It has recently come to my attention that my friend Sarah Zelcer has finally been able to set up a Peace Corps Partnership for her women’s group, Las Orquídeas, some of whose members are pictured below:

It was my pleasure to have worked with this group and I wish them all the best. I encourage those of you who can afford to give a little to do so! I can personally vouch that this is a worthwhile project.

Thanks!

Bullet points

I discovered after some searching that the resume generator supports markdown syntax (but not your LinkedIn profile!). Here's my solution:

* Bullet 1
* Bullet 2
* Bullet 3

These asterisks are not rendered as bullet points on your main profile, but it doesn't look bad, and your resume is rendered with bullet points and appropriate line breaks. Close enough, I guess.

Page breaks

My resume was page breaking in an inconvenient spot--right after the header for one of my job entries. But the resume builder does not allow one to specify where the page should break. My solution? To pad the previous entry with blank characters. I tried appending several line breaks to this previous entry, but quickly realized that LinkedIn will trim the end of the entry if it only consists of whitespace.

How to get around this? First, I looked up the Wikipedia page for spaces in unicode, then I copied the empty space between brackets (looks like: ] [) listed under the Display column in the En Quad row, then I pasted it into the end of my previous job entry in LinkedIn. It looks like this:

(end of previous job entry):
For this work at XYZ Widget Co. I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize...
[empty line]
[empty line]
[space character pasted in]

This tricks LinkedIn into thinking that there is content at the end of that previous entry and thus including the empty lines. This has the intended effect of padding the space between entries, thus forcing the page break to occur before the next entry begins.

Obviously, you should determine how much padding (how many empty lines) to add experimentally.

I would paste the character here for your convenience, but my blogging platform chokes on the character. Just click on the Wikipedia link above and follow the instructions.

Voila! Hope this helps someone.

attrib /D /S -r -s -h X:\*

Entry to doorway #2.

This entryway to the bus is restricted to: women, senior citizens, and people with special capabilities (disabled people).

Raise your hand if you love doing your taxes!

I know, I know, they’re a pain. But I would like to mention that there is something that all of you can do to help Peace Corps volunteers do their jobs more effectively, and it doesn’t have to cost you a cent: You can donate to the Peace Corps! It is tax-deductible, and the money goes straight to worthy volunteer projects. For more information, check out the donation FAQ page.

Since I’m quite partial to Ecuador, I recommend the Ecuador Country Fund. However, I would like to mention that PCV Sarah Zelcer (who lives very close to me) is almost finished with the process of getting her project to help a women’s group listed on the Volunteer Project Page—when she gets listed, I will post a followup.

So, to sum it up:

• if you’re paying taxes anyway, why not put that money to use to help us PCVs out?
• If you plan to donate and can hold off and donate to Sarah’s project, that would be awesome!
• If you plan to donate but cannot hold off on submitting your taxes, you can always donate to the Ecuador Country Fund.

Thanks for your patronage, remember to tip your waiters at least 15%.

In doing so, I came across what I’m guessing is a quite common scenario: I wanted to include other content, such as an Excel spreadsheet and some PDF documents as addenda. I figured that it would be easiest if all my attachments were in PDF form. So I dutifully saved all my attachments as PDFs, and set out to include them in my Lyx document. Easy as pie, right? Boy, how wrong I was.

Now, I know that LaTeX as a whole and Lyx are geared towards the Unix community. I have always found that things always Just Work from inside an Ubuntu install, for instance. I understand that development is geared towards that audience. But I would be remiss if I did not mention the following.

In the default install of Lyx 1.6.7 for Windows, there is a dialog (Insert => File => External material => [select Template pdfpages]) to include a PDF document inside a Lyx document. This dialog does not work! On my install, it fails with the following error: “pdfpages.sty not found” (or “eso-pic.sty not found”). Additional steps are required to resolve this error.

The steps are the following:

1. From your start menu, right click and run as administrator the following entry: MikTeX => Maintenance (Admin) subfolder => Package manager (Admin)
2. Right-click, select Install, for the following packages: eso-pic, pdfpages

In some cases, I have found that only the first few pages of a PDF are included. To fix this,

1. Click on the embedded PDF. This brings up the “Lyx: External Material” dialog.
2. Click on the “LaTeX and Lyx Options” tab and enter the following: “pages=-“. This tells LaTeX to include all pages.

Additionally, if you wish to insert a table of contents (TOC) entry for the included PDF, you should add something like this to that same options line:

addtotoc={1,section,1,My PDF,my_pdf}

Combining the two options I’ve just mentioned looks like:

addtotoc={1,section,1,My PDF,my_pdf},pages=-

Here’s a video of me going through the entire process (and making a few mistakes along the way). You’ll notice that my initial TOC entry is incorrect, and the first PDF that is generated does not include the whole PDF that I’m attempting to include (thus the adding of the pages=- option).

This is the church in the town where I live. I don't know why people here do things the way they do. Live and let live, I guess. I SAID LIVE AND LET LIVE! OH FORGET IT YOU'RE DEAF.

• I have recently discovered a program called F.lux. It automatically adjusts the brightness of your computer screen so that it is appropriate to the time of day. I highly recommend it, as it decreases eye strain.
• If you have more than one computer on the same desktop, synergy is an invaluable tool that allows you to share the same mouse and keyboard across multiple screens. This allows you to seamlessly switch between them and copy/paste text across computers.
• For web browsing, I highly recommend Google Chrome with the AdBlock extension.
• For PDF viewing, I recommend Foxit. It is much lighter-weight than Acrobat, and you're less likely to be targeted for malware since the user-base is so small.
• For organizing your pictures, I find that there is no competition for Picasa.
• If you download torrents, utorrent is hands-down the best client. Vuze hogs resources.
• For downloading from newsgroups, forget alt.binz which is terrible. Use SABnzbd instead. Set it and forget it.