trochee

Wow, I'm posting a lot -- I guess I've been saving up.
I wrote the following to

_dkg_ who was asking me what my plans were for the upcoming American holiday:
thanksgiving here is going to be four days of work, broken on Thursday by two thanksgivings (I've been invited to another, but two is enough). I'll be having T-day with A--- and K-- and W--- and J--- (A&K's mom) and possibly D---n; D---y -- my new squeeze -- will join us later, and D---y and I may go to ---'s house (J---''s dad) later on to socialize with the R--- family (all three generations) and some other activisty folks. I hear you about the file-format lock-in. We're using Excel in phonetics, and I've been stubbornly using open-office, until I discovered a missing feature in their chart-plotting (it's not possible in OOCalc to plot arbitrary error bars along with a data series -- you can plot the error *of the series* but that's not useful if the series is a group of means, each with its own error). So I switched to a Windows machine at the library in order to do the last steps of the plotting, which was irritating. I don't know how to find out what the OOffice people's plans are -- I'd contribute the feature, but I'm too busy and I'm not a GUI programmer. I'll be spending the weekend writing a phonetics paper -- actually, doing the advance coding to get the results for a phonetics paper -- and trying to flesh out an outline for my morphology seminar (heh, I just mistyped "seminary") into a full paper on finite-state computational approaches to Arabic morphology (well, and a new approach I came up with).