Failure

Today has been one of those days where nothing really seems to go right. The knitting is all fouled up, and I had

My knitting got caught on something and sprung a little catch. It’s actually kind of disappointing, and reveals that I have no clue as to how to graft or kitchner pieces of knitting together. I think it has something to do with knitting backwards and having the stitches mounted in the wrong dirrection. The best I can ever hope for is reverse stocking stitch grafting, and even that it’s sort of spotty.

I’m so going to be that person in 30 years who comes in to a yarn shop and pays one of the gurus to graft stuff. It’s sort of pathetic. I knit on the grey sweater today, and I find it intoxicatingly relaxing: How weird is that? Plain stocking stitch. On very small needles with very small yarn. I’d say, I probably have less than two inches to go until the neck shaping starts, and then less than 3 inches from there until the shoulder straps start. And like I said it’s intoxicating.

But enough about the knitting, perhaps the larger issue is that in my paper writing today I ran into a few issues with LaTeX when I went to compile everything, and I still don’t have a real clue what went wrong.

Here’s what I can tell:

1. I installed latex2rtf from MacPorts a few weeks ago, because it seemed lie a good tool for interfacing in the rest of the world. MacPorts, installed a different installation teTeX (or something), where I had previously been using the macTeX distribution, or maybe I was using something from Fink. UNIX nerds will probably disown me for having a really crappy set of paths and install locations. Sorry. It is coming back to bite me in the ass.
2. Whatever happened, all of the bibTeX stuff (thats the package that handles the bibliographic database and complies all the references and what not,) and it appears the APA formating style file is also gone, or at least not accessible to whatever TeX engine that I’m using.
3. This of course can be fixed by throwing the .cls file in the same directory as .tex file that I’m trying to compile. The same thing goes for the citation packages. I’ve been using the nat-bib, or at least I think I’ve been using the nat-bib citation package because it works a little more clearly and flexibly than apacite. Again, I got something that made really pretty APA manuscripts and I didn’t mess with it. Not sure what’s up with that.
4. My paper printed and for some reason jammed the cite-key in front of all the reference page items. To which I can only say “WTF?” Furthermore it errored (ok, ok, it produced an error) on line 214 of apa.cls (the bibliographynewpage flag/option or some such, monkeying with that code did nothing from what I could tell.

I finally just gave in and let it be, but I’d really like to be able to have the ability to produce clear and straightforward documents. Really really like to be able to do that.

Also, my email isn’t healthy at all, and I don’t have the clue as to what caused this. Gmail released new features today (group chat, don’t you all get up at once now,) and if that’s the reason that it’s been all screwy, I’m going to be pissed. Very Pissed. Also very sorry if you’re trying to get a hold of me. If you try the email, and it isn’t working, leave a comment here, and I should see it pretty quick.

To add insult to injury AIM is being cranky, and since I use AIM the way most people use the phone, this adds an additional layer of frustration to the day.

I think I’m going to get a book at hope that I don’t run into a paper cut issue.

Other work continues apace, I suppose. Sorry for posting the entries today out of order.