themorgue.org

I’ve heard this over and over from various sources: TV is bad. I grew up watching way too much TV and pretty much depended on it for 90% of my entertainment even into adulthood. Now that my wife and I sold our TV for our move, we’ve realized how dependent we were on it for taking up our time, and that disturbed us greatly. Not only that, we were paying almost $90/month to DirecTV for (mostly bad) programming and TiVo charges.

We’ve agreed that after the move, we are not going to buy a new TV. We are going to get a TV tuner for the computer that will be in the office. If there is something really special that we want to see on TV, we can watch it on the office computer. The office will hopefully be uncomfortable enough that we won’t want to veg-out and stay there the whole night gawking at the screen.

I will still set up a home theater in the house somewhere since that is my passion, but it will only be there for the occassional movie and video game. Maybe some day, I’ll be strong enough to eliminate those as well…

We’ve been in the process of moving for the past few weeks and it is astonishing, if not appalling, how much “stuff” we have. I talked about having too much stuff a few weeks ago, but I didn’t have any idea how much junk I had until we had to box it all up for the moving company.

During this boxing process, we sold our big screen TV, two computers, a futon frame, a credenza, a TiVo, and various small items throughout the house. We also made about ten trips to Goodwill with carloads of stuff that we just don’t need anymore. Even then, we still have way more boxes of stuff than we think we should have.

My wife and I have agreed that when we are unpacking the boxes at the end of our move that we need to get rid of about 25% more stuff. There is just no need for this rampant consumerism and pack rat mentality.

I’m hoping that with a new home in a new state, and my wife working a new job, that we’ll have enough impetus to completely revamp our living style and spending habits to reduce our over-spending and over-storing habits.

After working on a few glitches for a plasTeX user this week, plasTeX is now being used for the documentation of the itools package for Python. Hopefully, this exposure will help out with plasTeX’s adoption for other packages and eventually the documentation at python.org itself.

I’ve been looking for a nice writing instrument for a while now. I just feel more creative when I’m using equipment that is designed with attention to detail (which is one reason that I use Macs). For years I just used very inexpensive BIC ball point pens (the kind you buy 10 in a pack). These are pretty reliable, don’t glob ink all over, and generally just work well. However, the bland white shaft with black plastic cap don’t exactly inspire any masterpieces.

I have seen Cross pens all over the place from jewelry stores to office supply stores. They looked pretty nice, so I gave one a try. I paid about $30 for it and was quite pleased with the aesthetics and overall feel of the shaft, writing with it left a lot to be desired though. The tip of the pen seemed to collect a lot of ink and I would have to wipe the excess off occasionally. This excess ink would also lead to smearing which is completely unacceptable.

I had read about the Fisher Space Pen on a couple of blogs as well as in the book Mind Performance Hacks, so I thought I’d give one a try. It had some interesting features: pressurized ink cartridge, writes from -30 degrees to 250 degrees, writes an any angle, etc. I picked up the green bullet pen from the local REI (the green one just seemed the most creative ;). I’ve had it for a couple of weeks and I am very pleased. It hasn’t leaked any ink, the casing is very smooth and pleasant to hold, and it also writes very smoothly. The bullet pen casing is also very interesting. It is very short when the pen is closed. But when you take the cap off and put it on the other end for writing, it becomes a full length pen. This makes it very easy to carry in your pocket without any unsightly bulges or worries about leaking ink. I’m sure that there may be better pens in the world somewhere, but if you want a nice piece of writing equipment for a decent price, you might want to check out the Fisher Space Pen.

I submitted a paper to PyCon 2007 this year about my open source framework for processing LaTeX documents, plasTeX. Unfortunately, the reviewers thought that it was too specialized and esoteric. While it is fairly specialized, I don’t see it as being esoteric. Especially since the official way to write Python documentation is in LaTeX. I was hoping to increase interest in plasTeX so that it might some day replace latex2html (a Perl program) as the markup generator for Python documentation. This would eliminate installing Perl as a pre-requisite to writing documentation for Python.

I guess I’m not too worried about it at the moment. plasTeX is still very young and needs testing before it can be used in production environments. By PyCon 2008, it should be ready for action!