drowning...

i'm supposed to do a presentation for my design class, which ordinarily wouldn't be a problem, if i didn't have to do it on monday. yeesh. it's supposed to be about the typography of mathematics. it'll be interesting, i thought. once i started doing research (about a week and a half later than i ought to have), only to find that (heh) there aren't really any good sources out there.

whee!

there was a book called the handbook of typography for the mathematical sciences listed in the sfu library catalogue. sounds perfect, hmm? unfortunately, it was on loan. checked ubc library, and they didn't have it. desperation mode led me too check chapters on-line. no luck. amazon.ca had it, thankfully, and i ordered it with rush shipping.

yesterday afternoon, the buzzer rang.

'hello?'

'this is canada post with a package for nori maki.'

'oh. come on up.'

that was fast, i thought. but awesome, i'll have my book, and i might be able to pull this off after all. i heard a knock, opened the door, and the canada post dude handed me this massive box of canned fish from the st. jean cannery in nanaimo and left me gaping at the door, completely perplexed.

it was addressed to me alone. i had no idea what to make of it.

i e-mailed my sweetie, confused. were we expecting a big random box of canned fish? he called later that evening and said that he'd forgotten to tell me, but his mom was sending me a box of fish as a graduation present.

can't say that i'm not grateful. it's just quite possibly the most bizarre graduation present i have ever gotten.

anyway, the book i ordered arrived today, and it turns out to be kind of a useless piece of poo. i think i'm going to extract all i can for my presentation and *ahem* send it back.

also, i've been trying for the past three days to install metafont on my computer, with zero success.

first, it gave me

dyld: /usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/mf can't open library: /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.6.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2)

when i tried to compile the code. i looked on the ol' information superhighway for a solution, and it told me to install fink and get the "lesstif-shlibs" package. i tried. i got

Failed: Can't resolve dependency "gcc3.1" for package "xfree86-4.4.0-13" (no matching packages/versions found)

procured the X11 tools cd from the ubyssey and installed X11, gcc2.95.2 on my computer.

tried installing "lesstif-shlibs" again.

same error.

*fume*! help?

***

so i have a presentation and a paper on the typography of mathematics for my design class, a paper on scholarly publishing for text and context, and a presentation on libel for editing. i went to ubc to drain the libraries of their books: found four libel books at the law library, three books on scholarly publishing at koerner library, a couple of books on the history of mathematical notation at the math library...i find it peculiar that now that i'm no longer a student at ubc, i'm going out of my way to exploit that university's resources. i mean, before today, i'd never even been inside the law or the math libraries.

so...much...work.

oh...