Happy Thanksgiving

Kelly's parents came to town for Thanksgiving this year. They really had a lot of fun with Gunner. Kelly made Tofurky with all the trimmings, and awesome vegan meatloaf, some vegetables from the local farmer's market, and vegan blueberry cobbler. It all tasted so good it makes you wonder about all those people who complain about how you're missing out if you don't eat meat.

On Friday we all went to the zoo. The sloth bear was out pacing around

On Saturday we met up with some of Kelly's family that lives in southern Virginia. There is a huge natural bridge near the halfway point, so we met there. It really is pretty big.

Meanwhile

This is a really clever Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style comic book by Jason Shiga. It's full of math and science too!

Kindle

Even though it's kind of ugly and has a silly name, the new Amazon Kindle is pretty cool. I seem to be reading quite a few thicker books lately, and it's a bit of a pain packing them for travel or handling heavy books at night when I'm getting sleepy. I like the addition of the keyboard for making notes or searching for text, and the EVDO cellphone wifi is interesting (including the wikipedia support), but I don't know how ultimately useful wifi would be. I think the e-paper technology is the way to go, though, for these types of devices. They look more like real ink-on-paper, cause less eye strain (due to the absence of a backlight), and use much less energy than traditional LCD readers. Unfortunately, the Kindle is way out of my price range.

On a side note, since Amazon opened the Kindle store for ebook downloads, I now have the option of uploading ebooks for sale in the store. Since I own the copyright on my dissertation, maybe I'll put that up for sale. But I think the figures and tables might be a problem. Amazon says that HTML uploads will work the best in their conversion software, so I would have quite a bit of work to do to get my dissertation to look good in that format. I wonder if anybody would want to pay something like $10 for a copy of my dissertation on their Kindle (I would get ~35% of the sale price). Probably not.

Netflix

While Beth was in town, the topic of Netflix came up. A number of friends have been using Netflix for a while, including my brother, who watches TV shows on DVD exlusively rather than paying for cable. And everybody seems to like the service. Even with TiVo, Kelly and I have been renting at least two movies a week, either from the local independent video store or from Pay-Per-View, so Netflix is much more cost effective. So we signed up for a 2 DVD-at-a-time Netflix account this weekend to try it out.

Insert Font Joke Here

If you have written any kind of crystallography-related manuscript or report, you’ve probably run into one of the most annoying problems I’ve encountered in my academic career—the lack of a proper overline character. You see, instead of writing “-3”, crystallographers change the negative sign into a line on top of the 3 and call it “bar 3”. Unfortunately, there is no font that does this. Some font sets have a “combining overline” (U+0305) which you place between two characters and draws a bar over both characters, as in “4̅3”. In some font sets, this character extends over both letters, and in other font sets, it is centered over the first letter but extends towards the second letter. But I haven’t found a font yet that can just place an overline over a single character (yes, there are macron characters, but they don’t cover the entire letter).

However, just recently a bunch of scientific publishers have released a comprehensive, royalty-free font set for scientists called STIX. It is supposed to contain every character required by any scientific discipline. The STIX font set now has a proper combining overline character, so now I can write that the space group of bornite properly as F̅43m instead of F-43m. One quick note, the STIX fonts are in beta testing right now, but you can download them from the STIX website once you sign up. Also, the STIX combining overline must be inserted before the letter or number you want the bar over.

I hear Beth is coming into town this weekend. Better put on my thicker skin!

Veteran's Day Weekend

Kelly and I had a nice long weekend. On Saturday, Becky and Mike were in town, so we met up for lunch in the district. We went to a good Malaysian restaurant, and it was fun to catch up with them.

We also watched The Thing. For a special effects movie from the 80's, it stood up surprisingly well. Kelly and I were on the edge of our seats waiting to see how things would end, so I think the movie gets our recommendation if you're in the mood for classic horror.

new winter clothes

Kelly and I went clothes shopping last weekend at Nordstrom The Rack. Kelly found me this really cool Ben Sherman coat that I've been wearing all week. If figure since they actually have winter out here, I should probably have a winter coat. Anyway, I really like the coat a lot. It's pretty warm, but not bulky like many winter coats.

Other than that it's business as usual.

Another weekend means another week has passed by. I'm glad to be back home from GSA, but now I have to buckle down and get some more research done.