moving and writing miscellany

[metawidget]

I'm now pretty much wholly at the new² place. We're still picking our way through stuff that needs unpacking, reassembling and stowing, but things that need hooking up are hooked up, and the bulk of our stuff is here, thanks to Allied Movers (who were friendly, efficient and broke absolutely nothing as far as we can tell) and my uncle and his wife (likewise, and they brought us pizza despite my offering to feed them). It's chaos, but it feels like home already. We've put down some "Thames green" paint in places, patched up the white in others, cleaned, hooked up the appliances, taken out the initial trash, and generally started bending the place to our will. We've made coffee and toasted bagels so far, so the kitchen is coming along!

There's still some mop-up to do at the old new place, but we'll be out of there pretty soon.

I also tried out Inkscape, and I think it's definitely a keeper. It runs smoothly in X11, and makes sense to someone who's got basic mucking skills in Illustrator. The tutorials are also quite straightforward, yet treat the reader like a geek who's had enough coffee to get their brain working already.

The binge of figures that will illustrate what I'm thinking in the thesis will be upwards of 80% done in Inkscape. Met with Fred to set some more milestones and talk committee, and things are looking good. I'm going to set up the office in the new place today, I'm sharing with the cat den and the sewing machine (and a lot of boxes, for now).

Crashed at Owen's place on Wednesday after meeting Fred, ate Chinese food, watched Serenity and the Firefly pilot (the movie was excellent, and the pilot will probably have me renting the series in the fall). Something not-funny was happening with the plumbing there, so I also bailed grey water from the sink to the tub in a wok a couple times. If you live in a building with a no-dishwashers policy, then there may be a reason. Be nice to the guy in the basement apartment, mmmkay?

Adobe Reader 8's font "smoothing" on Palatino is a disgraceful, snaggly mess.

Lattice theory is neat. I've got my library card for the National Library so I can grab some books locally.

Comments

[loupdebois.livejournal.com]

For the record: turns out that the reason for the flooding was a grease plug that had formed 40 feet down into the drain. Most commercial drain cleaners are powerless against such a plug. Previous resident must have liked his bacon. I'm going to be putting TSP down the sink monthly as a preventative.

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

Happened to me once. I had to disassemble the pipe.... Tought me a lesson.

[silverspar.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the new place.

And you don't have to rent Firefly, I would be happy to loan it to you. (I have the series and the movie.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

Congrats for the new place.

And yes I love Inkscape. I just don't know how to use it correctly, and last time I got stuck because OOo does not support SVG... grmbl.
(running Linux here).

Cheers.

[metawidget]

Thanks!

Are you in Manchester right now, or closer by?

I'm throwing Inkscape stuff at LaTeX, and I just export to PNG and includegraphics it in. Maybe Inkscape exports to LaTeX…

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

I'm back from Manchester, but in still in Toronto.

BTW, "Inkscape can natively save as SVG, SVGZ, Postscript/EPS/EPSi, Adobe Illustrator (*.ai), LaTeX (*.tex), and POVRay (*.pov)."
So you shouldn't have any problem.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Congratulations (again) on your move. Hopefully it works better this time.