Aaron Swartz has a moderately in­ter­est­ing piece on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and pro­cras­ti­na­tion.

We all pro­cras­ti­nate. I certainly pro­cras­ti­nate.

Sometimes my pro­cras­ti­na­tion is tantamount to making sure that my pencils are very, very sharp. More often, I find myself surfing the web, free as­so­ci­at­ing off in random directions. There’s no end to the fas­ci­nat­ing dis­trac­tions.

In lesser cases, I pro­cras­ti­nate because I’m bored or not fully engaged in what I’m doing.

When I have a more severe case, I think fear is the root cause. I don’t really know how to proceed, I don’t really understand what it is that I’m supposed to be doing, and I don’t really want to come to grips with it. And so I don’t. My fear …continue.

So how do I go from the Project Gutenberg etext to LaTeX?

Here’s the Gutenberg text for the pictured fragment:

(BLOOM'S WEATHER. A SUNBURST APPEARS IN THE NORTHWEST.)

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted emperor-
president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant
ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!

ALL: God save Leopold the First!

BLOOM: (IN DALMATIC AND PURPLE MANTLE, TO THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR,
WITH DIGNITY) Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.

WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (IN PURPLE STOCK AND SHOVEL HAT) Will you
to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your judgments 

I have a long-standing fas­ci­na­tion with typography. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I became quite adept with TeX and LaTeX, the well-known scientific type­set­ting system. When I was at ICPC, I think I read the TeXbook cover to cov­er—twice. I became the TeX ad­min­is­tra­tor for the CS department while I was at Brown.

And then I moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft and entered the world of Windows, and I left TeX behind for more than 15 years.

I wrote the other day that I prepared the Bloomsday scripts in XML for several years, using XSLT to generate HTML. I used to send the HTML to the readers, but everyone’s …continue.

On a mailing list, I saw a dumb question answered with a link to Let­Me­GoogleThat­ForY­ou.

Try this: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=is+there+a+Santa+Claus

Or this: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=exploding+coca+cola

In the old days, you might admonish someone to ask smart questions.

I’m about halfway through the 60,000-word Circe chapter of Ulysses, converting it to LaTeX.

For several years, I took the plaintext from the Project Gutenberg etext, prepared the script in XML, used XSLT to transform it into HTML, tarted it up with CSS, and then saved it as a PDF. You can see a screenshot above.

I’ll write up tomorrow why I switched to LaTeX last year.

My talented wife got back today from four days at the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival in Tacoma. As you can see from Emma’s Flickr page, she’s knit a lot of beautiful pieces.

I’m hoping she will revive her dormant blog and write more about some of her projects. She does have some writeups at Ravelry (Facebook for knitters) under her username Emma, but that’s only visible to members.

In the 1850s, three anti-slavery families settled next to each other in rural Kansas: the Grelliers, the Schapens, and the rich Fremantles. Seven gen­er­a­tions later, the last of the Fremantles is gone, the Grelliers are pro­gres­sive farmers, and the Schapens are bel­liger­ent fun­da­men­tal­ists. Gina Haring, a Wiccan lesbian from New York, housesits the Fremantle mansion, while she tries to pick up the pieces of her life. In­ad­ver­tent­ly, she triggers a cascade of changes. Most notably, the Grellier son, at odds with his anti-war mother, enlists and is killed in Iraq, sending her into a …continue.

Clint Eastwood directs himself as Walt Kowalski, a retired auto worker. Newly widowed, estranged from his sons, and haunted by his Korean War ex­pe­ri­ences, Walt is a bitter, racist old bastard.

He doesn’t like the Hmong immigrants who live next door and he nearly shoots the teenage boy, Thao, when he catches Thao trying to steal his beloved 1972 Gran Torino. The theft was to be the reluctant Thao’s gang initiation. The gang come by to punish Thao and Walt runs the “gooks” off his lawn at gunpoint. The Hmong neighbors start bringing over food and flowers in gratitude. Walt is confounded and …continue.

I mentioned in my post on re­Struc­tured­Text that I use a little command-line tool, pbcopy, to pipe the output into the clipboard. I finally found a similar tool for Linux, xsel.

• Mac: pbcopy (UTF-8 aware, unlike the built-in version of pbcopy) copies its input to the pasteboard (Mac name for the clipboard); pbpaste writes the pasteboard to stdout.
• Linux: xsel gets and sets the X selection.
• Windows: winclip reads and writes the clipboard in a variety of formats. Use -m for UTF-8 text. The winclip binary is available as part of the outwit package.

This is, by far, the snowiest winter that I’ve ever ex­pe­ri­enced in Seat­tle—and I was in Ireland for the worst two weeks.

At least the snow that came down yesterday and today didn’t stick.