Category: Rants

One thing that drives me batty about submitting manuscripts to journals is that just about every one of them has a slightly different format for how they want things. Everything from margins, fonts and how things are referenced/cited to the title page and file format for the submitted manuscript. Drives me nuts.

AIP has a good system going where you can use LaTeX and the RevTeX macros to create your manuscript. All you do is specify the journal you’re submitting to in the \documentclass and it’s ready for submission. The journal style file takes care of all the formatting for you. Works for all the AIP journals. It’s great. Sadly TeX/LaTex remains obscure enough outside the basic sciences that there aren’t any medical related journals that I know of (at least none that I would be submitting manuscripts to anyway) that take TeX/LaTeX files. It’s a shame really. The more I do with LaTeX, the more I like it. The output that’s generated looks so much nicer than anything Word puts out, and doing equations/figures is dead easy. The learning curve is a little bit steeper, but if you can figure out HTML, basic TeX is well within your grasp. Both are essentially just markup languages so there’s really not that much to learn.

Honestly, MS Word sucks for creating manuscripts for publication (IMO). You spend all your time making things look right, and then if you take it to another computer where the default styles/formats might be slightly different, everything looks screwed up. Do you fix it? Leave it alone? Hope it looks ok to the journal editor? Will the reviewers ding you for a crappy looking manuscript because their styles/formats have messed up your manuscript?

My ideal world? Every journal publisher would provide LaTeX style files for their journals and accept LaTeX manuscripts, or at least provide MS Word style libraries and/or templates for their journals (like AIP’s Toolkit 2000). I think it would make creating manuscripts so much easier.

Ok, I’m done now (can you tell I’ve been spending all day trying to cram my manuscript into a Word document?).

After taking the dogs out to the dog park earlier this morning, we decided to stop off at the Farmer’s Market and work on socializing Simba a little more. The dogs are always a little easier to handle when they’re just a little bit pooped out after running around the dog park.

This morning was a little on the toasty side and they’re also just finished a long game of chase and wrestle, so naturally the dogs were panting pretty hard. To top it off, Simba’s not exactly great on the leash and tends to pull a lot (working on it) so it makes him look like he’s panting really really hard.

There’s a very convenient doggie water fountain in Marion Square, so after camping out there for about 10 minutes letting the dogs drink their fill we headed off to walk around. We didn’t get very far before some lady walked up to us and said “Your puppy is way too thirsty so I’m donating this bottle of water to him. It just hurts my heart to see him like that.” Just like that and walked away. Tried to tell her that he had just been at the fountain drinking for the past 10 minutes, but she was already walking away by then.

Now I appreciate the concern over the dog and everything, but just the way the woman spoke to us made both the wife and me feel like we were terrible dog owners dragging this poor thirsty puppy around. No questions, no bothering to ask if the dog is all right or anything. A simple “Is your puppy thirsty? Does he need some water?” would have been much nicer. Then I would have been able to explain that he’s already had lots to drink at the water fountain and then stopped at the Good Dog Bakery booth a few meters away to top off for good measure. He’s just panting because it’s hot, not because he’s thirsty. Dogs do that. When it’s hot, they pant and hang their tongues out. When they’re thirsty, they don’t pant; they drink water.

Oh, and another thing for parents. If your kid wants to offer someone’s dog a treat or some food, tell them ask the owners first. Even though most dogs will eat most everything, some things end up coming right back up a few hours later for the owners to deal with. And some dogs don’t always react well to a kid thrusting something into its’ face without warning. The wife would like to apologize for startling the poor girl trying to give Nala a bite of her cheese cracker. She really didn’t mean to scare anyone. Her loud “No!” was meant for Nala and not at all for the girl.

The people responsible for this act should be made to die a slow painful death.

From the MSNBC story:

The Drug Enforcement Administration arrested 22 Colombian nationals for smuggling heroin into the United States via various methods, including surgically implanting the drug into puppies, officials said Wednesday.
The Colombian organization brought more than 20 kilograms of heroin into the United States, concealing some of it by slitting open purebred puppies, according to John P. Gilbride, the DEA’s New York Field Division special agent-in-charge, in a news release.
At least three puppies died from having liquid heroin packets placed inside them and then being stitched back up, DEA spokesman David Ausiello said.

Just reading about it and seeing some of the pictures makes my stomach turn.

I’ve never been a big fan of McDonald’s, both from a food and service stand point, but the wife gets these cravings for McDonald’s every now and then, so we end up there on occasion. Yesterday was one of those occasions, and what probably should only have been a few minutes waiting in the drive-thru lane turned into about 30 at the McDonald on the peninsula. This particular McDonald’s has always had pretty crappy service to begin with, but we were there and the wife wanted a cheeseburger. I suppose when I restarted the car to move up to the ordering sign, we should have taken that as an indication of things to come.

So there we are, third in line wondering what’s taking the person so long to order. Finally he drives off, the lady in front of us starts up the car and drives up to the speaker. After waiting a few more minutes, she gives multiple orders, asking for the price after each one. This takes about 10 minutes.

Finally we make it up to the speaker, and end up waiting for another 5 minutes before a staticy voice says she’ll be with us in a minute. 5 more minutes pass by with cars behind us deciding to bail out and leave. We probably should have joined them.

15 minutes after we reach the speaker, the staticy voice comes back and asks for our order, which we have to give twice because apparently weweretalkingtoofast the first time. S..o….w..e….s..p..o..k..e….s..l..o..w..e..r. Finally, we got our order in. Drive up to the window, pay…and wait some more.

We get the drink we ordered, but then someone says the McNuggets were dropped, and ask us to pull forward to…you guessed it, wait some more. At this point I was about ready to go inside and tell them to forget the order and get a refund. Finally after waiting another 5 minutes, we got our stuff (minus straw, napkins and sauce for the McNuggets) and left.

Needless to say, I think that’ll be the last time we go to this particular McD’s (or any other one if I had my druthers)

Halloween pumpkins are barely in the trash and the endless loop of Christmas songs has started on one of the local radio stations already. Last year it didn’t start until the 10th. Seems to have started a full week earlier this year! Already saw a bunch of Christmas stuff on the shelves well before Halloween. If the goal is Christmas saturation/aggravation by Thanksgiving, it looks like stores are well on the way.

Halloween: it’s the new Thanksgiving.