It's so weird how for the past few months, since finishing what I consider to be a reasonable draft needing only small improvements before I think people should sign off on it, my brain keeps saying, "Oh, god, I do not want to work on my dissertation, I am so sick of it, I want to do something else." Yet every time I open it to work on it, as I'm ( Read more... )

None of my job applications came through, so I will be finishing my PhD in August, and teaching a course on English vocabulary as a lecturer at UCLA this fall. After this fall, I am guaranteed nothing.

In August, I am going to a conference in Pécs, Hungary. nastasie is coming with me! After a week in Hungary, we're taking the train via Slovenia and ( Read more... )

I spent all last weekend tinkering with the theme on my beloved 3-year-old laptop. I hugged it and praised it before shutting it down for the night ( Read more... )

I was over in ubuntu_users, and someone was asking how to use the gtkrc files to make the handles (three lines in the middle) on the scrollbar go away. I didn't know such a thing was possible (save in the abstract sense that if you're a big enough computer geek, anything is possible). I tracked down my gtkrc files, figured out how to alter the code to get rid ( Read more... )

* Dogs and earthquakes. Easily mistaken for one another. Four full-grown, hungry Rottweilers being released into the kitchen for dinner sounds like a small earthquake. So when I lived with the Rotties and there was an earthquake, my first thought was always "Who let the dogs out?" until I realized it was an earthquake. Skip to Rio, where Lorelai ( Read more... )

* Some time ago, Andy asked me to collaborate with him on a project involving English vowel mergers. We are, roughly, testing the hypothesis that statistically speaking, vowel mergers that occur tend to create fewer homophones than potential vowel mergers that could have occurred but didn't ( Read more... )

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I would like to say that I have been working like a crazy person lately, after two months of lazing around reading Akkadian, having something to do with wanting to get my dissertation in a super-advanced state, Donka's home situation notwithstanding, just in case the postdoc people ask. Also, as indicated in a previous post, having to do with ( Read more... )

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My problems are twofold. One, which I hope to solve, is that my gedit LaTeX text editor only creates pdfs if I ( Read more... )