Getting my geek on

It's time I started creating documents like an adult, so from now on I'll be writing my documents in LaTeX, on Emacs. Of course, first I have to learn the damn things.

After I managed to put together the bare bones of a document, my first real project has been to put together a new kind of list. I like to enumerate my block quotes ("T1", "T2", etc.), and then refer back to those quotes by those labels. (A trick used by Gregory Vlastos in his papers.) I couldn't find any ready-made set of commands that would do this for me quite how I wanted it, so I decided I'd go ahead and define some myself. Totally doable. I used to be a comp sci major, you know.

Well. Call to mind the stereotype of the middle aged man who used to play baseball back in the day, and suddenly finds himself on a diamond again after a decade or two devoid of real athletic activity. The baseball-playing part of his brain still remembers what it used it used to tell the limbs to do when they were fully functional.

You know what happens next.

(I do have my list type now. I won't say how long it took. With my luck, all the work has probably been done and is nicely laid out in a LaTeX package somewhere.)