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-Old song quote: "Ah poor bird! Take thy flight / high above the sorrows of this sad night."-

My dreams this week (or one of them at least) have me wondering what in the world "Abilene" is. It's rare for me to remember a word from a dream, particularly since this one came with a precise spelling as well.

The week has been busy and not all that fruitful. I'm currently learning to use a typesetting program/language called LaTeX, which may or may not be useful later down my current career path.

Let's just say that the program is ornery. The thing is designed to make formatting one of the lesser concerns of writers (particularly technical writers -- it contains plenty of packages for beautifully typesetting equations), but at the level of mastery I have so far, the formatting is just annoying. You see, the way that it keeps the user from worrying about formatting is by deciding that it always knows best in that department. It can be surprisingly difficult to get it to do what you want it to do if your idea of proper formatting doesn't match TeX's ideas.

Add to this my fair level of proficiency in Microsoft Word, which makes learning any new formatting program just a little more frustrating. Often I'll decide that I want to do X to the document and not think much of it, but it'll turn out to be a lot harder in TeX than I'm used to having it be in Word. I sound like such a Windows fanboy, but I would guess that this happens to anyone who becomes a "power user" in any one application (no matter whether that application is even good or not).

On the other hand, LaTeX does make certain things much, MUCH, easier, particularly in mathematics-heavy writing. It sure is easier to just type $\leq$ than to have to hunt down that ≤ symbol on the character map. So it would behoove me to learn to play well with its flaws -- I'm pretty sure that the benefits, at least for me, will end up being much greater.

Reality check. Wait... a city in Texas?? Why would that occur to me?