Last night, I attended a campaign meeting for 
Peter Vickery. He's running for the Governor's Council, which is one of those things that most of us vote for by ignoring or picking randomly. Peter is taking it very seriously and actually has a well thought out platform. I haven't been very involved, but I'm planning to do more over the next few weeks. The meeting last night was about the fact that Robert Reich has endorsed his campaign and is coming to Amherst to announce it.
Speaking of things political, Alisa pointed out a quote in an article in the paper this evening. There is a hideous Republican woman running against our state representative. (The governor is targetting progressive women in the state). In this article they quoted someone else saying that the woman is not your typical Republican: she's a thinking person. I'd say that captures Republicans pretty well, though whether or not it describes this one is a matter of dispute.
My Fulbright is coming together. I have just about everything ready: my project description is in good shape, but can still take a bit more polishing. I got the bibliography finished. I called the rep to ask about submitting a single syllabus with some of my project descriptions, rather than multiple syllabi and she agreed that my strategy made more sense. I don't have the invitations in hand, yet, but I have got committments and I believe everything is set. And there's still a week!
I've used the Fulbright application process to learn how to use LaTeX and BibTeX. They're really pretty simple once you know how to look stuff up. BibTeX is confusing in that you have to format the LaTeX document first using LaTex
, then using BibTeX, and then using LaTex again. At least I think all three runs are required. And if you're building a Table of Contents or an Index, you need to run them even more times. Using TeX, however, reminds me a bit of when my dad would describe something as "just like using a computer". Using TeX is "just like using a computer".