I made two PDFs. One is the version I submitted to the library. This is in the traditional, anachronistic thesis style, where the text is double-spaced and formatted to be printed on one side of each sheet of paper. The other PDF is formatted more like a normal book, with single-spacing and different formatting for left and right pages. They both have exactly the same content; the only difference is the parameters I passed to our LaTeX style sheet.

Enjoy!

I think the reason they limit it to two days or one trial is that after the second day, you realize that even though they tell you to be there by 8:30, you don’t really need to be there until 9. They took attendance at 9 to make sure nobody decided to play hooky, and then we sat around until around 11 before I got selected for another juror panel.

This time I had a much lower number, 26. Unlike Monday, when the judge had each potential juror come up and discuss her or her issues in private with the attorneys, this time the judge did most of the voir dire by having people say their issues out loud. The 4th of July holiday was the following week, and nearly half the panel had vacation plans. I, however, did not, since I’d decided to hold off on any vacation plans until after I was done with jury duty. By the time we broke for lunch I was sure I was going to end up on the jury.

Before we left, the judge said that he was going to talk to the attorneys over lunch to see if they could speed up the jury selection process. When I got back from lunch this was apparently still going on. The doors to the courtroom were closed, and all the jurors were waiting out in the hallway.

About 20 minutes later the doors opened and a number of people left the courtroom and walked past us to go to the elevators. Shortly afterwards we were told we could enter the courtroom. We sat there for about 45 minutes, and finally the judge entered. He apologized for making us sit around so long, but he had good news: the defendant had accepted a plea deal. It turned out they’d been in negotiations for months, and he could have gotten a much better deal if he’d accepted the original offer. As it is, he’s facing up to 54 months in prison. When the judge sent us back to the jury room, I hadn’t seen so many happy people since the Phillies won the World Series back in 2008.

By the time we got back, it was already late in the day, and within a short time we were excused for the day. Since I didn’t get picked for a trial, my federal jury duty was over. When I got home, I found a report on the case online.

The following day I was supposed to report to Media for Delaware County jury duty. But when I called them up, I learned that they didn’t need any jurors that day, so I was excused. My perfect record of never serving on a jury remains intact!

It’s 2 days or 1 trial, and clearly I’m going to have to step up my game tomorrow. But even if the feds don’t want me, that’s not the end for me. On Wednesday I get to report to Media for Delaware County jury duty! (If I do end up on a jury in federal court, I can get a postponement for Delaware County.)

Since they had to shut off the water to my bathroom to stop the flooding, I decided to spend the night at a hotel in Center City.

Sigh.

And speaking of my defense, it’s scheduled for Tuesday, June 5. I’ll be spending the weekend working on my slides. Wish me luck!

Just about everything is there, but there are still a few small parts that need some work. I’ll be continuing to edit it for about another week and a half or so. I might post some updates from time to time, but the URL will stay the same. (It’s also not in the final format my committee gets, but it’s easier to read this way than when it’s double-spaced.) I’ll post the final version of the document after my defense and take down the draft.

Of course, if you spot any typos or have any comments or questions, please let me know.

journal = {Human–Computer Interaction},

but it was appearing in my bibliography as HumanComputer Interaction.

The error turned out to be that the innocent-looking hyphen between “Human” and “Computer” was actually a Unicode en-dash. I didn’t intentionally insert it, but I guess I must have copied that bit of text from a Unicode-enabled website or email. LaTeX and BibTeX are happiest plain ASCII characters, and once I changed that character, it looked fine.

But that got me wondering if I had anymore Unicode characters in my dissertation project. They’re nearly impossible to find by hand, so I wrote this little perl one-liner to find them for me:

perl -ne "print if /[^[:ascii:]]/" *.bib *.tex

I discovered 3 more bad dashes, and also a smartquote tossed in as well.

Yesterday was opening day for some teams so as I sat down to eat dinner I went to that block of channels to see what was on. The only game they were still showing (all the other games were day games in the east) was the Dodgers-Padres game. It was the Dodgers feed, and the play-by-play guy was Vin Scully.

Now Vin’s a legend — he’s been calling Dodgers games since 1950 when they were still in Brooklyn — but he’s also 84 years old and he’s not as sharp as he used to be. At one point the Padres sent in a pinch hitter by the name of Kyle Blanks. Blanks, Vin tells me, is originally from outside of Philadelphia (he was born in Souderton, the same hometown as the great Jamie Moyer) but he currently makes his home in Moriarty, Mexico.

That’s interesting, I thought. Since he plays in San Diego I figured maybe he was living across the border to try to save a little money. I’d never heard of Moriarty, but I assumed it must be a suburb of Tijuana. Must be hell trying to cross the border everyday to get to the ballpark, but whatever.

After the next pitch, Vin continued. “Moriarty, Mexico,” he said, “is a tiny town of about 2,000 people. It’s about 40 miles east of Albuquerque.”

Aha.

LaTeX Warning: There were multiply-defined labels.

Since LaTeX didn’t feel the need to tell me which labels were multiply-defined, I had to find them myself. As anyone who’s ever used LaTeX can tell you, finding them by hand in even a moderately complex document can be next to impossible. I wasn’t even sure if the the duplicates were in something I’d just added, or if they’d been there for a while. I didn’t even know how many duplicates there were.

Fortunately it’s easy to find duplicate LaTeX labels with a perl one-liner:

perl -nE 'say $1 if /(\\label[^}]*})/' *.tex | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

1
2

# I'm sure I could do this with a single SQL query, but I don't know
# how.  So instead I'm going to brute-force it with some perl.

That was exactly the conclusion I’d reached tonight before I found this code. Instead, all I had to do was a simple select on the precomputed results. Thanks, past me!

What was on my neighbor’s mind tonight was the high price of whoopie pies.

“The whoopie pies at the Giant [a local supermarket] have been Obamaized,” she said as the elevator doors closed.

She was bringing in her groceries in a large wheeled suitcase. The whoopie pies didn’t quite fit inside and were sticking out the top. She’d bought half a dozen of them at the store’s bakery. The cake part was red velvet instead of the traditional chocolate. They looked pretty tasty.

“Obamaized?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied. “They used to be $5.99, but now they’re $6.99.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re blaming President Obama for raising the price of whoopie pies at Giant?”

“Yeah, they’re so expensive now.”

With that we reached her floor, and she wheeled her suitcase of groceries out of the elevator.

The film must have just ended when I arrived. I got on the elevator, went up one floor, and the doors opened up. In walked a group of people, one of whom was carrying a familiar-looking golden statue.

It’s shiny.

Obviously, then, the Ivy League is the best conference in the nation, and the Quakers should be No. 1 when the new polls come out.

But unfortunately, when I installed the new package, I was disappointed to discover that they’d removed all the LaTeX packages that previously came pre-installed. LaTeX support is really important to me these days as I finish up my dissertation, so rather than trying to get them working (only to find other packages I use were also missing) I decided to restore 23.3 from Time Machine.

Sigh.

After the game saw an even rarer sight, as Quaker fans all pulled out their smart phones to check the score of the Princeton-Harvard game. Penn fans rooting for Princeton? Maybe the Mayans were right about this whole 2012 thing…

In case there was any doubt that Eagles fans are crazy…

For the record, I’m still a supporter of Andy, but I’m in the minority in Philly these days. Still, you’ve got to respect the commitment of these folks, if not their intelligence.