Punting beats revision every time

Yay! I’ve finally finished writing the 1^st draft of my research report. This is the first time I’m using LaTeX for a coursework, and I can safely say that it turned out well. I needed to keep the documentation nearby the whole time so that I can refer to it, but it’s actually quite easy to use. The only trouble I had was with the nomenclature, though I suspect that has more to do with me using the command line in Windows wrong (Windows and command line aren’t exactly synonymous). In the end I just manually made a table for nomenclature, so that’s one problem sorted.

The thing with LaTeX is that it is supposed to typeset documents beautifully, and I must say I like how my report turns out. However, I visited a friend the other day (who also uses LaTeX) and I saw that his report is much, much more beautiful than mine. Damn, how can that happen?! Guess I’m still a novice after all.

The weather was very nice this whole week. It’s warm and sunny, but the downside is that I realised my room is sweltering in this kind of warm weather, up to the point where it’s really uncomfortable to study. Hence, in appreciation of the nice sunny day, I went punting! Yeah, I did felt guilty of not using the time to do work but, come on! Punting wins every time.

Yarr, matey!

Yaz.

Eyesore

Yay! People are coming back to Trinity.

Boo! Holiday’s almost over.

I can’t believe the break is about to end. In fact, the new term will start next week. That’s so soon! Well, technically Easter term has already started on the 10^th but the full term will only begin next Tuesday. Where have all the time gone? My report is only half complete and I haven’t even been procrastinating. No, I want the holiday back!

On the plus side, Cambridge is getting lively again. And then there’s the volleyball summer cuppers to look forward to.

On another note, people who have been reading this blog for a while will have known how Trinity Great Court looks like. I’ve put the pictures up often enough.

See how nice it looks?

Even in the snow...

How majestic, how grand...

How amazing...

Okay, that last one was actually from Vienna. But you got my drift.

My point is, sometime before the break there was this construction going on at a corner of Great Court. People I spoke to said it is a temporary shed or something for the kitchen which is currently under refurbishment. Still...

I can imagine tourists walking into Trinity, taking in the view of Great Court (and taking pictures, like they always do) and suddenly exclaimed, “What the heck is that!”

Yes, the orange doesn’t exactly mesh with the rest of the building. I hope the kitchen refurbishment will end soon.

Yaz.

Holiday?

What holiday?

Hello people! Sorry for not writing anything for the past week. It’s just that since now is the Easter break, there isn’t much going on. Adding to that, I’m busy with reports and revision, so I’m at the department almost every day working. It’s basically like term time but without the lectures. For the life of me I don’t know how all those people who went back home manage to cope with the amount of work. It’s just insane.

For my main research report, I’ve decided to use LaTeX this time. For those who don’t know, it is a typesetting program and document preparation system. Whereas in Word whatever you type on the screen will appear exactly the same way when printed out, using LaTeX you just type your report and let it handle your formatting i.e. you don’t have to worry about layout, image placements and the rest. It will do it for you. LaTeX is known to supposedly produce beautifully typesetted documents, so we’ll see how it goes.

On an unrelated topic, you guys noticed recently there’s been an inundation of stupid quizzes on Facebook? They are annoying because they clutter my news feed and make it harder to actually notice other real and more important feeds. Honestly, nobody cares how Malaysian you are or which superhero is most like you. This is just like the time when applications were newly introduced and people got bombardments of invitations to become zombies, vampires, werewolves etc. Remember those?

In any case, this tip is courtesy of Imran a.k.a. Black. First, you need Firefox with greasemonkey installed. If you don’t use Firefox, then why the heck not? Unless you use Chrome, in which case... have they rolled out add-ons like greasemonkey yet? But anyway, once that’s settled, then just install a blocking script like the one found here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44459.

Finally, on another unrelated topic, the punting station of Trinity should be open by now. Unfortunately, the weather this week seems to be gloomy (doesn’t it always?) but if it gets nicer then I think I’ll organise a punting trip soon. In the meantime, gonna build up those arm muscles, heh heh.

Yaz.