Eureka! moments

Last week I had a Eureka!* moment. I love these moments - when you've been trying to figure out a problem (could be big, could be small) and it is frustrating you to no end, and then finally you break through and find the solution! It's pretty amazing.

This Eureka! moment had to do with the linguistic examples I wrote about earlier. They weren't formatting properly, and because of this some of the examples were splitting across pages. Pretty early on in my attempts, I posted on a forum devoted to LyX/LaTeX/TeX, the typesetting program I use. Forums are pretty nifty ways to aggregate knowledge, and I've learned a ton about LaTeX through this particular forum. If you have a specialized industry or tool and you haven't found a forum where people can help each other out, find one quick or make one yourself. It is totally worth it.

Unfortunately, with this particular issue no one was able to help. So I kept troubleshooting, trial and error. Eventually one of the things I tried worked! So satisfying. I imagine this is what I'll feel once I finally submit my PhD thesis... though people tell me a grammatical description is never complete, even if it's over 1,000 pages.

*As I remember, and according to Wikipedia, "Eureka" comes from the Ancient Greek word εὕρηκα heúrēka, meaning "I have found (it)" and is attributed to Archimedes, who discovered how the volume of objects could be measured by water displacement.