast Fourier Transform, wavelets, and MATLAB.

Teresa-

At least you have a new story to tell at cons...

... oh, to have been a fly on the wall when you first heard this news.

Jonathon Vos Post wrote:
Certainly there's a "cult of Tolkien." I was in "the cult of Feynman."

Surely you're joking, Mr. Vos Post?


( sorry, had to do it. )

Right now, I can't be bothered to care about rejections.

I apparently got into grad school.

What the hell am I thinking, going for a master's degree with 2 kids.....

Who cares. I just find this stuff really cool.

... that's just sheer class.

Jonathan:

I'm not a practicing physicist, by any means...

I was just silly enough to decide I had enough of driving forklifts and making sandpaper... so I went back to school to complete a bachelor's degree. ( I'll be 31 when I graduate this May, with two kids )

I was fortunate enough to land an internship at a nearby school, in their graduate electrical engineering department. When I'm not busy writing MATLAB code, I spend my time going over the journal articles my boss has going in the review process.

Case in point:

An article submitted to an IEEE journal by my supervisor's last PhD advisee in 1999 took three years to get comments back from the first reviewers.

Yes, that's right. 3 years.

The author and his boss made some changes, sent it back-- and waited another two years to hear back... from a different set of reviewers. The first reviewers are no longer available.

Where do I fit in?

I've had to move the paper from WordPerfect to LaTeX... I've had to use the MATLAB code supplied by the original author of the paper to regenerate the original graphs in camera ready form... I've had to edit stuff for flow, and track down additional references to help prove the point...

What do I get?

I'm now named as Third Author.

... I value the two rejection letters I received.

Further proof I need to stick to doing physics.

But what about the poor vegetables?

Who speaks for them?

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