Thursday, December 15, 2022

Up at 3:30 am with Alice. The usual pleasantness of our early morning walk was hampered by 33- degree wind and rain. We cut thing a little short, got home, and I rubbed her down good with a towel. Now she's snoring on the couch and I'm damply typing. Good morning!

...contrary to the cliché, it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort—which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.

Over the past few months, I've blogged using TiddlyWiki, Tinderbox, Hugo, Ghost, and WordPress. Currently, I'm down to three: baty.net using WordPress, baty.blog using Tinderbox, and wiki.baty.net using TiddlyWiki. WordPress is the easiest and most complete package. Tinderbox is weird and custom and challenging to tweak. TiddlyWiki is fun and simple, but not really a blog. By far, right now, this blog at baty.net using Tinderbox is my favorite for both writing and reading. It's the only thing I can make work exactly how I want a blog to work.

Halfway through the NYT's "‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes" I forgot I wasn't reading an Onion article.

Org mode provides any easy way to produce excellent looking documents—typeset with Latex—with a very lightweight markup language. It’s easy—certainly easier than with something like Word or its evil siblings—for a casual user to use it to produce letters and simple documents but it can also be used to produce complex and sophisticated documents.

I'm sorry, but there is no universe in which it's easier to create a nice-looking document using Emacs->Org->LaTeX than with Word. I despise Word and its ilk, but that's just ludicrous. Unless by "casual user" he's talking about people with a decade of experience creating documents with Emacs. Even then I'm not sure.