There are only so many variations of meat and some type of bread-like item that can be done although most of them are good. It is perhaps one of the most enduringly delicious culinary inventions. Ranging from pate on water crackers to corned beef Reubens there is no end to the textures and tastes that can sprout from this basic theme. However, the best part of the bread/meat combo is the general portability of the outcome. Enabling a patron to walk and eat has advantages for both the restaurateur and the patron. It relieves the restaurateur of providing spacious seating arrangements and gives greater mobility and flexabilty to the patron. The added mobility in eating is one of my favorite “big city” experience. There is something extremely satisfying about eating on-the-go even when there is no real hurry. I have yet to visit a city that takes advantage of mobile eating as much as Chicago. Between the Eastern Europeans, Italians, Middle Easterners, Mediterraneans, and Mexicans, and even Western Europeans that have variously populated Chicago neighborhoods they have all left behind a legacy of wonderfully mobile “city food.” (more…)

I’ve always wanted to keep my method of having a single BibTeX library. So I keep a file in my home directory called .refs.bib which is linked automatically to the appropriate location with my new LaTeX document function, along with my LaTeX template, etc. However as my library has grown this has become difficult to manage, and I find myself realizing I simply can’t do it without some reasonable grouping or management. Recently a friend of mine in the lab began switching from Word to LaTeX and she had been used to using Endnote to manage references. She found a reasonable Endnote XML -> BibTeX converter online which worked pretty well. However managing a huge text file of references wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. Jabref was the answer. I played around with it and was relatively impressed. It is basically, feature for feature, a complete open source Endnote replacement. And quite honestly I’d say it’s significantly more stable than Endnote. So if you’re thinking of moving to LaTeX (I’m writing this with a few people in mind), give it a whirl. I’m still not 100% sold on it for my own use but for new users it will make the transition quite wonderful. (more…)