Not to mention readers who will remember until the end of time that they were forced to haul a useless chassis.

Also, the Mets should clinch soon.

Posted September 15, 2006 11:35 PM by D.

Since I just finished reading Od Magic by Patricia McKilllip, which is the most luminous, beautiful fantasy I've read in a while, I'll second that. It gave an 'aha' moment about my own writing, but it also carried me along on the trip and I enjoyed it immensely.

There were not many spare words in that book, I'm gonna read it again in a week or so and post a review on my LJ.

Posted September 15, 2006 11:36 PM by Paula Helm Murray

TNH, do you have a citation on the roman folding knife in the sidebar? I would like more details if you've got them.

Posted September 16, 2006 12:18 AM by Sisuile

Just wanted to say thanks for the link to the Sharpe's essay in the sidebar.

I might have something intelligent to say about it at some point, but for now, just: Thanks!

Posted September 16, 2006 12:24 AM by Mitch Wagner

i like how that was the one thing you pulled from the website i sent you.

also, it sucks being home. that is all.

p.s. the chewable toothbrush and the musical toothbrush.

Posted September 16, 2006 12:29 AM by sdn

But if you make the reader carry bacon to the top of the mountain, they may just resign themselves to being the internet flavor of the week.

Posted September 16, 2006 12:32 AM by Annalee Flower Horne

I wouldn't mind the volkswagon so much if it hadn't been masquerading a yak, which I subsequently had to shave ...

Posted September 16, 2006 1:02 AM by xeger

Might modern readers instead get into the Volkswagon and use that to get up the mountain? And then, of course, when it runs out of gas complain loudly (maybe all the way to court) that there wasn't a warning label on the vehicle notifing all and sundry that the author neglected to top off the tank and is also not responsible for any damages that may occur from the unintended uses of the vehicle.

Posted September 16, 2006 1:18 AM by Scott W

If it were a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, I wouldn't mind carrying it up the hill, even if the writer never used it again... As long as I got to keep it in the end... And assuming it was in decent shape.

Back when I drove a VW Bug, I always wished it was a Karmann Ghia instead. I think the body pan, engine, transmission, and suspension is the same for a Bug and KG, if I recall the manuals correctly.

Posted September 16, 2006 2:37 AM by Greg London

Speaking of machinery.

I spent a fair amount of time over the spring and summer trying out various text editors, so I've been thinking a lot about tools. What software do people around here do their typing in? What does it do for you that makes you prefer it?

Not to spark an editor war, or anything; I'm just really curious to see a wider cross-section than my own front yard/recent college bubble. (Undergrads all seem to use MS Word.)

I'll go first: I ended up deciding I really like BBEdit. All the amenities of a programmer's text editor, but accessible in a way that's kind of hard to describe. It also integrates really well with various Mac-isms, and (the real kicker) just tends to work the way my brain does. A very touchy-feely sort of preference.

Posted September 16, 2006 5:14 AM by Nick Fagerlund

Isn't this volkswagen quote just a slightly clunky reformulation of Checkhov's Gun?

Nick: I have vi (or preferably vim) hard-wired into my fingertips. I used to write novels using vim as an editor and Perl's POD macro system (and a custom makefile, and rcs for version control). However, a while ago I let myself be strong-armed into using first MS Word for OS/X, and then NeoOffice, for novels, due to the annoying tendency of publishers to demand Word documents (and in some cases edit them using Word's change tracking mechanism), but I have just discovered this OpenDoc to POD conversion module in Perl and I think I might just be migrating back to vim ...

Posted September 16, 2006 6:18 AM by Charlie Stross

Hi, Sharyn. I've fixed the credit line.

The SNAFU at Newark sounds atrocious, especially since it means you're not in Montreal so we can't see whether you're up yet and want to go check out the Bretagne Creperie two blocks over.

Woe!

Posted September 16, 2006 7:49 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Sisuile, I got the folding Roman knife from Jo Walton. It's in a museum in England. I found the museum's site the same day I put up that Particle, but I can't find it now, and I'm on a different computer in a different city with very indifferent connectivity.

Posted September 16, 2006 7:56 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Nick: Lotus WordPro 96.

I like it because, having used it for ten years (actually longer, since I started with AmiPro around 1993), I know it extremely well, because it does everything I need my word processor to do (which is quite a bit), and also because it's paid for.

Charlie:

"Hang the phaser over the holographic fireplace in the Captain's quarters, Mr. Chekov! Chop down the cherry orchard, Mr. Chekov! Embarrass yourself with Harcourt Fenton Mudd's three so-called 'sisters,' Mr. Chekov! Let me tell you something, Gospodin Sulu: if the Captain ever orders Mr. Chekov to take the phaser down from over the holographic fireplace, you had better not go on the Bridge until the zapping stops."

Posted September 16, 2006 8:03 AM by John M. Ford

Woe, a creperie.

Not that I'd have been awake to go if I'd been there.

But woe, a creperie.

Posted September 16, 2006 8:09 AM by Kate Nepveu

Right, now that I've got lamenting over my crepe-less state out of my system:

Nick @ #10: NoteTabPro for HTML, WordPerfect for work.

Re: the open thread quote: and if I haul that Volkswagen all the way to the top and find the author wanted it, but only to toss carelessly in the junkyard . . . I'm probably going to be just as annoyed.

Posted September 16, 2006 8:16 AM by Kate Nepveu

Oriana Fallaci has died. She was 76.

Guardian obit here.

If I'd had more to say, I would have put it on the front page, and I might yet, but as those of you who've followed her career may imagine, I'll have to do a bit of thinking and sorting out first.

Posted September 16, 2006 8:16 AM by John M. Ford

I used the free version of BBedit for a long while, but I recently started using TextWrangler from the same stable. It's much the same, but when I'm hand-coding HTML it handily colours up the tags.

Using anything more sophisticated than a text editor for writing is too much like my day-job; I start thinking layout and my graphic design lobe fires up and starts consuming the energy my writing composition lobe needs. I guess if I were writing professionally and my editor demanded it, I'd start books in a text editor and port them over to Word the night before the deadline.

Posted September 16, 2006 8:28 AM by NelC

Kate:

"Today on Scrapheap Cha -- uh, sorry, Junkyard Wars, our teams have to convert one of these yellow Volkswagens into an armour . . . sorry again, armor-plated Careless Author Pursuit Vehicle. Once complete, the teams will take off across this course -- which you'll note is rather short on auctorial hiding places -- after either A. N. Wilson or Bevis Hillier, target to be chosen by lot, and no fair slipping a ringer into the draw box."

[Music: "Big Yellow Taxi"]

Posted September 16, 2006 8:28 AM by John M. Ford

I will forgive the writer the Volkswagen if they make it a very entertaining Volkswagen indeed. I suspect I'm unusual in that, though.

#7 xeger: Did you save the yak fur? It's expensive stuff, although not as expensive as vicuna.

Posted September 16, 2006 8:29 AM by G. Jules

woe indeed.

request, if possible: could you buy me some sucre à la crème? it's a candy like butter tablet, but made with maple sugar.

if not, not, but i thought i'd ask ...

Posted September 16, 2006 8:53 AM by sdn

When does a yellow Volkswagen became a red herring?

Posted September 16, 2006 9:02 AM by Serge

When does a yellow Volkswagen became a red herring?

When the smell distracts you.

Posted September 16, 2006 10:48 AM by Deborah Roggie

Nick:
I use AbiWord.
It is a GUI program and it is free. I have it on my windows box and my linux laptop. It allows conversion to and from many different applications. I have converted MSword files to my Abiword, which worked beautifully. It has the ability to convert files to MSword, I just haven't gotten around to seeing how that works out since I don't use MSword.

As a bonus, I use a free version of Natural Voice Reader to give my writing a different format for editing. Hearing it is different from reading it in your head. The free version comes with one voice which sounds like Stephen Hawkings. I laughed alot the first time I used it, but I still caught errors I hadn't noticed before. When I start making cash for my writing, I plan to upgrade and get new voices.

Posted September 16, 2006 11:06 AM by JmariC

And if that volkswagon has nothing whatsoever to do with this story but then gets a whole story of its own, don't expect that the reader is going to trust that you will not repeat the ploy.

Ok, so the reader may fall for it once more but after that this reader will no longer read any of your books.

Posted September 16, 2006 11:10 AM by sara_k

JMar my experience, AbiWord is as buggy as an ant-heap, and highly allergic to documents longer than, oh, about ten pages -- not to mention having weird rendering glitches that make it barely usable on OS/X.

I'd like to love it for its open-sourcey goodness, but every time I've tried it it's bitten me within five minutes. No wonder the project logo is a fire ant ...

Posted September 16, 2006 11:43 AM by Charlie Stross

#13 - the folding Roman knife

Not exactly - this,with much omitted, from:
http colon whack whack www dot romanarmy dot com whack rat whack viewtopic dot php?p=88059

active link to the discussion board = extended discussion.

There is also a find from St. Albans in Hertfordshire, England of a 'Swiss army knife' which features a spoon, fork, earscoop, nail cleaner, toothpick and knife blade.

The fork is assumed to be for eating snails with. Len morgan makes beautiful replicas of this find.

Len Morgan posted:
I've made several pictures of the original years ago, unfortunately they were not of good quality, so I asked for a good picture. I got a angry letter back "no one is allowed to make pictures of the original" Sorry.
But fortunately there is an article about the Roman 'swiss' knife in "The Antiquaries Journal in 198? p. 310-311 PL XLIX" (sorry I was so stupid not to write it down properly). I've reconstructed the siwss knive in bronze (the original is in silver).
The original was sold by Christies in 1986 by a swiss dealer. It's probably late second or third century.
I have also seen folks in the Neaples museum dating from 79 AD so forks were used in the first century.

And from Paul B who is hosting the pictures linked to in the sidebar
And here is a picture of the Len Morgan replica- having used it, I can testify that it works well. Does anyone have a picture of the original?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/PaulHB/IMG_0478.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/PaulHB/IMG_0480.jpg
_________________

More information at the link.

I have had no correspondence with these folks and if anybody does I'd like to know if the Warncliffe blade is a significant modification of the original.

Posted September 16, 2006 11:51 AM by Clark E Myers

Oh my. I am a bit flustered. A friend of mine just passed on a link to Red Hot Library Smut. Not what you think; its a blog post about a book with stunningly lovely photos of libraries. Book lovers must, simply must, have a gander. You know you want to.

Posted September 16, 2006 12:06 PM by Peter Hentges

There be but 3 days until Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Be ye ready?

Posted September 16, 2006 12:07 PM by Josh Jasper

More on the folding Roman knife - the replica is offered for sale at pounds 40 on the maker's website at: knives for sale including replica Roman hobo with photograph as a composite pen knife - others are also pictured with a Warncliffe blade and sold as pen knives. I'd not be surprised to find a price increase as the last modified date shown is 2004.

Posted September 16, 2006 12:10 PM by Clark E Myers

It's funny that Paula brought up _Od Magic_, because it was a book that triggered thoughts of Chekov. I enjoyed it, but it did have an, um, odd, feel. As if she had intended a longer or different book.

In particular, (mild spoiler)...

...the protagonist's brother features at the beginning of the book, and takes off for the same big city as the protagonist later does. The protag thinks or talks about him several times after he hits the big city, including wondering how to look for him. But this never goes anywhere and the brother never reappears, which is a bit distracting since the repeated references result in the reader waiting for him to come back into the plot.

Also, the ending is such a rehash of something from the Hed books that it again feels like McKillip throwing up her hands and wrapping the book up hastily.

Posted September 16, 2006 12:30 PM by tavella

Last night I went to an not-exactly open house at a Historic Mansion in town owned and restored by Middlesex Community College. There was an art event there, part of a set of weekend festivities, I will shortly be heading out to go to some more of them.

On the Usual Topic, Mr Ney of Ohio is pleading guilty to accepting illegal gifts from Jack Abramoff. Is he out of Congress yet?

There's another of the Republicrap sacks of useless shit (once upon a time one of my coworkers explained to me, I don't know how truthfully, that the excrement from racehorses didn't even make usable manure...) who won't be back next year in Congress. On the other hand, given the situation with voting machines in Ohio that loaded dice are more honest than....

One second thought, "useless" isn't a term that is appropriate. It indicates a no-op. Ney has been an actively malicious and malevolent force in Congress, to the enormous detriment and deterioration of the quality of life in the USA today and for a long time to come--and to increased misery in the rest of the world, too. Four dead in Ohio, more than a hundred thousand in Iraq, and millions women being persecuted into chattledom there. Some record...

Posted September 16, 2006 12:33 PM by Paula Lieberman

Nick --

Another vim user, here; two (drawer) novels, well over a million words of usenet posts, and some effort so I can use mutt (and thus vim) with exchange at work, because, indeed, the keys are wired to my brain.

OpenOffice, if you happen to like GUIs, doesn't abjectly suck; if you're not planning to use any multi-page tables, kword (the KDE office suite text editor) was ok the last time I looked at it, which was admittedly awhile ago now.

It's important to figure out what you're trying to do -- get words into a file, format the file for output, programmatically manipulate the contents of the file, etc. -- before you start deciding on tools.

Posted September 16, 2006 1:54 PM by Graydon

Speaking of Volkswagens...

Are there any German speaking and/or publishing savvy people around here that could tell me anything about "Gipfelbuch-Verlag_ in Waldsolms"? I'm trying to find out if it is a legit house.

A German author is trying to get me to let her use a photo of mine for a cover a her new book, but she doesn't speak English very well, and I speak no German, so we have a bit of a language barrier, and it is hard for me to tell if any of this is sketchy.

Posted September 16, 2006 2:26 PM by Kayjay

I use StarOffice as well as MSOffice at home, partly because my verion of MSOffice is 4.2, and it doesn't understand any format more recent than that. StarOffice understands HTML and XML also. It just doesn't have some of the neat bells-and-whistles that make Word so handy.

You can have an antique Porsche that will get you there but has fuel limitations, or you can have a VW that runs on almost anything but won't go more than 55.

Posted September 16, 2006 2:57 PM by P J Evans

I got an email today from William Sonoma with this unfortunate headline:

Shun Cutlery Sets by Ken Onion

with links to http://www.williams-sonoma.com/shop/cut/cutb/cutskob/index.cfm?&bnrid=3101590&cm_ven=KANA&cm_cat=EDM&cm_pla=060913%20ShunRem&cm_ite=060913%20ShunRem%20CollBNAV

Posted September 16, 2006 3:30 PM by sara_k

My question of the author would be: Does the VW have a bud vase or not? If not, why should I carry it up the mountain? If it does, can I use the whole thing as a planter?

Posted September 16, 2006 3:36 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Teresa @13: I'm fairly certain the English museum you want is the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, which was local to me for much of my life. Unfortunately, I can't find anything about the knife itself within their site.

Have I been quick enough to provide some useful information about something I know about before half a dozen other people get in first with something more comprehensive? That would be cool!

Posted September 16, 2006 3:38 PM by Individ-ewe-al

Graydon(33): Precisely. I suspect that's why it took me two seasons (or wait, was it longer?) to pick my weapon of choice.

Mike Ford(14): Wow, no kidding?! I used WordPro 96 for all my writing on our family's first PC! I always liked it; I remember it being a little more agile and a little less aggressive than MS Word.

That program was also my first introduction to file format lock-in--we managed to lose the install disc sometime between the point where we became dependent on it and the point where we had to wipe the hard drive and re-install everything. I still remember frantically converting the whole family's documents, one file at a time, to MS Word files.

Everyone: Thanks, this is fascinating. Keep 'em coming!

Posted September 16, 2006 3:46 PM by Nick Fagerlund

John M. Ford: I wrote my dissertation using AmiPro. Unfortunately, it didn't catch on within the academy so, if I want to share anything with my colleagues, I find that I have to use MicroSloshed Turd.

Posted September 16, 2006 3:59 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Are there any German speaking and/or publishing savvy people around here that could tell me anything about "Gipfelbuch-Verlag_ in Waldsolms"? I'm trying to find out if it is a legit house.

Posted September 16, 2006 4:15 PM by Dan Blum

Teresa @13: I'm fairly certain the English museum you want is the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, which was local to me for much of my life. Unfortunately, I can't find anything about the knife itself within their site.

Posted September 16, 2006 4:21 PM by Dan Blum

The first WP program I used was MultiMate, which from what I was told was very similar to the proprietary Wang WP system. I use Editpad for blog posts, MS-Word for letters.

Posted September 16, 2006 5:15 PM by Linkmeister

Replica Roman folder #13, #38, #42 more quotes from the pre-Scadian period folks doing Roman army reenacting:

The replica tool Ambrosius mentions with it's[sic] fork spoon knife, nail cleaner, ear scoop, and pick is shown here [same links as the Particle].. ....
I am awaiting photographs as we speak from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge of the original find.....
------------------------------
Actually, Len Morgan makes .......It is a copy from an original in the museum in Cambridge, near to where it was found. ......And there is another 'winkle-picker' tool on it - for tackling snails, etc - as well, so the fork
was definitely intended for use in eating regular food. Rumour has it they found another one... Who says Romans never used forks?..... Ambrosius/Mike

I'd not be surprised to find another replica and/or more information in the daily life exhibits at Caerleon which would be England's greatest resouce for Roman occupation research if it were English. The geography of course ties in so very nicely with the Arthurian knights as Cataphracts - as so many have duly noted obs sf(s) omitted as an excercise for the readers

Posted September 16, 2006 5:24 PM by Clark E Myers

I had information at one time about a word-processing program named WordSmith, which looked really neat - this was in the late 70's to mid '80s, and word-processing was very young. IIRC, you could do things by word, by paragraph, and in other-sized chunks also. The finer details have, alas, long since fled, along with the hard-copy of the stuff. ISTR all I could afford was one binder of instructions, although I'd have liked to get the whole thing.

Posted September 16, 2006 6:04 PM by P J Evans

Sara: One imagines James Bond in Manhattan (well, one Bond or other, anyway), being handed a note telling him where to meet his contact:

SHUN LEE PALACE

"Someone must be having me on."

Posted September 16, 2006 6:35 PM by John M. Ford

bOINGbOING has a somewhat disturbing link to a zombie story on the Laos/Cambodia border. Mosquitoes reanimate the dead? Who then act violent for two hours? Sweet Mother of Romero!

Posted September 16, 2006 6:45 PM by Kip W

Teresa (Authorized torture #175):
...disasters caused by human volition -- the Great Chicago Fire of 1871...
Michael Weholt (#176):
I thought that was caused by bovine volition.
Teresa (#177):
Michael, you wouldn't believe the quantities of scholarly and semi-scholarly ink that have been spilled trying to settle that inherently indeterminate question. Reconstructing the night's events from the fragmentary testimonies (some of them given years later) of people who may or may not have been sober on the night is only part of it. I believe there's even a theory involving meteor showers.

Can't we just agree to compromise and say that the fire was caused by an incadescent cow at terminal velocity named Mrs. O'Leary that was invited for a sip of poteen in the barn?

Posted September 16, 2006 6:56 PM by John Houghton

If, on the other hand, the yellow VW is in fact a magic vehicle which may, with the proper incantation, be turned into a Yellow Submarine, a 747, a trireme, a Brough Superior, a surfboard, a kayak, a Harrier, the Millenium Falcon -- well, you have yourself a very useful little bug.

Posted September 16, 2006 7:13 PM by Lizzy L

Lizzy:

You left out an airship, a whatever-that-guy's-name-was Trimotor, a Temporal Displacement Widget,* the Nautilus (the one with the sense of interior design), the C-57D, and a Mechanical Mole. The last one would have to be capable of reaching Symzonia/Pellucidar/Anyplace Down There That Isn't Real Hot and Preferably Supports Dinosaurs.

Of course, all those vehicles need to reach all their relevant fictional destinations. Singly or in combination.

Fortunately -- and I would imagine this was your point -- we can do that. We have the technology.
I like a fountain pen for initial development, going to larger hardware for implementation.

*Preferably as small as possible, as large ones are inevitably left in places that end up behind Great Big Bolted Doors or on the other side of a River of Molten Sugar. Not that that's bad for the story, as long as it does not become a plot, you know, device.

Posted September 16, 2006 7:40 PM by John M. Ford

I used to have WordPerfect and loved it, but that secondhand computer died and the guy who sold it to me didn't include the program disks. Budget constraints forced me to buy a Cheapobox Home Edition with the complimentary bundle o'Microsoft kludge. At work, I had already realized that I didn't like Word when I tried to line up four items in two columns and discovered that TrueType means having to set up a table for every little thing. Oh, well. A spell-checker dictionary that hasn't been spell-checked itself? It happens. Letter templates that made my Business English teacher reach for the Tylenol and her red pen? I could live with it.

Now, however, I use Word for my church newsletter (eight pages, columns, graphics, drop caps) and hate it with every fiber of my being. It's like finally having a reason to go over 35 miles per hour in your marvelous shiny heavily advertised car and discovering that over 40 it shimmies, over 45 it pulls to the left (when it isn't pulling to the right), and over 50 it randomly goes into reverse now and then, plus two of the gears don't actually do anything. And you paid for this piece of crap. Gah!

Posted September 16, 2006 7:52 PM by Jenny Islander

Charlie Stross--

Ah, another vi user. I've been teased about using vi for years. My coworkers use emacs, which they consider vastly superior. Like you, I have vi programmed into my fingers. Old dogs, new tricks...

Posted September 16, 2006 9:06 PM by mary

#28 -- that link to Red Hot Library Smut was posted here in Particles a couple of weeks ago.

It is beautiful, though. It made me think of the scene in Disney's "Beauty & The Beast" where Belle first sees the Beast's library....I want a moment like that in my life, someday. "Here is this huge, beautiful library, and it is all yours."

Posted September 16, 2006 9:51 PM by Caroline

#52 -- Not to restart the editor wars, but emacs is programmed into my fingertips.

Happily, the scientist who is effectively my boss (I'm a grad student) is also an emacs person. When I told him I prefer emacs, he got all excited. So there you have it -- using the same editor as your boss is helpful to your career.

Posted September 16, 2006 9:54 PM by Caroline

John Ford @ #50: I think part of the fun of "McGyver" for us non-engineer types was the feeling that any minute now the guy was going to invent time travel.

Jenny at @51: my first word processing program was Wordstar, and I used it for years. Now I use Word, and yes, gah, and also ugh.

Posted September 16, 2006 10:03 PM by Lizzy L

Wow, someone still uses Word Pro and remembers Ami Pro! I salute you, John M. Ford! I was a software tester for those products for more than four years, and to this day, there are things Word Pro can do that other products can't do nearly as well. If I still had a copy of Word Pro (I prefer the 97 and Millennium editions), I'd be using them today. I wonder if they still sell them?

Posted September 16, 2006 10:20 PM by Lynne

I prefer textedit, which is only available on Sun Solaris, on something called "open windows", I believe.

Anyway, the Sun is setting on OW, and rising on Common Desktop Environment, which, most unfortunately, doesn't appear to have textedit on it.

So I coded an editor up in perl using TextUndo and got it rolled into the standard perl TK release. It's called "gedi" which does most of what 'textedit' does.

"gedit" is available on linux, but doesn't quite do everything that textedit or gedi do.

I hate just about every other editor I've ever used. What I've discovered is that a lot of editors are "hands-on-keyboard" mode, while I prefer "hands-on-mouse" editing. the ultimate HOK editor is xemacs, which has a keystroke sequence for everything, but disables ctrl-C and ctrl-V. HOM editing, such as textedit, lets me do a compile, and when the error message scrolls up, I double click on the line number, use the mouse to select the pulldown menu for "go to line", and the line number is automatically pasted in, then mouse click on "ok". Once my hand touches the mouse to click on the line number, it doesn't leave until the editor cursor is on that line. Which seems to be a rather seemless and intuitive transition, but no editor I know of, save textedit and gedi, does that simple little thing.

There were a number of things you could do with textedit that were like that: grab the mouse, click, click, click, and you're done and ready to return to the keyboard.

Posted September 16, 2006 10:20 PM by Greg London

Tavella, that's why I'm waiting to review and perhaps read it again. My brain says there is something that is bothering me about it, but: between not having weekends because of our Renaissance festival (I'm shop help for a jeweler) and the fact we're in "fall crunch' == I work for a trade show publisher and, well, lots of trade shows happen in the fall and early winter, my brain isn't quite working right. My critera are a bit lower right now because the desire to be entertained is higher.

Now I've got a manuscript that a fellow writing workshop member is marketing, and that I've only read pieces of (the group had been critiquing it a lot longer than I've been a member and by the time I joined she was offering rewritten pieces to be refined). My main critique was, "I want to read the whole thing." and since she considers it finished I now have a copy in my hand.

Posted September 16, 2006 11:13 PM by Paula Helm Murray

I've heard RUMORS of this before.

Now it's the top story on MSNBC.

Thank you, MSNBC:

* * *

Ties to GOP trumped skill on Iraq team
In rebuilding effort, loyalty to Bush administration was paramount

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.

...

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade.

Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation that sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

* * *

I'd say "unbelievable," but I have no problem believing that this is exactly what the overconfident, arrogant bastards would do.

Posted September 16, 2006 11:19 PM by Stefan Jones

At one time I had the WordStar "cursor diamond" and other keystroke commands memorized.

Just a few weeks ago, I ditched the very last copies of WS 4.0 and 5.0 that I had left. (Along with almost every other floppy disk I had.)

No regrets. I appreciate the GUIshness of Word for applications where appearance is important, use TextPad for entering code on Windows, and I know vi and an even more primitive text editor when I need to work on Suns and the like.

Posted September 16, 2006 11:24 PM by Stefan Jones

Greg@57: the ultimate HOK editor is xemacs, which has a keystroke sequence for everything, but disables ctrl-C and ctrl-V.

because they're unnecessary; long before they existed; emacs had set-mark, {copy,kill}-{word,line,region}, paste, and pop-paste cmds. The problem I have with HOM editing is that even with thorns I miss the proper keyboard position 5-10% of the time I return to 2-handed touch typing. (I'd also debate whether any emacs is the ultimate HOK editor compared to vi, but each has its own issues. I nearly went crazy writing a 30,000-word report in vi, but still use it for small things simply because I want not to forget it entirely; it's more likely than emacs to be installed ab initio.

Posted September 16, 2006 11:32 PM by CHip

PNH & TNH,

I think you might find this (via Miss Snark) amusing, especially since you both work for Tor. I'm sure you've seen worse but I think this has to be high on anyone's list. And yes, I'm being purposefully vague because it's best to read the post than have it described.

Posted September 17, 2006 12:06 AM by A Series of Tubes

I am an emacs girl. I am a HOK person; every time I have to take my hands off the keyboard to use a mouse or it slows me down. I suffer GUIs nongladly when I must and use whatever is given me, but if I have the chance, I work in emacs.

I read mail via a shell account, too. GUIs for mail waste way too much time.

Posted September 17, 2006 12:11 AM by Susan

Lamest line ever when suddenly confronted with someone who used to be Dennis and is now Denise:

(brightly) "I never realized you had ink."

I'm going to go try to extract my shoelaces from my small intestine now. My only excuse is that I really didn't recognise her and was suffering the paralytic social terror of "omigod this person knows me really well and I have no f'ing clue who she is..."

Arrgh.

There's evidently a Story to be had here on how macho soldier-guy transformed into serious girly-girl, but now I'm too embarassed to ask for it.

Posted September 17, 2006 12:19 AM by Susan

I basically use wordprocessing as glorified typing. I like the functionality of cut and paste, font change, etc. I use MS Word simply because it comes loaded and I'm lazy. What I can't stand about it is that it really doesn't have a "reveal codes" function anymore--what is there is basically paragraph marks and tab arrows. I'm thinking more along the lines of the earlier WordPerfect where if your formatting went widgy, you revealed all the codes--and IIRC you really did get all the formating codes--you could actively edit the format coding (almost like in a text editor like Notepad). Any suggestions? I don't need all the bells and whistles.

Posted September 17, 2006 12:23 AM by Mark DF

I'm on a Mac running OS X most of the time. I'm using MSWord for my disse%^&*#& and for the books I work on because my committee and the publishers like it that way. I don't.

Before the committee was involved, I used Mellel, which handles many languages, Unicode, double byte characters and bidirectional mixed text, with footnotes, beautifully, but is in every other way idiosyncratic and not simple to learn.

I use BBEdit Pro for HTML and text. I use Mariner Write for my own stuff, like blog posts. Sometimes I use TextEdit, which has much more going for it than most people think.

I mourn MacWritePro.

Posted September 17, 2006 1:09 AM by Lisa Spangenberg

Interesting question, and now I'm wondering myself why I use what I use:

- Writing code and markup, or for taking notes by myself and for myself: BBEdit.
- Taking notes in groups when there are other Mac users around that I can convince to also use said tool: SubEthaEdit.
- Blog posts (when I use something other than just a Safari text box): MarsEdit.
- Pay copy: MS Word.

That last is because every editor I work for wants the file submitted in MS Word, so it's simpler to just start there as well.

Posted September 17, 2006 1:13 AM by Dori

A quick Google showed Lotus WordPro, as part of the Smartsuite pack, still being advertised by a dealer in the UK. First response on a search for "Lotus" and "WordPro", and the OEM version is pretty cheap.

I bought a copy years ago. An earlier version was given away with one of the UK computer magazines as a promotion when the Millenium edition came out.

More sources may be found if you Google for Smartsuite.

For a lot of things, file compatibilty is the problem. Unfortunately, MS Word is a moving target, and there are problems with older Word formats not being readable by current versions.

Posted September 17, 2006 1:44 AM by Dave Bell

Paula @ 32: (once upon a time one of my coworkers explained to me, I don't know how truthfully, that the excrement from racehorses didn't even make usable manure...)

Kevin Conley reports in his book Stud: Adventures in Breeding that Campbell's uses the manure from Storm Cat, the top Thoroughbred sire in the world by some measures, to fertilize its mushroom fields.

I believe I have also read that Bill Veeck sold the manure from the backstretch when he ran Suffolk Downs.

Posted September 17, 2006 1:55 AM by Jen Roth

Nick Fagerlund (#10): What software do people around here do their typing in? What does it do for you that makes you prefer it?

I do most of my writing for the Web, and I use a text editor called Notetab. Specifically, Notetab Pro, Version 5. I like it because it's a text editor, rather than a word processor, so it delivers unformatted straight ASCII. It's got a spell-checker, it does word-wrap, and word-counting. It keeps a list of favorite files open in a panel to the right of the document Window, so I can click on a file and have it pop open. It automatically generates some HTML. There's some other things I like about it, but those cover the basics.

I use Word on a daily basis as well. I write fiction in it. Also, I 'r an editor myself (of the journalist variety), and (like Charlie's editors) I like its track-changes and comments mode for discussing editing changes with my vast legion of minions.

There's a third app I use regularly, called Wikipad. It's a single-user desktop Wiki, I use it as a to-do manager. And then I can fiddle with Wikipad instead of getting stuff done.

Charlie, what do you dislike about MS Word?

Kate Nepveu (#16): Ah, another Notetab user! Notetab roolz! All other word processors and text editors droolz. Uh, drool! C'mon, Kate, gimee a high five!

(Kate does not give Mitch a high five)

(Mitch puts an I-meant-to-do-that expression on his face, and is left standing awkwardly with his hand above his head)

(everyone else looks embarassed, and looks away)

(Mitch combs his hair with the fingers of his upraised hand, as though that's what he intended all along)

Posted September 17, 2006 2:39 AM by Mitch Wagner

I mourn XyWrite.

Posted September 17, 2006 2:40 AM by Mitch Wagner

Hm. I'm also a vi user - emacs was far too much of a space and memory hog for the machines I started with - and by the time I had the standard use for emacs, vi was engrained.

These days I use vi regularly - XCode regularly (yup, that'd be OSX), subethaedit (mmmm!) and omnioutliner. I suffer Word when I must.

Posted September 17, 2006 4:04 AM by xeger

#34 Kayjay -seems like it is a very small (think 30 books since 2003, half of them no longer available), but normal publisher.

The website looks a bit amateurish -they didn't even link to their online-shop! On the other hand, one of their authors apparently worked for half a year with an editor before they agreed to publish his celtic-boy-is-chosen-by-the-gods-to-become-druid-fantasy.

Doesn't seem to be a scam or vanity press, just a small publisher for authors who'll probably sell only in their hometown.

Posted September 17, 2006 5:51 AM by Fitzroy

3 days until Talk Like A Pirate Day

Yes, Josh, I'm ready. I already watched Robert Newton as Blackbeard a few months ago though and wouldn't care to watch that surreal exercise in movie-making again. Well, I do have a piratical t-shirt I could wear at the office.

(Speaking of surreal cinema, Turner Classic Movies on Friday showed nothing but short films, some by the likes of Scorcese, Lynch, Kubrick, Tony Scott and Ridley Scott. I missed most of them although I caught on tape Chris Marker's la jetee. It looks VERY unusual. Well, I'll finally see if it really was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 monkeys.)

Posted September 17, 2006 7:31 AM by Serge

I use vi because emacs gives me RSI. Over the years I've tried to switch four or five times, and every time, within a couple of weeks, I've begun getting stabbing pains in my hands.

What I prefer, editor wise, is gvim. vim = vi iMproved; gvim = Graphical vim. (There's even an emacs emulator written in vim macros, if you insist ...)

Word processor wise, I'd switch to Nisus Writer Express in a shot if it had just one key feature -- the ability to have more than one window (or a split window) open on a given document. As it is, when editing a novel, not being able to see what happened on page 100 when writing page 200 is a crippling problem, in what is otherwise an excellent writers' word processor. (With Perl as a macro language, yet!)

NeoOffice, the OS/X port of OpenOffice, does what it says on the tin, and although it's still in beta it seems reasonably solid if a bit sluggish. Sluggish I can put up with: lacking vital features (multiple-windows-on-one-file, for example) or crashing and losing data regularly are another matter.

I still get nostalgic for Borland Sprint, back in the 80s, which most of my trunk of burn-before-publishing novels were written on. Requires DOS, 384Kb of memory, 4Mb of disk space when fully loaded on a PC-XT, and basically acted like a combination of Emacs and Scribe on steroids, with a whole bunch of then unheard-of features -- it saved edit state and open documents and windows between sessions, could emulate the keystrokes and menu hierarchy of other word processors, had a nifty external command-line file conversion utility that you could splice into batch scripts or call from a menu, the user interface and printer drivers and typesetting commands were all hackable in a couple of not-too-brain-dead macro languages, and so on. I can't help feeling that with the exception of WYSIWYG and XML, everything's been a step backward since then.

Posted September 17, 2006 9:10 AM by Charlie Stross

Jenny Islander (51) -

OpenOffice (you want 2.0) supports page templates, page template sequences, and n-column layouts. It's also entirely free and Unicode-enforcing. Never tried drop caps, but a quick search indicates that the feature is there. (I have done 500 page technical documents in it, so this isn't a purely theoretical recommendation. Of course, if I was doing what it sounds like you're doing -- a purely to print newsletter -- it's at least possible I'd be doing it in troff.)

Mark DF(61) --

"Reveal Codes" isn't available in a current word processor. (Word Perfect is still available, though.) You can do use things that use text markup as the input to the formatter -- troff, TeX/LaTeX, XML/XSL -- but those, while highly suitable for high volume documentation, have substantial learning curves.

OpenOffice is based on an XML format -- Open Document -- and the "files" are really compressed (zipped) directories, so it's possible to go into the XML and edit it directly, but I don't recommend it. (On the other hand, you can use zip commands to pound the styles.xml file you want into all your OpenOffice documents, which can save a lot of time.)

Posted September 17, 2006 9:26 AM by Graydon

Mitch Wagner:

I mourn XyWrite.

I know it's a clone and sort of expensive, but what about Nota Bene?

Posted September 17, 2006 10:32 AM by Bruce E. Durocher II

I am starting to warm up to OpenOffice though...

Posted September 17, 2006 11:48 AM by Greg London

Kip, your link doesn't work, and I don't see anything about mosquitoes or Cambodian zombies on BoingBoing's front page now, but this story has been circulating for a while now, over a year. It seem to have started from this 2005 April Fools day joke.

Posted September 17, 2006 12:49 PM by Avram

Open Office is my friend. The only thing is that I have to remember to do is save a copy of anything that I do asI'm pretty sure that I can change the default setting, but I kinda like the fact that it isn't MSWord.

I use notepad to code in, though. It's still my default, and I don't particularly do anything complex enough to require something more powerful.

Nice research on the knife. Thank you. Now to see if I can get one made as an experiment and challenge for the smith...I love geeks.

Posted September 17, 2006 12:54 PM by Sisuile

#76 - One of the real issues is keeping actual styles and markups up front and useful. Revealing a markup code leaves the actual visual undetermined - and styles contain a variety of changes such that styles of a given name themselves change both what they include and what the value of the included property is at the given moment - and changes can be applied globally or not.

As I say everytime the subject comes up I'm tempted to run WordPerfect 5.2 revised on a current machine but under DOS so that everything is at worst in high level cache.

Word 2003
Reveal formatting
Show All
Hide All
On the Format menu, click Reveal Formatting.
Select the text whose formatting you want to review.
The formatting information will appear in the Reveal Formatting task pane (task pane: A window within an Office application that provides commonly used commands. Its location and small size allow you to use these commands while still working on your files.).

Do any of the following:

To change any formatting properties, click the text with a blue, wavy underline, and then change any options you want in the dialog box that appears.
To determine the formatting source, such as whether the formatting comes from a style (style: A combination of formatting characteristics, such as font, font size, and indentation, that you name and store as a set. When you apply a style, all of the formatting instructions in that style are applied at one time.), select the Distinguish style source check box.
To show formatting marks, such as paragraph marks (paragraph mark: The nonprinting symbol that Microsoft Word inserts when you press ENTER to end a paragraph. The paragraph mark stores the formatting you apply to the paragraph.) and tabs, select the Show all formatting marks check box.
To format a text selection like the text that surrounds it, select the text. In the Selected text box, click the arrow, and then click Apply Formatting of Surrounding Text.

Posted September 17, 2006 1:29 PM by Clark E Myers

Mitch @ #70: C'mon, Kate, gimee a high five!

(Kate does not give Mitch a high five)

Dude, it was 2:39 in the morning. Despite the dog's best efforts, I was asleep.

*high-fives Mitch*

Graydon @ #76: "Reveal Codes" isn't available in a current word processor. (Word Perfect is still available, though.)

Are you trying to say that WordPerfect doesn't do Reveal Codes anymore? I don't have their most recent edition, but the FAQ for it says that Reveal Codes *is* included.

(I went out and bought WP 8 as a starving college senior because I refused to attempt anything as complex as a thesis without Reveal Codes. I'm still running that edition on my home computer.)

Posted September 17, 2006 1:59 PM by Kate Nepveu

Kate (82) --

I am more saying that Word Perfect isn't a current word processor. It's still being released -- I think they're up to version 11 -- but it's not in active design.

Clarke (81) --

That's what's really good about XML as an authoring format; you get pure semantic tagging and the writers doesn't have to worry about the output formatting at all.

Most technical writers I've encountered hate this, at least initially, but it's got a lot going for it when it comes to high-rate documentation production, which resembles making a book a lot less than an example of the typical process would indicate.

Posted September 17, 2006 2:30 PM by Graydon

Actually, WordPerfect went up through 12 and then switched to a ridiculous hybrid numbering system, calling its most recent "X3."

I don't know what your basis is for saying that it's not in "active design," particularly since you didn't know of the release of the two most recent versions, but I find that I don't really care very much either.

Posted September 17, 2006 3:03 PM by Kate Nepveu

I'm currently doing as much of my writing as possible in plain text (because it's future-proof), using Markdown or MultiMarkdown to generate XHTML, RTF, or whatever from the plain text original.

For an editor, I use TextMate, the latest hot new thing that all the cool kids are using on MacOS X. It's a Cocoa app, so I get the default system-wide OSX spellchecker, and it's heavily extensible.

And I've been experimenting with using Merlin Mann's method for naming and organizing text files.

Posted September 17, 2006 3:35 PM by Avram

Kate: CORELDraw also hit the "X3" designation, and I'm assuming that someone at the company was superstitious about calling something "version 13." Or maybe they weren't, but worried that some of the customers might be. Hey, if it works for hotel floors . . . (The Marketing People, they live in a dimension not of sight and sound, but of Mind.)

Or maybe the new versions will give you mutant powers, like Resize Window and Select All Bezier Nodes.

Posted September 17, 2006 5:05 PM by John M. Ford

Avram @85: Yup, I'm a Markdown user too. I'd actually been considering learning LaTeX and writing in that, which, of course, would have been completely insane. All I really needed were some simple machine-readable placeholders for things like emphasis, headers, and footnotes.

I'm actually aiming for pretty much the same thing as Charlie Stross is with that POD <--> OpenDoc converter he's playing with (see #11). What I really want is a good way to build a rigorously-styled MS Word or OpenDoc document out of Markdown-formatted (or Markdown-like) text. Even though I prefer not to write in a word processor, the text is going to have to end up in one eventually. It'd be cool to do that in a way that takes advantage of Word's nice features. Maybe I'll have to eventually write one.

(Also: I was impressed with TextMate; it was one of the big contenders when I was figuring out what I wanted. Didn't match up with my brain quite the way BB did, but a damn fine app nonetheless.)

Posted September 17, 2006 5:17 PM by Nick Fagerlund

Peter Hentges writes:

Oh my. I am a bit flustered. A friend of mine just passed on a link to Red Hot Library Smut. Not what you think; its a blog post about a book with stunningly lovely photos of libraries. Book lovers must, simply must, have a gander. You know you want to.

If you are looking for a gift for someone with this fetish, I recommend watching the Renaissance Libraries Calendar site for the 2007 calendar to come out. Or just buy one of their posters.

Posted September 17, 2006 6:04 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

Mitch @ #70:
(Mitch puts an I-meant-to-do-that expression on his face, and is left standing awkwardly with his hand above his head)

Free-associating happily:

Not to inspire Bush or anything, but apparently one of the hot new tortures for the Elizabethans (used on Catholic priests caught in England, according to this interesting book called God's Secret Agents) was to suspend the victim by the hands. Weirdly, one contemporary, um, torturer, cheerfully says that this is just like in [the dance] Trenchmore, which makes me think that Trenchmore must have been a much more exciting dance in the 16thc than it was in the 17thc when it was actually written down.

(Do I get a little gold star for getting current politics, religion, and dance into the same post?)

Posted September 17, 2006 6:39 PM by Susan

Silly repeating sentences like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".

Posted September 17, 2006 6:52 PM by eric

I've used both vi and emacs, but at some point vi got the edge in familiarity (not to mention startup time) and the positive feedback loop has by now erased all my emacs skills.

Not only do I write in vi, but I write text as HTML in vi -- most of what I write ends up on my web site anyway. The few times I've done anything submission-like, I went to Kinko's, downloaded the HTML into Word, redid all the formatting Word ruined, and then printed it there.

This is because I'm a loon.

Posted September 17, 2006 7:25 PM by Trip the Space Parasite

Stefan Jones, #59, I hope MSNBC has that attributed to the WashPost because that was the front page WashPost article today. The author, a WashPost writer, adapted the article from his book.

Posted September 17, 2006 9:02 PM by Marilee

You guys see that ad for Dr. Danger up there on the right side? It took me a long time to figure out why they were calling a guitarist "Dr. Danger."

Posted September 17, 2006 9:03 PM by Marilee

Kate (84) --

I know people who used to work for Corel, who continue to know people who do work for Corel, and we use Corel Draw in my team at work, so the subject of the development schedule has come up. (We really wanted to know if Corel Draw had W3C compliant SVG in its roadmap anywhere.)

Nick (87) --

You can go from text markup (ReStructured text is the one I've used) straight to PDF or print output by a number of means, with no intervening word processor required. You may not want to, but the possibility exists.

My experience is that this is miles more consistent than passing anything through a word processor, which is inherently inconsistent about styles. (If you can override the formatting of anything to which a style has been applied, it's inconsistent about styles.)

Posted September 17, 2006 9:10 PM by Graydon

"I hope MSNBC has that attributed to the WashPost because that was the front page WashPost article today."

Yes, the article has the Washington Post logo with the byline.

I didn't notice that book adaptation angle until I went back to look.

I am really glad this shit has finally hit the fan. I just hope the fan is spinning fast enough, and that the shit hits the right people.

Arrogant phuqtard Young Republican carpetbaggers . . . I can just imagine them waking up with hangovers on the day they're due to be coptered out of the green zone, seeing the chaos and misery around them, and blaming the Iraqis for not having the strength to believe in the glorious vision provided them.

Posted September 17, 2006 9:14 PM by Stefan Jones

Nick, you can go from Markdown to RTF. TextMate's Markdown bundle has Convert to RTF (and PDF, and LaTex) as a command.

Word will read RTF, and I assume OpenOffice will too.

Posted September 17, 2006 10:11 PM by Avram

Avram @ 96: Yeah, but isn't RTF all inline-formatted instead of styled? Styles are the coolest part of MS Word; I was hoping to be able to (for example) make emphasized text show up as underlined instead of italicized, mess with the way blockquotes and bullets show up, etc. (And does RTF do footnotes correctly?)

I hope I'm mistaken, though, because that would be sweet.

Posted September 17, 2006 11:01 PM by Nick Fagerlund

Susan #89: Weirdly, one contemporary, um, torturer, cheerfully says that this is just like in [the dance] Trenchmore,

That's only because the 'greek' system hadn't been invented yet, so he COULDN'T compare torture to fratboy hazing.

Posted September 17, 2006 11:30 PM by Bob Oldendorf

p1. I use Pages 2 for editing my manuscripts on Mac OS X. It's fast, has all the built-on Cocoa goodness you Textmate people are raving about, handles ridiculously huge documents, reads and writes MS/Word documents, RTF, etc. You couldn't pay me what I'd demand in exchange for using any of these other editors mentioned so far in this thread.

p2. A friend of mine claims that using a Dvorak keyboard alleviated the stabbing-pains-in-the-hands problem for him (and two of his friends who recommended it to him). I think people who write novels in VIM are probably geeky enough to use a Dvorak keyboard to do it. (Come on, you know you want to...)

YMMV. (Disclosure: In my day job, I work for the same corporation that makes Pages, but I swear: I'd endorse it even if I worked for Microsoft.)

Posted September 18, 2006 1:41 AM by j h woodyatt

Bruce E. Durocher II (#77): I know it's a clone and sort of expensive, but what about Nota Bene?

Thanks, but NB is $400. I don't mourn XyWrite that much.

Kate Nepveu (#82): Your high-five arrives too late. All die. O, the embarassment.

Posted September 18, 2006 2:35 AM by Mitch Wagner

All die. O the embarrassment.

"Important message for the King of Denmark. Sorry about the delay; had to wake up the Minister of Shriving Time to tell him he wasn't needed. Long story. Anyway, your two chaps, choir invisible, high-five dispatched per instructions. . . . Just a literally bleedin' minute 'ere, don't you people own a mop?"

--To Carry On or Not to Carry On (1962)

Posted September 18, 2006 2:49 AM by John M. Ford

Tomorrow, September 19, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Because of a flaw in US law, there are no penalties for noncompliance; please write your Congresspersons to protest this gap.

Meanwhile, do your part by talking like a pirate tomorrow. If you haven't had your training sessions yet (and again, appallingly this training is not required in the United States), here's a website that may help.

Practice tonight, talk like a pirate tomorrow!

Avast!

Posted September 18, 2006 8:09 AM by Xopher

I have my Enron quotes all ready for tomorrow.

Posted September 18, 2006 8:31 AM by Jon Meltzer

But what if the pirate isn't Robert Newton, Xopher, but Peter Ustinov? Or don't you remember Blackbeard's Pirate? Maybe you erased from your memory anything having to do with Dean Jones, who was well known for that movie about a certain Volkswagen - a white one, true, not the yellow one that initiated this thread.

Posted September 18, 2006 8:40 AM by Serge

Nick in #10 - Notepad for small jobs (under 26KB). OpenOffice Writer for the larger ones. Notepad because I sometimes get distracted by Macdinking away at fonts until I've got everything *absolutely* right, and by using just the plain text editor I wind up less distracted and better able to just put the text on the screen. OpenOffice because the document size is about 1/3 of a Word doc to start with, and just keeps getting smaller (no kidding, I have one document which is 100KB in .sxw format, and over 700KB in .doc format. I grew up with limited storage space, and still tend to port things from A to B on floppies. Small is beautiful).

That said, I'm reasonably fluent in both Word and Lotus Word Pro, I've been forced to use the rather tautological MS Works at one point, and if someone handed me a version of First Choice I could probably remember a lot of stuff in that too (I've probably just [carbon-]dated myself and made all the Unix geeks look at me down their noses for being a Winders slave). I could also manage to work my way through things in vi if I had the man pages printed out.

Yes, I've used a few different word processors. I'm also able to work straight to page on a typewriter (I learned document layout in typing class at high school, and it stuck - I still tend to stick to minimalist layout styles) and I have reasonably legible handwriting. Now if only I had something decent to write *about*...

(Oh, and HTML is either Notepad for small changes, or Dreamweaver for the big stuff. My tendency to hand-carve HTML in Notepad is what put me off the whole business of web design a long time ago; Dreamweaver is rekindling my interest).

It's probably not a coincidence that I work tech support. Over the last seventeen years, I've been forced into contact with a lot of different types of software, not all of it friendly.

Posted September 18, 2006 8:47 AM by Meg Thornton

Oops. I meant to write Blackbeard's Ghost... My apologies. My only excuse is that I haven't yet had my first cup of Folger's instant crap.

Posted September 18, 2006 8:49 AM by Serge

Breaking in with a serious note - are we seeing the October surprise?

Gas prices have dropped here by forty cents or so - over ten percent.

I'm willing to bet they pop right back up after the elections.

Posted September 18, 2006 9:15 AM by Margaret Organ-Kean

I'm currently doing as much of my writing as possible in plain text (because it's future-proof),

Microsoft just recently announced that Longhorn (or whatever the codename for the next windows version is, I keep forgetting) won't support plain text because plain text can enable copyright violations. They have dropped the plaintext format and replaced it with a DRM-enabled text tool that beta testers say is as easy to use as FrameMaker. Microsoft's new operating system will take any plaintext file you try to open, wrap it in the DRM-enabled format, and delete the original. Rumors that the OS will then email the FBI have been vehemently denied by Microsoft.

Posted September 18, 2006 10:15 AM by Greg London

I'm currently doing as much of my writing as possible in plain text (because it's future-proof),

Microsoft just recently announced that Longhorn (or whatever the codename for the next windows version is, I keep forgetting) won't support plain text because plain text can enable copyright violations. They have dropped the plaintext format and replaced it with a DRM-enabled text tool that beta testers say is as easy to use as FrameMaker. Microsoft's new operating system will take any plaintext file you try to open, wrap it in the DRM-enabled format, and delete the original. Rumors that the OS will then email the FBI have been vehemently denied by Microsoft, prompting some experts to speculate that the OS might actually email a division within Microsoft tasked with determining whether the uncontrolled text file is the result of copyright piracy and whether any money might be made from a lawsuit.

Posted September 18, 2006 10:23 AM by Greg London

echo? sorry, don't know how that happened.

Posted September 18, 2006 10:25 AM by Greg London

#99 ::: j h woodyatt pondered:
p2. A friend of mine claims that using a Dvorak keyboard alleviated the stabbing-pains-in-the-hands problem for him (and two of his friends who recommended it to him). I think people who write novels in VIM are probably geeky enough to use a Dvorak keyboard to do it. (Come on, you know you want to...)

FWIW, the navigation in vi was clearly designed around the qwerty keyboard. It's not nearly as visually intuitive under dvorak, but since most people who take the time to learn dvorak don't hunt-and-peck, I suppose it's not really an issue.

Posted September 18, 2006 12:43 PM by xeger

I use a Windoze shareware editor Textpad, which is similar to Notetab. It understands Java, HTML, and easily manages files of several mb. Everything I do is written there in good old ascii, then ported to whatever moronic productivity-killing information-eating app is required - PDF, Word, etc. Before this vim was the choice.

I like OpenOffice for producing pretty-print, since the .odt output is just a zipped-up collection of XML documents. This gives at least a fighting chance of recovering the data in the future. It also has a good set of convertors to/from the proprietary formats.

Admittedly the new Word also saves as XML, but it's MS-proprietary XML, golly what a surprise.

Posted September 18, 2006 1:43 PM by Doug K

Aye -- Talk Like a Pirate Day -- I work in the library that day, so I'm going to take all the kid's picture books about pirates and put them on display, working on the theory that it's never too early to warp their little minds. So far I have:

Little Badger, Terror of the Seas
Pirate Girl
Rabbit Pirates
How I Became a Pirate
and a book by Jane Yolen that is still %$#@#% checked out but had better come in by tomorrow.

(Unfortunately, suggestions won't be helpful -- this is dependent on what books we have in the collection at the time.)

Posted September 18, 2006 2:06 PM by Lisa Goldstein

What about Tim Powers's On Stranger Tides, Lisa?

Posted September 18, 2006 2:17 PM by Serge

Lisa--

_Treasure Island_, surely.

Posted September 18, 2006 2:22 PM by Sarah S

#107 -- Breaking in with a serious note - are we seeing the October surprise?

Nope, it's not surprising enough. In fact, no real surprise at all.

Posted September 18, 2006 2:23 PM by joann

Serge: Great book, but not quite the read for small children?

Posted September 18, 2006 4:09 PM by Clifton Royston

Admittedly I haven't read this thread and won't have time to do it for a few more hours, but I was wondering if anyone has seen this:

http://community.livejournal.com/veronicamarsfic/1352553.html

If so, is it a real concern? Or something being wildly misinterpreted?

Posted September 18, 2006 4:16 PM by MWT

True, Clifton, true. Powers's book might be too much for kids.

Posted September 18, 2006 4:20 PM by Serge