Martin Geisler Online

I’ve just finished my final written exam! I’ve spend five hours trying to write a Danish essay, and I think the result was pretty good.

I used my dads notebook with Windows and Word. I did this, just to remind myself of why it is, that I’ve spend countless hours reading manuals and books for LaTeX. Why have I spend entire evenings trying to achieve a particular effect in LaTeX? Now that I’ve started to use Metapost, I’ve also had to read the manual for that — it’s large but really good. The question remains: why do I do it.

The answer just occurred to me today: Word is full of bugs! It’s a faulty, PITA-program! It crashed on my today, even though I didn’t do anything fancy. I wasn’t playing with a lot of OLE-objects, nor was I trying to do anything else. I was just writing an essay with perhaps three different fontsizes. But when I tried to change the size of the skip after paragraphs, it just died. And it did this several times.

So, luckily there won’t be a next time, but if I ever have to write something important on a computer, I’ll use LaTeX. It’s the only program that I know of, that if reliable. It might be a little difficult to do some of the more advanced things, but if you’re just writing a plain essay, then it’ll never let you down. It was only because it was easier for me to transport the notebook that I used it instead of my normal machine.

Yesterday I helped Cookie build his new machine. After some initial problems with the jumpers, the machine now runs at 1050 MHz — 5% more that the specs :-)

We also tried to download Gnome from Ximian, but there were all sorts of problems with the packages. Now that he has a fast machine, I persuaded him into trying Nautilus… But then we discovered that Eazel is closed! (You’ll find the real link here: Eazel). What a shame — I was beginning to really like Nautilus, now that it’s stable and fast.

Yesterday I spend an hour outside reading about Danish literature… So I’m getting a tan — or perhaps we should call it a tint instead, as I’m mostly pink at the moment :-)

I’ve just been told which exams I’ll have this year — the final year in the gymnasium. Here’s the schedule:

Now, is this good or bad? I can already tell, that it’s going to be hard. We’ve had all four classes for three years so I have to read-up on a lot of things. History is considered to be one of the largest classes, together with Danish, because we’ve read so many pages in the three years.

But, we’ll see how it goes — judging from my grades, it can’t go that bad :-)

It’s really getting warm here in Denmark — we’ve had temperatures above 20°C (70°F) today, so I’ve switched to shorts instead of jeans.

Yesterdays physics-exam went well. I was able to answer all the questions, and when I talked with the others afterward, it sounded like I’ve made the same answers as the rest. So unless we’re all mistaken, I think I scored pretty good. It takes at least a month before we’ll get the answers.