I’ve gotten so caught up in the “I’m home again” mindset that I forgot that I didn’t have a blog post schedule for today. But never fear, in the TealArt of the future (and present) tycho the ever present blogger is here to save the day with some thoughts about moving back home, his battles with sudo, and his projects for today and beyond.

I spent yesterday, my first full day back in hometown getting situated. Because I haven’t been here for more than a couple of weeks in 3 years, “my room” is mostly devoid of furniture, so I have taken over my mother’s desk in retaliation1. In addition to accomplishing a number of important tasks related to finding summer employment, I was able to get a couple of computer related tasks completed.

I’ve had a long running feud with the sudo command, which has made it difficult for me to do a lot of things with the command line. Luckily my issue was relatively minor, and now I have rubygems and maruku installed on Zoe2, and I really couldn’t be happier. Rubygems is a package manager that is required for a number of handy ruby scripts, and maruku, is a command-line translator for PHP Markdown Extra3. Conveniently it also translates into LaTeX and XHTML, and looks really great doing so. I need to work up a good LaTeX template for day to day usage for shorter documents that that I can push a lot of the kinds of things that I need to output, but that’s for another day, right now I’m just happy.

In other news, there isn’t a lot to report. I spent a long time driving and unpacking and what with the pomp and circumstance of graduation rituals, didn’t have a great deal of free time to write blog entries. My projects for today: write more, revise resume, write a future professor, and do some more unpacking. Other on-going blog related projects: work on growing and developing the reader/particpant base for TealArt. I think part of this has to do with my writing style, but part of it has to do with promotion, and I’m working on both of these aspects of the site, and hopefully there’ll be comments a plenty in the near future.

best, tycho

  1. A long running joke, my first brake back after I left for college, I returned to find that the only furniture left in my room were objects that wouldn’t fit out the door easily. This included my desk, which is ok, because I wasn’t using it. The ironic aspect is that I realized while I was away at school, that despite having a laptop, a desk/table to work at is crucial for my ability to focus and get things done. ↩︎

  2. My PowerBook G4 of wonder. ↩︎

  3. PHP Markdown Extra is a subset of John Gruber’s Markdown which affords for footnotes, tables and some other much needed features. I use this script, more or less, (so I changed two lines, shoot me,) to parse my syntax on tealart. ↩︎