I had my thesis defense a few days ago (master’s in theoretical linguistics), I got an A, it went fine. I don’t know anything about the graduation ceremony… but this is one step up from when I originally enrolled in this program.

Crazy anecdote from several years ago: I went to the admittance exam, two rounds, everything went OK and I got a good score. Then I got a notice from the university administration that despite my score being over the threshold, I was not admitted. No further explanation. Huh? The next day I called the department – they told me I was in, I told them I apparently wasn’t! Confusion ensued. In the end it turned out that an administrator thought the university did not even have a theoretical linguistics program and sent out similar notes to several prospective students. Augh!

I hope they realized by now because I’d like to receive my diploma… sometime… It did take a bit longer than expected because in the meanwhile I finished a different master’s program, started a PhD and also had an unfortunate illness. *sigh* But it’s finally over, I graduated, happy joy! Now on to publish my thesis results.

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I’m quite busy right now and I have a deadline at hand, but I also have content for the site, so I’ll try to do updates more often!

I did not forget about Amesirun either, but unfortunately it had to take a back seat to work right at the threshold of completion. The game is mostly finished, I just need to put it together, compile the executable and send it out to closed beta. (Thank you for everyone who volunteered! I even got someone to test the Mac version, which I did not even want to release because I could not test it myself.) Hopefully next week!

Have you ever been to a journal club where someone wanted to present an article, didn’t feel like making a a set of slides, but still had to show something (after all, someone had to lug the projector all the way…)?

If you are a grad student, you probably have Here is a very easy solution that beats putting your average pdf reader on screen and suffering around with the scrollbars! (Scrollbars on an unfamiliar laptop can annoy the heck out of even the most patient presenter. Trust me on that.)

I talked about making complicated zooming presentations with Impress!ve in the previous entry, but this versatile little piece of open-source software can be used for this purpose too, and you don’t need to do anything taxing.

Just install Impress!ve (it should run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but I only tried the first two) and run it on the article pdf! Absolutely no configuration necessary, though you might want to launch it with the -e parameter if zoomed-in pages are low resolution (depending on your video card and drivers).

That’s it! You immediately have the article on your screen and converted into a nice presentation. Useful commands:

* Left/right arrow to move forward/backward

* Tab to create an overview (choose between pages)

* Enter to create a spotlight (really spiffy! You don’t need that laser pointer)

* Z to zoom in on the page (it zooms where the cursor is placed)

Have fun!

I have two scientific projects I’m involved in at present, I’m going to describe them briefly just for you to get the idea what the other posts in this category will be about, etc. Click to read more!

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