20131023
Finished watching the first season of The IT Crowd. Fun show, bit like a hybrid of Black Books and Dilbert. And particularly similar to Dilbert in that while many episodes entertain me with hijinx, some just make me cringe. Case in point: final episode of the first season was an extended joke on menstruation and femininity stereotypes.
Watched final episode of Whitechapel, season 2. Didn't watch the first season because I did not think I would be interested, regret this now. Rather especially like that the character DI Joseph Chandler has OCD. Don't often see that treated in fiction as a serious, life-affecting condition. So far feels overall well-written, with awareness of genre tropes and displaying discretion in when and how to deploy them.
Also after much frustrated searching resolved a problem I had been having in my attempted adoption of LyX for document editing. The problem was simple - representing cancellation in mathematics - and so was the solution. The hard part was finding a tutorial such that I could follow and work from without having to master LaTeX formatting overall. Been trying to get the hang of LyX by copying out some of my old study practice notes.
Still unsure what to use LyX for. At first I thought it would be a great way to lay out my assignments for my classes. The only formats the university interface claims to handle are RTF, DOC and PDF, and while LyX's finished output is PDFs, feedback on one of the assignments I submitted earlier asked me not to submit in PDF format in future for the markers' convenience. Bit awkward, as I've not had Microsoft Office installed on a computer that I've owned since an old hand-me-down a decade ago. Does get to be an ongoing frustration schools not accepting documents in any of the formats I actually work in.
Right. Unsure what to use LyX for. PDFs for submitting assignments is apparently out, a shame as LyX appears to be built primarily with academic documents in mind. Maybe ask the unit coordinators each time. Might be able to work it for my self-directed study writings, especially now I've resolved the cancellation issue. LyX seems much better suited to handling mathematical input than LibreOffice, which I'd previously been using. Journal posting, maybe.
As an experiment I am writing this post out in LyX. My main concern is what will happen with the formatting when I paste text from this editor into the post editors at deninet and Dreamwidth. Also being intended for transposition into a different environment means most of LyX's semantic features are off-limits. Shall see how this one goes; quite possibly will go back to drafting these posts in Notepad++. Meanwhile for fiction I will probably stick to using tools intended for that purpose such as yWriter.
Watched Doctor Who S5E11, "The Lodger". Kind of nice episode, not especially great or terrible, a bit sweet. Was a bit amused to notice, right where one of the guest characters touches a bit of alien discolouration that causes him to fall deathly ill the music briefly echoes the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
