In Other Thesis News...
Sometimes, if I misspell "quantitative" just so, my spellcheck will automatically replace it with the word "qualitative". That's an important thing for me to catch.
= March 2008 = Main = May 2008 =
Sometimes, if I misspell "quantitative" just so, my spellcheck will automatically replace it with the word "qualitative". That's an important thing for me to catch.
Our upstairs neighbor clearly has just purchased a new video game. There was a time in my life when I could probably identify the game from the pitch and timing of the explosion sounds currently rocking our apartment, but those days are far behind me.
I don't want it to seem like all I do on this blog is whine about things and ask for other people to help me, but I'm having a bad morning. Let's just say that about two weeks ago, Marie and I purchased plane tickets for a honeymoon in Europe, fully aware that seven years of geopolitical goings-on had conspired into making this to be a bad financial decision. So... the tickets were pretty expensive. But in my idiocy I went ahead and checked Kayak this morning to see if the fares had changed, and boy howdy did they ever. Turns out, on Orbitz today I still could have booked the exact same trip on the exact same airplanes, the only difference being that one leg (of four) would be booked with a codeshare partner. And that trip would have been $500 cheaper per person. Oi!
I called the airline in question, but they tell me that since the tickets are non-refundable, there's nothing I can do. Bill suggests that I make Marie cry and have her call them with her saddest "but it's my honeymoon!" voice... but would something like that ever work?
Okay, guys. I have a little problem and if anyone can help me, it's the internet. I've been writing my thesis as of late, and I've hit a stumbling block. It's going to seem incredibly stupid, so prepare yourselves...
There's this font that I really, really want to use. It's called "Simplex Roman" and it's one of the original Hershey vector fonts developed back in the 1970s. Yes, I know that it's kind of ugly, and yes I know it doesn't scale well, and yes I know that I might as well just use Helvetica. But listen: every textbook and journal article written before 1980 uses this font on all of its graphs, and I think it'd be fun if I did too. The thing is, I don't know how to get it into version which I can use easily with Adobe Illustrator and the like, given that it predates things like TrueType by many years. I don't want to compile it in GhostScript or write code to export it via IDL or somehow wring it out of AutoCAD - I just want to use it in some graphs.
Is this even possible? It's free, supposedly, so I don't think it'd be illegal. Does this help? This? I'm typographically in way over my head here.
I know I've made some ridiculous claims in the past, but... you know at the end of this new Danity Kane song "Damaged" where Diddy comes on and gives a little speech and closes with the prophetic line, "This too, shall pass". THAT is the greatest moment in the history recorded music. From here, I think it's clear that the record industry will collapse under the weight of its own brilliance. Icarus had the same problem... with heights this high attained, down is the only way left to go.