| December 30, 1989 | Issue 1 | Provo, Utah |
In this issue:
A New Source of Information
Now that I have some real desktop publishing capabilities, I thought It appropriate to make good use of them. Some of you may have read the newspaper-like letter that I made a few months ago. That trick wasn’t repeated because, in all honesty, it was a pain in the neck to set it up, and it didn’t look that good in the end anyway. So here it is, the start of something that I hope will last. I hope that Sparks from the Smithy will eventually become the world’s forum for all intellectual writing, and after that, I hope to print The Far Side.
-The Editor
Provo Welcomes Eric Home
After a mostly uneventful flight from PDX to SLC (except for some nauseating bread with strange fruit-things stuck in it) Uncle Gordon came and drove me back to Provo. My roommate, Bob, in the embodiment of the entire population of the city declared, “Oh, hey. You’re back. Was that your dad you were with?” The apartment is a little empty though. Notably missing are Brian, Sang, and a plate of chocolates I had left in my cupboard. The Sears Telecatalog Center was also rather desolate when I returned to work. I wondered, “Now why was it that I didn’t get a few more days off’?” Then I remembered that they were paying me to be there and earning money is conducive to eating.
BYU Blows the Bowl
In surely one of the most nerve racking football games ever played, BYU hit the gridiron with their powerful, muscular, intelligent squad and, sadly, lost. Ty Detmer passed for some three million yards but had to learn the hard way that he ought to fall down faster when he gets sacked or hold on to the ball tighter. My roommate, Sang, who was actually there to see it all live must surely be thinking, “I came all this way, paid all this money for this?” And it looks like dinner is on Kent.
Math Stuff
I’m happy to discover that discrete mathematics is not calculus, It deals with trees, paths, ordered pairs and, I assume, other landscaping subjects. I bought the textbook the other day, and I’m also happy to discover that the authors don’t like to make use of words such as “obviously” and ”clearly” which are surely the most frustrating words In the English language when in a certain context. For example “…then, differentiating f(g(x)) implicitly twice and with some algebraic manipulation after dividing both functions by a random number between 3.76 and 2,133,942 and holding the resulting equation up to a mirror, this is obviously special case of theorem 2.1. as Illustrated in figure 97.232.” (Okay, so I made this up, but I swear there is stuff like that In my calculus text book.) It is sure to be a fun semester with both calculus and discrete mathematics.
In Conclusion
Well, hasn’t this been fun. You know, after spending a lot of time doing this, I’ve discovered that this isn’t so easy either, but it will look a heck of a lot better than that one newspaper-type letter. Or at least it had better.
I actually have no idea how full my layout frames will be after I import all of this text, and seeing how as I don’t really have much more to write about since I’ve seen most of my readers within the last couple of days, I guess I’ll end this here. Well, unless there is all kinds of nasty negative white space that I have to deal with. Then who knows what I’ll do?