Today WaMu bit the big one and the Republicans, those sacred guardians of fiscal conservatism, personal responsibility, and hard-work, are pushing for Congress to accept another balance of power mutating scheme that will make the few rich and undermine the checks and balances system.

But today, my friends, something momentous has happened in my life. I now owe a big fat $0.00 of credit card debt.

Having good credit has allowed me some really sweet 0% finances for moving, buying furniture, buying a car, selling that car, buying another car, re-financing my current car, buying office machinery needed, going to Rome, taking classes in Rome, going to Vancouver, trips to CA, presents, a TV, and a great fair bit of dining out. But it all came at a price, the sick feeling of moving monetized debt from place to place.

Make no doubt, I payed good attention to the lectures in Finance and have absorbed the lesson that someone else’s credit is better than my liquidity, that a dollar tomorrow is better than a dollar today ( when giving ), and that when you can get cheap capital ( and it isn’t much cheaper than 0% ) you should use the hell out of it. Knowing these lessons allowed me to use the capital well and not get in a screwy situation that a great many consumers are in now.

But the thing is, when you manage debt, it requires a certain amount of mental effort. You’re aware it’s out there. Companies and corporations hire people to make sure that the transactions are performed at the right time, that the narrowest of windows are used to maximize the profit made on other people’s money before they want it back. Monetized debt, the way that our world is run, is something that I just don’t want to carry around anymore.

Henceforth, only mortgages ( no plans looming there ) and car notes ( only one, and the payment’s reasonable, and I’m going to start attacking it now that I’m free of the shackles of Delaware ) are going to be in my portfolio, the rest is staying in currency and investment. It’s a tool, but never again will I finance my lifestyle by means of it.

I’m going to have to put “no” back in my vocabulary, until the Bank of Steven is a bit richer, but worry is an activity I no longer want in my life.

[code lang=”latex”] renewcommand{labelenumi}{Alph{enumi}.} renewcommand{labelenumii}{alph{enumii}.} [/code]

This is used to define the classes of glyphs you want to use in an outline. In this case, the top-level points will be majuscule, Latin ( no for once I don’t mean the language, but the letter-forms ). The first level sub-set of that will be Latin minuscule. There are a number of classes that are available.

LaTeX recognizes 4 levels of sub-idententation ( thus no labelnumxix ), but 4 is usually sufficient ( yes, I strained to type that, but if it’s not sufficient, odds are you’re not as clear in your thinking as you ought be ).

The renewcommand operator is used to re-define standard operators. newcommand is sufficient for a non-extant operator.

I’m typing this here because I’m tired of visiting Jeff Krimmel’s excellent resource on the matter

You can also use

[code lang=”latex”] Roman, alph, arabic, roman, and Alph as formats [/code]

Here’s the one I tend to use, which I would call “traditional.”

[code lang=”latex”] \renewcommand{\labelenumi}{\Roman{enumi}.} \renewcommand{\labelenumii}{\Alph{enumii}.} \renewcommand{\labelenumiii}{\arabic{enumiii}.} \renewcommand{\labelenumiv}{\alph{enumiv}.} [/code]

Define new commands that take arguments

Sometimes you want to create a new command, here’s how to do it. Here was a command i wrote that produced small-caps-ified large text:

[code lang=”latex”] \newcommand{\verbatimTask}[1]{begin{sc}begin{large}{{#1}}end{large}end{sc}} [/code]

I modeled this off of devdaily.com

Adding new styles

If you need to add a new style, on my system, you do it in:

/usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/tex/latex

You add your style there. Subsequently, you need to execute “texhash” to rebuild the database so that you can use it.

Thereafter, by using [code lang=”latex”] \usepackage{packagename} [/code]

Will allow you access to your commands.

Inter-linear spacing

To doublespace a LaTeX document, you should include the line

    \usepackage{setspace}

after your \documentclass line.

Before your \begin{document} command,

\doublespacing

will make the text of the whole document doublespaced. Footnotes, figures, and tables will still be singlespaced, however. For one-and-a-half spacing, instead use the command

\onehalfspacing

In order to make a part of the text of your document singlespaced, you can put:

\begin{singlespace}

at the beginning of the text you want singlespaced, and

\end{singlespace}

at the end.

You can also set the spacing to be something other than doublespaced; for example, if you wanted to have one-and-a-quarter spacing between lines, use the line

\setstretch{1.25}

before your \begin{document} command, and after the \usepackage{setspace} line.

(NOTE: there is another package, called “doublespace” which will usually work exactly the same way as setspace. However, it interacts poorly with some graphics packages.)

From MIT

Adding a style

On my OSX machine copy it into a subdirectory off of /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/tex/latex.

Then run mktexlsr.

I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging thanks to:

1. Car accident drama
2. Latin III
3. postponed GRE from this weekend to the 24^th of October
4. Work
5. The LatinVerb library.

Most of these don’t produce much in the way of visual artifacts, but here’s a short demonstration of the LatinVerb library ( it’s coherently working, but still needs some refactoring to get it to 0.1 release state… ). Here’s the video:

What’s going on here is that I have a Ruby debugger ( RDebug ) session open where I’ve created an instance of Latin::LatinVerb. I then proceed to execute some of the “vectors” that uniquely identify a single conjugation of a verb or a collection of verb tenses.

It’s not too pretty yet, my main work has been on getting the thinking working. The displaying part comes next.

Ants in the pantry = food all over the house and not in the pantry

“Great!”

[ Lauren’s Take ]

“Steven”

By the middle syllable I knew something was very, very wrong. I grabbed my bag and tried to work my way out of the conference ballroom as unnoticed as possible.

“Car accident…everyone OK…”

I drove with single-minded focus south down MoPac and swung onto North Lamar.

“At least everyone was OK…she’s OK, she called me”

I approached the spot and the car looked OK from the right, and then I parked and saw the above.

The fear that had been gnawing at the periphery of my awareness came into full focus.

“The other car was in the boundaries of this car…”

It was incongruous, seeing the thirsty, distracted girl whole and shaken and seeing the bent metal before me. I traced my finger along the shattered glass in the door to feel something real of the trauma.

She had been in an accident, a wreck that hit her square in the door - the weakest part.

Having lived things I can say now, coherently, that Saturday Lauren was involved in an accident on South Lamar. She’s got shoulder and neck pain and had a scratch on her left leg. She’s recovering. It seems so strange to me that she is walking, talking, safe in the other room as I type this, and, right now, I can see a grisly mangled box on wheels.

But she’s safe right now, but she’s safe right now, I repeat.

Today the insurance company called and told us that the car will now go the way of the Charon. Said the adjustor: “They always walk away from Honda’s…she’s really very lucky”.

Farewell, Honda Accord, you have seen the heights of Tahoe, the lows of Pete’s Path and the ways of MoPac. You have picked me up, taken me to school, been to HEB, and ferried us throughout the South Bay. You loved San Francisco and baths at the apartment care care center.

And while I shall miss you as you voyage on, my love remains well and whole thanks to your last, brave, valiant act. Good night, brave sir, may the Shinto gods of the land of your birth greet you as your frame is melted into a liquid-metallic Tao that quickened you.

I loved Ellison’s Invisible Man: a smart black man refuses to be the tool of American hypocrisy or Communist rabble–rousers and instead asks society to engage him in the most difficult way possible: as a man in himself.

Ellison’s writing has a stark, almost journalistic character, but you definitely feel his familiarity with the Southern Gothic’s sentimentalism.

In an absolutely beautiful sample of Ellison’s style I cite:

Materially, psychologically and culturally, part of the nation’s heritage is Negro American, and whatever it becomes will be shaped in part by the Negro’s presence. Which is fortunate, for today it is the black American who puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals. It is he who gives creative tension to our struggle for justice and for the elimination of those factors, social and psychological, which make for slums and shaky suburban communities. It is he who insists that we purify the American language by demanding that there be a closer correlation between the meaning of words and reality, between ideal and conduct, our assertions and our actions. Without the black American, something irrepressibly hopeful and creative would go out of the American spirit, and the nation might well succumb to the moral slobbism that has ever threatened its existence from within.

America Without the Negro

It’s 10:04 as I write this, and I normally wouldn’t say such a thing as this for fear of a jinxing, but for my later-rising friends I feel I should recount that:

…on the way out the door I felt a breeze that was distinctly not reminiscent of Thermopylae

…I smelled the smell of fresh cut grass

…my mind briefly flashed to the Texas v. Tech football game ( traditionally in late October )

I could be wrong, but I believe that I felt the faintest, slimmest, most gossamer hint of the suggestion of the remembrance of the season known as fall.

And sure, today I’m sure we’ll run a tight tangent line to the hundred degree mark, but this morning, soft as a robin’s breast, gentle as a snowflake, tender as Lauren’s right cheek, I felt the idea of fall.

I was born in Texas, I currently reside in Texas.

My entire life there’s been been one woman, and fellow Longhorn, who has made public service a core part of her life ( and getting rich in banking or oil, or both; about par for the course for Texipublican candidates ): Kay Baily Hutchinson.

I disagree with her on a great many topics, but I agree with her on more than just a few. Keep in mind that this woman served in the Texas legislature before I was born and has been a serving senator since 1993. Now she certainly had a bit of trouble here in Travis county about some misconduct around state resources used for her campaign, but these were not substantiated in a court of law.

There’s no way Sarah Palin is more qualified than KBH and not giving KBH the chance to politely decline is just an insult to her service record.

I was at Sodade last weekend and proprietress, Kim, popped in as I went to grab my medio litro of Mexican Coke. She was wearing a tank top with a gorgeous abugidaïc script which led me to, recklessly I now recognize, observe:

“I really love those characters in Thai script”

As she turned I realized that the shirt had the shape of Angkor Wat and realized i had made a bit of a faux pas: Egyptians would get a bit irked if you said the Pyramids were in Saudi; the Hellenes if you thought the Acropolis was in Crete. I hastily apologized realizing I was a Cambodian.

Thus I had a chance to speak to her a bit about Khmer script and how the words hang together. As a take away she taught me how to say “eat”, it’s a tonal sound /ɲam/.

What’s really interesting is this, I read up a bit on Khmer at Wikipedia and apparently it has social registers: different verbs for speaking of / to royalty, monks, commoners, or intimates. “Nyam” is is for the third category.

Can you imagine learning an entire deferential sub-language for four social registers? Very interesting.