Am I first? Gosh.

Pity I can't think of anything relevant to say.

"Blessed is (s)he who, having nothing to say, refrains from giving wordy evidence of that fact."

Things that sound magical, but aren't?

True Names, they burns, my preshussss!

the spirit level!

not only is it a miracle that allows me, a terminally imbalanced woman, to hang pictures, it has such a mystical name.

like pizza stone.

Great Inventions?

(I have a studfinder, although it probably needs a new battery. Also I'm sure my modems are error-correcting. Now if Windows would do that for itself ... !)

Real things that don't actually do what it sounds like they do (or we wish they would do)?

Judging solely from the stud finder, the universal remote, and my experience, I'd say it's things that don't work.

Your experience doesn't work, ethan? How unusual...

I would like to point out that jumping up and down in a near-incoherent rage is *tiring.*

I don't think Madeleine L'Engle's death has been noted here yet. She must have a good many fans among this blog's readers. I sure read a lot of her books when I was a kid, and when I think back on them, they really were unusually good for kid's books.

Well, by observation, blogs that require True Names don't work either.

I've had a fairly well-known comic book writer refuse to let me join his blog because I won't use my True Name. Nevermind that Leva Cygnet might as well be my real name since I've used it in fandom for close to a decade. Shoot, I even get snail mail sent to Leva Cygnet. From business contacts. And my accountant.

If I'd used my real name nobody would have known who I was!

I expect that a True Name registration system would lead to very, very polite commenters, simply because you never know who has your True Name or what they might order you to do if you trolled. It might include autodisemvowelment.

“The net is phenomenological. If you do a letter-perfect imitation of a jerk, you are one.”

Is Bruce Baugh related to Alan Turing?

Er...things that were here just a minute ago, but you can't remember where you put them?

(Where DID I leave that comment registration system anyway? I had it in my hand, and then I went into the kitchen and now it's gone.)

Of #3 I would also like to add a quotation from a friend of mine: "Remote means far away."

Has anyone else noticed that the spelling references right above the comment box seem to take on a rather frightening amount of implied meaning? For example, reading them, I seem to hear a fragment of some obscure catechism...

Tolkien?
Minuscule.

Gandhi?
Millennium.

Delany?
Embarrassment.

Publisher's Weekly Occurrence?
Asimov.

Weird connoisseur?
Accommodate hierarchy.

Deity etiquette?
Pharaoh: Teresa.

It's Macdonald?
Nielsen Hayden

It's more?
Here.

You forgot Radio Shack's Male-to-Female Converter.

Stephen Frug @ 14... Deity etiquette? Pharaoh: Teresa.

I like it.
"I'm ready for my closeup, Mister DeMille."

I am entirely too young. Decidedly. I say this because when reading 5. Comment Registration Systems which require the use of True Names, I thought "Wait, you mean like Facebook? That's not a great invention. Not even close."

Things that work at a distance?

I think if you hooked them all up together, added some paper clips and rubber bands, a particle accelerator, and a sequence of highly unlikely events, you might end up immortal. Whether you spend the rest of eternity insulting everyone is another question.

Things to which Good automatically accrues, but when put into practice inevitably fail.

Alex is an ex-parrot. ;-(

I gather Dr. Pepperberg's project continues with a couple of other parrots. I know about Koko & the Gorilla Project, but what other Human/Animal Communication projects are still running?

#15: And the Donaldsonian/Feistian Grip.

(What did we ever do without Google?)

Stephen 14: even with the reference right there, you misspelled at least two things.

#20: "but what other Human/Animal Communication projects are still running?"

I tell my dog to quit barking at cats every damn day, but I don't think that's what you had in mind.

I'll vote with Tracie (6):
1. Error-correcting Modems don't correct the errors we care about, only errors that originate on the analog line between the modems.

2. Stud Finders only find studs in sheet-rock walls, don't work through tile or in plaster-and-lath walls which is where you really need them (magnetic compasses work pretty good for the plaster-and-lath wall).

3. The Universal Remote Control won't even control my TV properly (pre-standardization of IR remote control protocol), much less control the neighbor's dog.

4. The Teleport isn't what it sounds like (I had to Google, but then the memory kicked in, it's the Satellite-Dish farm hidden behind a dike on Staten Island).

5. The registrant must appear in person with passport in hand to get even close. And to what effect? They'll just be Trolls with "Real Names".

Ha! Embarrassing.

My addition: Reciprocating saw.

I asked this question in the "Bad sources" thread but only after (it appears) everyone who could have answered it had stopped reading the thread, so here it is again:

I wonder if anyone here has an opinion on Jane Jacobs' Cities and the Wealth of Nations. It's interesting to me because it tries to make a principled argument for something that I feel intuitively ought to be true -- that cities and nations ought to strive to produce their own goods for local consumption first, rather than becoming ever more dependent on global trade. I know nobody in mainstream economics takes the book seriously, because nobody in mainstream economics tries to argue that. But I don't know why.

I wonder if anyone here has an opinion on Jane Jacobs' Cities and the Wealth of Nations. It's interesting to me because it tries to make a principled argument for something that I feel intuitively ought to be true -- that cities and nations ought to strive to produce their own goods for local consumption first, rather than becoming ever more dependent on global trade. I know nobody in mainstream economics takes the book seriously, because nobody in mainstream economics tries to argue that. But I don't know why.

In general, economists reject her arguments because what Ms Jacobs is referring to is traditionally called "mercantilism" by economists. Mercantilism is the economic system that Adam Smith (the patron saint of modern western economists) railed against. Her books introduce no equations, nor any magical handwaving. As a result, they look down on her.

That being said, I happen to like that book, and think it accurately describes how countries get wealthy, or lose it. Any region that consistantly replaces imports with exports will end up becoming a city. In later books, she describes how some cities can manage to acquire wealth without manufacturing, or import-replacement, with an odd turn of phrase: "transactions of decline." Paper pushing, financial mismanagement are those sorts of things and usually national/state capitals specialize in those transactions of decline.

Weasel words: All typographical errors in this post are the fault of the error correcting modems that are currently taking a coffee break on Staten Island. I hereby certify that this is my true first name, and if your stud finder is detecting me, then it most certainly is broken. I may look like Al from Home Improvement, but my home improvement projects usually involve plenty of my blood, a minimum of 100 trips to the hardware store and all the NSFW curse words I can muster.

Brodysattva, we discussed L'Engle's death quite a bit in the previous open thread.

The Ellison/Fantagraphics thing is not over. Ellison is refusing to put Groth's rebuttal up on his site.

I sometimes wish I had a Global Positioning System.

I have an open-threadish sort of a question: I'm looking for a book (or website) about technical and/or business writing that's suitable for someone who doesn't speak English very well, and needs to learn how to write passable tech-writing type prose. Does anyone have any suggestions?

1. The Error-Correcting Modem.

Generally designed to handle N number of lost bits per M total bits sent without any loss of user data, where N might be 3 and M might be 24, or something. Lose more than N bits and retransmission should happen automatically.

2. The Stud Finder.

Hm, I've only had a stud finder mess up on me once. Not that I use it a lot, but when I do, it's usually pretty accurate. The one time I missed, it was off by half an inch for reasons I never did figure out. (wasn't anything in teh wall that I know of.) But I do spend something like half an hour fiddling with it before I'll drill a hole or pound a nail. Old, old house, original plaster. Can't afford too many mistakes.

3. The Universal Remote Control.

Ah, well, this is more like the "Remote control for common devices we could find the codes for".

4. The Teleport (an installation on Staten Island).

Dang thing still doesn't work.

5. Comment Registration Systems which require the use of True Names.

Hm. If the category really is "things that don't work", this really does cover quite a spectrum.

John@24: Error-correcting Modems don't correct the errors we care about, only errors that originate on the analog line between the modems.

I assure you, that if modems didn't correct the errors in the analog line, you most certainly would care about them.

This is like saying that Compact Discs don't fix errors on a disc where "error" is defined as "music I don't like".

;)

The amount of scratched out bits that a CD can suffer and still play music flawlessly is actually pretty amazing.

Bob Webber @ 29

Your globe needs to be positioned?

I'd like to add, I like the way the comment system is set up here, and I use my True Name with it even though it's not required.

What I don't like so much are comment systems that require new local registrations. (And yes, this means I've created a bit more work for one of our gracious hosts by sending a couple of Boing Boing comments through the "anonymous" mail-slot.) The problem is: basically it's Yet Another Authentication Credential to worry about, which means either (a) creating yet another username/password I'm likely to forget, (b) giving the site the same username/password I give other sites (or an easy-to-reverse-engineer variant), which raises all kinds of security issues, or (c) using password managers on my machines, which both has security issues of its own (e.g. if something compromises the machine), and also requires me to update not just one password manager, but the various password managers on the various machines I use.

For non-anonymous comments, I much prefer the "just say who you are and where you're from" schemes on sites like this one. A system that would allow me to use local authentication for registration purposes (e.g. OpenID or Shibboleth) could be okay as well.

Without something like that, I'm more likely to use the Anonymous route than go out of my way to register at yet another site. Or just not comment at all.

It's probably just as well I can't find any studs, because I don't know what I'd do with them....

Greg @ 32

The amount of scratched out bits that a CD can suffer and still play music flawlessly is actually pretty amazing.

As long as all the scratches are on the side that faces the laser. Scratch the label side, and it's another story. [/potential ruefulness]

Scratch the label side, and it's another story.

Hm, not sure what it would take. Always use a felt tip marker for writing on the label side of a compact disc. On the data side, I know that the error correction and layout is designed to handle a physical scratch of some measurable width for a scratch starting at the center and going out radially.

Never clean your CD's in a circular motion. If you must clean them at all, use a lense cloth, start at the center, and slide straight out to the rim.

The way everything is transfering to harddrives and solid state memory, this probably qualifies as equivalent to a "care of your vinyl records" post.

sigh.

I have heard that the data on a CD is closer to the label side than to the shiny side, and that's why label scratches are worse. But I haven't experimented with it myself.

Zack #26: Well, I tried. Did you look up Ricardo?

Short Ricardo: if Albany and Boston both need zymurgy and yarn, and Albany is better at making both, *both* cities will be better off if Albany specializes in the one it has a bigger advantage at and they trade the results. Usually this is explained with equations, but you could probably do it with pie charts.

Clew's Humorous Reductio ad Absurdum of JJacobs: so nu, why stop at cities? Why shouldn't the *boroughs* be self-sufficient? Neighborhood councils? Blocks? Households? Individuals? At one of these scales, it becomes obvious why we benefit from trade; why not trade at *any* level?

Peter (27); I don't think what Zack is describing is mercantilism -- I think it's autarky. She gets to mercantilism later.

Greg London @#32: Never clean your CD's in a circular motion. If you must clean them at all, use a lense cloth, start at the center, and slide straight out to the rim.

Picky, picky, picky! Just rub the thing across whatever boob is handy. Your butt also works, except that jeans are scratchy, and it's difficult to do while driving.

1. The Error-Correcting Modem.

But I nvr mkae ne errors, so it's UN ecessary.

2. The Stud Finder.

I call that a mirror.*

3. The Universal Remote Control.

Belongs either to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

4. The Teleport (an installation on Staten Island).

Not working very well, since Staten Island is still there.

5. Comment Registration Systems which require the use of True Names.

But what if my True Name is Phnowappoverbumcarobeatusvirginenominepatrisetfilioetspiritotuo, and 'Fragano Ledgister' is just a convenient label (and what's written on my birth certificate).**

* Or I would if I were Serge.

** Not counting the two middle names.

Diatryma @38: I have, though I didn't make the scratch.

Roughly speaking, the layers in a mass-produced CD are: plastic, aluminum, paint. The data is contained in the plastic-aluminum interface -- more precisely, that side of the plastic has pits which encode the data, and then the plastic is vacuum-plated with a very thin layer of aluminum to make it reflective so that the laser can see where the surface is. And then that's all painted over; the paint acts as a bit of protective layer as well as decoration. But it's a very thin layer, as such things go.

A scratch on the unpainted side of the disk really isn't a big deal for a couple of reasons; one of them is that the laser is focused with a very shallow depth of field, so that a scratch on the unpainted side is out of focus and doesn't affect the "view" much.

(And, even if the scratch is bad enough to cause skips, it can be polished out pretty easily.)

On the other hand, scratch the paint hard enough to go all the way through, and that data is physically gone. Just a wee tiny 5mm-long scratch on that side of the disk, and a couple of tracks on the Green Day CD I got at the library booksale are entirely unplayable.

Oxymorons? It took me several minutes to remember that word, being that I'm suffering from an advanced case of CRS...but that's what I thought of when I saw the list.

Mary Dell, you leave me Really Happy I'm back friends with my flexi keyboard.

My Universal Remote Control is definitely defective. It doesn't make the moon shine any brighter. It doesn't make meteorites steer better courses. It doesn't align the planets when I'm ready to view them. If I knew where to obtain a refund, I'd return it.

1. The Error-Correcting Modem.

Parsed by me as the Error-Connecting Modem...

2. The Stud Finder.

Clearly created by those worried about having to pay a Stud Fee.

3. The Universal Remote Control.

Like the one size fits nobody garment...

4. The Teleport (an installation on Staten Island).

Separate from The Heliport or the Teleharbor?

5. Comment Registration Systems which require the use of True Names.

One Name to rule them all / One name to find them / One name to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.[0]

[0] We were talking about daemonology there, were we not?

Xopher @ 22: even with the reference right there, you misspelled at least two things

I knew someone would say that.

At any rate, I don't believe I did. I copied & pasted the text. Then I deliberately changed it to fit the grammar of what I was making it say.

The first thing I did was change "Publishers Weekly Occurrence" to "Publisher's Weekly Occurrence". The first is the name of a magazine; the second is an event, which belongs to the publisher -- the publisher has a weekly occurrence, which is "Asimov". I was using a different grammatical form, so I had to change the spelling.

The only other thing I did was change the first "Its" to "It's" (matching the second); in both cases it seemed like it was grammatically correct.

Anyway, there are a lot of editors here: if someone calls me on it, I'll cop to a grammatical mistake in either or both instances. But whatever it was, it wasn't a spelling mistake.

SF

I'll take "Things that work in theory" for $200, Alex...

G. Jules @30: I've been a tech writer for about 17 years now, and I was a copyeditor on technical manuals for several years before that. I have never seen a generic textbook that I would be comfortable recommending. (There are specialized books on certain aspect of technical writing that are pretty good, but they assume you're already a technical writer looking to expand your skills.)

Can I ask, is this something that your friend wants to do, or something that their boss is asking them to do? If it's for work, the short answer is that you get what you pay for.

Will your friend be producing customer-facing documents (i.e., online Help for software; installation or assembly guides, handbooks, etc. intended for customers) or internal technical documents such as specifications or P&P (policies and procedures) documents? The standards and requirements are very different -- obviously, customer-facing documents represent the public face of the company, and there's a higher expectation of quality in presentation.

Before you can do tech writing, you first have to be able to write. That's true in any language. Can your friend write well in his native language? Those skills will transfer. Most of the actual sentence-level technical writing is pretty formulaic. Once you have a handle on the basic tropes (Use X to do Y; click this; enter that), it goes pretty fast. And mechanical errors (grammar, typos, etc.) are all fixable, given time and resource.

The hard part is not the writing itself, it's the research and analysis of the audience and the information you're trying to present that makes the greatest difference in the quality of documentation. Good grammar and spelling are of no use if you haven't thoroughly analyzed the information and presented it appropriately for the intended audience.

How are your friend's graphical skills? Clear graphical representations of important concepts and a strong visual language for representing procedures are in high demand. That would bypass a lot of language issues. (Recently, a Japanese colleague reviewed a pilot course using courseware I'd helped develop, and his feedback consisted almost entirely of graphics, since his English was poor and our Japanese nonexistent. Worked out great.)

One aspect of technical writing that doesn't get much mention: You need to identify the experts in your organization and then interview them mercilessly. Formal Q&A, demos, drop-ins, emails. I like to use the "Columbo" technique -- I ask some simple yes or no questions, start to leave their cubicle, and then turn and say, "One more thing..." That's when I get the good stuff. But tech writers are generally an introverted group, and interviewing experts is something most of us work on our entire career.

I would advise your friend to concentrate on analytical skills -- especially audience analysis.* Make as detailed a profile of the audience as possible. Then analyze the information you want to present. Discard anything the audience already knows, because good documentation doesn't waste anyone's time.** Make note of the information that the audience needs to know. Avoid needless repetition. Strive for the most economical sequence of presentation. He can do all this in his native language, or graphics, or English, or some hybrid of all three. Then he can focus on mechanics.

* Google "audience analysis". There's a lot of good stuff available for free, especially on .edu domains.

** For some reason, manager-types are extremely resistant to this. Be firm. Don't document stupid stuff everybody already knows. The more things you document, the harder it is to find any one thing. Users will thank you.

NB: This comment is not an example of my technical writing. This is an example of my informal writing. If I were writing this for a technical manual, I would probably spend about two days on it -- at least 12 hours on research. As it is, I'm pushing on 90 minutes for this meandering mess of a comment.

I love the folks who post on Making Light, you make me look up words! Autarky. Quick, find dictionary -- ah. Thank you. George Autarky, b. 1877, date of death unknown: obscure Austrian composer, known for his experimentation with twelve tone compositions: his music has been entirely lost, and his place in history exists only due to his having once played one of his experimental compositions for Gustav Mahler, who, it is said, recommended to him that he give up music entirely and enter a monastery, which, in fact, he did.

5 items which do not function as advertised.

#49 ::: Howard Peirce recommended:
** For some reason, manager-types are extremely resistant to this. Be firm. Don't document stupid stuff everybody already knows. The more things you document, the harder it is to find any one thing. Users will thank you.

No, not all users will thank you. I've spent far, far, far too much time trying to find stupid stuff everybody already knows that's actually opaque and specific craft knowldege.

I'd be laughing from the Caymans if I had a dollar for every time some issue was [caused|fixed] by something "everybody already knows"!

#37 (and co) - I had to obliterate some CDs for a reason or two. A scouring pad applied to the label side pretty well put the data beyond most plausible kinds of recovery. (Then I put the disks on the anvil and whacked 'em with a hammer to make sure.)

Back when I was single, I bought a Stud Finder, and it definitely didn't work! (ba-dump ching!*)

xeger, #51: I'm with you all the way on that! "Stupid stuff everybody already knows" -- especially about the reason why something is done X way -- disappears when the last person who knew it leaves, and sometimes it's damn obscure to dig out again.

Rule of thumb: No documentation should ever be solely in somebody's head.

* I can't believe no one beat me to that.

Mary Dell #40: Just rub the thing across whatever boob is handy.

For me, in most situations where I would be cleaning a CD, that would require an awkward phone call.

Ha. In my job I've repeatedly discovered that "stupid stuff everybody knows" is often "stupid stuff someone else knows" and after exhaustive interrogation I discover that nobody knows it, and possibly nobody has ever known it. (For example, incomprehensible requirements sometimes show up in project plans, and after hours of meetings discussing what item 23(a) might actually entail in terms of time and effort and implementation expense, I go off to seek clarification from whoever put it there. Everybody tells me they didn't originate the requirement and don't really know what it means, it just got included from some other source. Eventually I run out of sources...)

Since this is an open thread...

Last night I had an email advertisement from a store I shop at. The subject line was "New Wireless Bras" which caused me to ponder "Why would my underwear need to have network connectivity?" and then I caught a clue.

When I mentioned it to my husband, he mentioned this possibility. I decided I spend too much time around technology.

G. Jules #30: Joseph M. Williams has written several books on the subject of style. The one I own is Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. It is not for technical writing per se, but writing better English leads to writing better technical English.

I can best describe the book by mangling an aphorism that I don't have time to look up: The novice knows what happens. The journeyman knows how it happens. The master knows why it happens. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace is mostly on the how level and occasionally gets into the why. If I haven't made myself clear yet (writing!), I strongly recommend it.

Amazon has several copies of this book and Mr. Williams' other books.

Serge,

I just finished going through the last Open Thread and discovered you recently had a birthday. Sorry, I haven't been around long enough to have everybody's birthday in my calender, or I would have posted this before:

Happy Birthday Serge!

6. The Flying Buttress.

7. The Personal Digital Assistant.

8. The Heat Gun.

9. The Cowboy Coder.

10. The Manual Cleaning Oven (no, a strapping fellow named Manuel is *not* going to come over and clean your oven).

#57, Brenda Kalt: Style: Towards Clarity and Grace is a fabulous little book. It's sitting on my coffee table right now. Every time I open it, I learn something new.

But for the situation G. Jules described, maybe the person should start with Strunk & White? Yeah, I know, I know it's a Freshman Comp book... but sometimes you need to go through Freshman Comp before you can run off and unlearn some of the lessons of Freshman Comp.

One aspect of technical writing that doesn't get much mention: You need to identify the experts in your organization and then interview them mercilessly. Formal Q&A, demos, drop-ins, emails. I like to use the "Columbo" technique -- I ask some simple yes or no questions, start to leave their cubicle, and then turn and say, "One more thing..." That's when I get the good stuff. But tech writers are generally an introverted group, and interviewing experts is something most of us work on our entire career.

Have you noticed that the murderer in a "Columbo" story is always the guy with a certain answer for every question?

Tania, #56, I suspect some of the writers in thai field get their anatomical knowledge from comic-books.

(And if I listed "Phone sex", how many readers would complain that a telephone is the wrong shape?)

Self Modifying Code

We're still nowhere near Babel-17

Bachman Turner Overdrive

And no sign of the Royal Canadian Space Force, though since they unified their military it wouldn't be so obvious.

Perfect binding.

#4: Ambrose Bierce wrote ...

The World, the Flesh and the Devil
Once went for a midnight revel.
The Devil he sunk
To the ground dead drunk:
Said the World, "There's a spirit level."

Racing into the Open thread with news(ish-like report). Imagine my excitement/confusion when I spotted this headline on my local newspaper's website front page: "Hlp! My prnts cn cntrl my mbl".

Disemvowellment conquers the world!?

On reading, however, it's about a "software suite enabling parents to completely control their children's mobile phone usage", and this is an attempt to render a(n) SMS text message. Still a bit of a thrill to see.

Dave Bell @ 63

We're still nowhere near Babel-17

Probably a good thing or we'd all sit around trying to figure out how to pick our hammocks apart from the way they're named in the language. Though maybe it's good for something else?

You notice that Delany didn't think much of the idea himself; he wrote an afterword to the book that rained all over the concept.

I had one post to make in response to the prompt, and it was stolen by Luthe @48. Stolen! Right out of my brain! Word for word!

"Get out of my teeth!!!"

J. D. Bernal was a sage,
a marxist, a child of his age.
But he predicted with glee
a sort of singularity.
The text is right here at this page.

Dave Bell @ 62

A dreadful thought: how many wouldn't?

Fly tower. Dead ringer. Chirp radar. Private dick. Tea dance. Like mind. Hidebound. Hothouse. Crackpot. Car pool. Dead certain. Labor intensive. Land ho. Half-cocked. Dire straits. Brand spanking new. Loss leader. Naked flame.

And my favourite, though it comes from cricket: "Caught in slips".

A Self-Cleaning Oven would certainly be an unsettling appliance for one to own.

They had comment registration systems requiring True Names back on Atuan, but for some reason nobody ever signed up.

Since I've made it here in the first hundred, and the issue is still quite fresh, here's a BUG REPORT ATTN TNH/PNH:

The "Geek cakes" links in Particles from 3 Sep 6:43 are (still) empty (and the "via" links just the homepage and not the particular post).

Similarly, the list of "Thank you, political bloggers" links to The Talking Dog as merely href="v".

BTW, am I the only one who dislikes the way Our Esteemed Hosts join several links so that they look like a single one?

Next time, my pet peeeve: don't tell me there isn't a MT plugin that couldn't convert string of the form "@<number>" within comments to links to respective comments.

Tania @ 56... The subject line was "New Wireless Bras" which caused me to ponder "Why would my underwear need to have network connectivity?"

This reminds me of 2005's big-screen version of puppet show Thunderbirds, especially the scene where they save the day by using the wire inside Lady Penelope's bra.

Howard Peirce @49: Thank you for your comment. The idea of trying graphics, in particular, is something I hadn't thought of; maybe it'd help on training.

The situation in question is management-directed. The type of writing in question is writing of engineering reports, but I've been hoping for a tech writing recommendation because it's a much more closely allied type of writing than academic, business, or casual writing, which seem to be the big three ESL categories. (And I suspect presenting the situation as a new skill to be learned, rather than something remedial, would make the individual in question more likely to actually use the book.)

Ack. One of the things making this request hard is that it's due to a work situation, and I can't really get into the details and explain why I need to try to train this individual so far outside of their core competency. Management has its reasons, whereof reason, etc. (They're good reasons, actually; it's the intersection of those good reasons with the situation on the ground that's become messy.)

#57: It sounds like a great book -- I'll add it to the list for me. :-) I suspect it'd be over the head of the person in question, though, as they're still at the "how" stage.

#60: Strunk & White is usually my first thought. In this situation, it'd be much too advanced.

I used to know a company that proudly boasted of being "Teleport Operator of the Year"..

Mary Dell, #40: Picky, picky, picky! Just rub the thing across whatever boob is handy.

I should try this at the office next time a CD misbehaves? Is there an etiquette for this sort of thing? I guess I should ask politely first. "Hi, could I please borrow your breast for a minute?" (Is "breast" the proper word to use in a work setting? Somehow "boob" sounds unbusinesslike. Or should I go with an office-jokey "bazoomba" or some such word?)

Presumably some breast coverings clean CDs better than others. Velvet, da! Chain-mail bra, nyet.

Office etiquette. Always such a minefield for me.

Greg Ioannou: @#77:

Cd's or no cd's, if you only know the boob in question well enough to call it a "breast," it's not "handy."

Christian Science.

Self-addressed envelope.

Jan 73: Next time, my pet peeeve: don't tell me there isn't a MT plugin that couldn't convert string of the form "@<number>" within comments to links to respective comments.

There are any number of MT plugins that couldn't do that. I can't imagine why you care. It would be cool to find one that could.

Geek cakes: I know I found those links while working on Boing Boing. Can I find them now? I cannot. It's mortifying.

#77 Greg:

You want the woman with the chain mail on for destroying data, but remember to scratch the label side. (This was new to me.) "Hey Helga, come here." ; *scratch scrape scratch* ; ***POW***)

The category seems more like "things that work at one level of meaning, but not at another." (Though I love the idea of being required to use my individualized copy of True Names to verify my right to comment.)

How about:

Unconditional security (think one-time-pads).

Permanent teeth.

Any high speed internet service which promises to be available in your neighborhood within the next several months.

And of course, you should only communicate with your broker using lossless compression.

Gay marriage ("Damnit Fred, I don't feel very happy right now.").

Optimized brute force search?

Was this one of the geek cake links? It was linked in the Whateverettes a little while back....

Xopher #79:

I recommend a program which simply generates some random sequence of instructions, and which you can prove includes a sequence that would do what's required. You would then be able to prove that this program could convert numbers to links.

albatross 83: I should think that any program that could do something but won't would qualify as an AI.

#10 If I'd used my real name nobody would have known who I was!

Either it's time for a legal name change, or else you have a very strangely constructed personal identity. (Or perhaps you exaggerate?)

Got it, Jules. Apparently that colleague of Titivullus who causes sites you know exist to become unfindable was only waiting for me to admit that I couldn't find them. Then it did the ketchup-bottle thing. I've reparticled the subject in a more substantial version.

Jan Vaněk, sorry about that, but I'm not going to stop. Does Patrick ever do multiple links from one word? It's mostly my bad habit. I over-research, and then I can neither bear to leave out all the interesting links I've found, nor clutter up the surface text with full-scale references to them.

#84 ::: Xopher ::: (view all by) :wrote:
albatross 83: I should think that any program that could do something but won't would qualify as an AI.

... whereas I'd think it was standard operating proceedure, and part of the daily grind ...

the mac cake is nice

Stud finders, universal remote controls and comment registration systems requiring True Names have two things in common - they don't work enough of the time and they're a pain to use. (They do, however, work just well enough to still exist.)

Actually, I don't think I've ever encountered a comment registration system that actually enforces the use of real names. I don't doubt there are ones out there where the blog owner tries to enforce some such rule, but it's futile.

I even know of one blogger who deletes any comments not posted under the user's Second Life name - fortunately, (s)he isn't technically-minded enough to actually make the comment system enforce this. (It's a long story.)

Teresa, beautiful geek cakes on the sidebar links.

Our wedding cake, in 1999, was also designed to resemble a stack of books, and we gave careful thought to which titles to put upon the spines:
• photo alone, or
• with a little commentary.

1. The Muppet Show Cake. Per the Flickr tag, it was a blue ribbon winner at the 2007 Kentucky State Fair, and, IMO, deserved it. *Does the Kermit Flail and Cheer*

2. I skipped all the media hooraw about the date, and just reread 110 Stories. It took ten minutes for my eyes to dry out enough to see the screen to type this post. Thank you once again, Mr. Ford. Wish you were here.

I'm in the same boat as Leva (comment #10). I think I know the writer that's walled her out, because he's done the same to me.

Go ahead, just silence all us pseudonymous people. (sniffle) We'll probably set up our own site eventually, and not let any of you true name people in.

(goes off to see if pseudonym.com is taken...)

“The net is phenomenological. If you do a letter-perfect imitation of a jerk, you are one.”
—Bruce Baugh

Any sufficiently advanced imitation of a jerk is not an imitation of a jerk. I've always said, in cases where I've been told, "Oh, ASSTRON99 is really nice in person," that this just means A99 is a genuine jerk who's too cowardly to be himself in face-to-face situations. Mr. Hyde wasn't created from whole cloth: he was an excuse for Jekyll to give rein to his worst impulses.

I was going to say more, but my modem wouldn't let me.

Kathryn #85:

What name is on my passport?

Kathryn Cramer @ #83
I don't know about that. A huge percentage of my personal contacts know me by my SCA name. And I naturally tend to use some fragment of it when I need a nick name for a some web activity or another and don't feel like sticking my own oft mispronounced (read: rendered unrecognizable) name in there. And somewhere in there my boss took to addressing me as Lord Avery.

All it would take is for me to do is take one or more of my little making stuff in the basement hobbies commercial and I'd pretty much be where Leva describes herself.

But a legal name change? That'd be too geeky.

Here's geek cake (with instructions) that is not for the squeamish! But with Halloween just around the corner....

Also, shouldn't there be some kind of duration or percentage attached to that imitation of a jerk thing? I mean if normally happy friendly commenter takes a moment to get into the character of a troll to make some sort of point about trolls, it's not like he's become a troll. Now, if he starts moving his furniture in there....

Remus #92: It is, but that's not its real name....

If you are really into the true name issue, you usually wind up asking what you are trying to achieve. Like, are you trying to get:

a. Each person can only have one ID

b. Each person can be held responsible for their actions in some way, perhaps involving the cops.

c. Each person must have some link between his account and some identity by which he is commonly known.

d. Each person must have someone else in the community vouch for him.

etc.

Many years ago, this sort of thing was a big, more-or-less endless topic on the cypherpunks list and among crypto people. It seems to have fallen off since at crypto conferernces, I think largely because so much of the current crypto research is never intended to exist anywhere but in a conference or journal article and on a publication list--if your scheme is utterly and hopelessly impractical and silly, then the difficulty of implementing it becomes a non-issue. Also, the main cypherpunk ideas have apparently all failed.

I remember when I was *sure* that widespread strong crypto was going to change the world, once we got past the RSA/PKP patents, US export restrictions, and slow processors that made public key operations too slow to be practical for small transactions. And that information technology improved privacy, and intrusive oppressive government was on the way out. *Sigh*.

Dumb weblog software question: Multiple duplicate successive posts are really common on pretty much all weblogs. This is trivial to detect and prevent. Why does it still happen?

For example, if you just remembered the SHA1 hash of the fixed part (poster name and text) of the most recent post, and refused to post anything with the same hash, it seems like that would stop nearly all of these annoying things. (It would still be possible to get into a race condition between two posters during a duplicate posting, but keeping track of the last 5 hashes would be sufficient to stop nearly all of it, I think.)

Is there some reason why this would be a bad idea?

Kip W #93:

Also, people are capable of being jerks in some situations, and not in others. (The common case is that tired, hungry, upset, and drunk people can often become really nasty, even when they're nice enough people at other times.) Anonymity, pseudonymity, lack of direct social feedback like shocked looks or clenched fists, lack of immediate conseqences like having nobody talk to you or everyone obviously mad at you at work, all these things affect people differently. Lacking that feedback or those near-term consequences, many people are jerks online who wouldn't be otherwise.

And most of us have been jerks in specific situations, both online and in the real world.

The International Earth Rotation Service doesn't oil the axis each year; pity.

True names are weird no matter how you look at them. I have relatives who are one name to one side of the family and another to the other, a cousin who decided to change her name* from Lexa, through Britney (we were confused and gently mocked her, mostly because she didn't announce the change) to Alex. When it comes to nicknames, girls can have two names in one-- Ashley Lynn was a friend of my brother's, but he had to fight to convince every teacher that his name is John Michael. I'm a Catherine, called Cassie, and I switched to Dia for here** because there was another Cassie on Scalzi's Whatever, and Diatryma is my name in text. I am apparently growing a new True Name.

*Speaking name? Not her legal name, just what people call her in school and home.
**Some of my posts are as Cassie, some are not.
I am becoming addicted to footnotes. Please send help.

Xopher #84: Now you're making me think of the right verb tenses. I think my randomized program gets us to subjunctive tense: This program might turn numbers into links. A program that has the ability to turn numbers into links, but only does so when the local time shows that the year is 2000 or less gets us to conditional tense: This program could turn numbers into links (if it were before the year 2000).

Or am I mixing these? I have to admit, I only really got some of the English verb tenses by studying Spanish. (!Que estudiemos los tiempos!)

I most recently ran into the True Names problem at Facebook, who try to automatedly enforce RealNameness by forbidding some set of dictionary words. My name (which is, admittedly, not my birthname, but which I have used personally and professionally, in person and online, for 15 years now) is not "legitimate", their system says. Annoying (and not to jinx him) my brother Disco Gerdes was able to register his name just fine.

When I'm wanting something explained, I find that asking the really basic ('stupid') questions gets the best answers. The person being asked frequently goes into detail when answering, because they're assuming you don't know anything about the subject. (If you do, it's better not to enlighten them.) And, as one of the people who has a whole lot of possibly-useful information stored in my head, that's also the easiest way to spread it to others, because I don't know what (or how much) they already have.

Happy Birthday Xopher!

A lot of this conversation reminds me of The Name of the Wind.

#105--Yeah, dude, we're lucky to have you.

Xopher (#2): Was that a criticism, or did I avoid wordiness?

Avery @ 96

Cathyn changed his modern name to his SCA name. But he's a geek.

My technique for cleaning CDs/DVDs, especially the disturbingly grungy discs one gets from a library, rental, or used-music/video/game store:

Soap and clean fingers, applied under running water; gentle rubbing from hub to rim. Dry label side with towel; remove large drops from optical side by blowing; let sit until completely dry.

I've never met a disc with a paper label, but I expect this would be a bad idea for those.

Nancy 105, fidelio 107: thanks.

Mary 108: It was praise.

Periodic acid.

Mean Solar Time.

Attitude gauge.

Alligator clip.

Happy birthday, Xopher!

(I'm still trying to figure it out.)

I find myself moving a sofa
and wishing I had a gopher
who would do all my work,
neither shorten nor shirk,
and wish 'Happy Birthday!' to Xopher.

Happy birthday, Xopher!

Happy Birthday, Xopher. How many candles? Twenty-six, right?

Many happy returns of the day, Xopher!

Oo. I forgot "mother liquor".

Avery @ #96: where's the sternum?

Xopher: many happy returns of the day!

How I destroy CDs:

Bring CD outside. Put label-side down on asphalt. Rub with foot until shiny silver stuff comes off.

Or:

Put in microwave, on top of scrap paper. "Nuke" for five seconds. Smells bad, but the brief display of fireworks is spectacular and the disk is rendered utterly, totally dead.

A very happy birthday to you, Xopher. May you have many more.

Xopher (#111): Then thank you. And happy birthday. (And it's 'Mary Aileen', but you knew that. :)

I know we're just picking on the stuff in the list out of fun, but I wanted to present a quick defense and endorsement for the Harmony Universal Remote..

It's hard being a technology slut* in a household populated by non-technical family members who will disemvowel your keyboard should the 10+ component A/V system prove too complex to allow easy access to the latest episodes of Heroes/BSG, etc.

The Harmony Remote allows you to associate buttons with activities such as "Watch Tivo", "Listen to Music" or "Watch Movie". Press an activity button and the appropriate components are switched on, settings adjusted and remote controls tied to the right components (like volume).

The remote has a USB port that you use to connect to your pc/mac and access Harmony's free online programming service. You identify what components your entertainment system has and the control codes are looked up in their online database. You then program activities by identifying which components and settings are needed for that activity.

Initial setup took me about an hour, and it takes maybe 15 minutes to update my settings online when I add/remove components from the system. The rest of the family just uses the remote as usual, with no apparent changes to the interface.

When other alpha geeks complain about how much time they spend on household tech support, I like to tell them that I've been able to reduce mine by 95% with two things: Harmony Remotes and switching to Macs. At $150, the Harmony Remote is a much cheaper first step!

----
* As in I'll take any gadget home that looks purty, winks at me and promises me the time of my life

Thanks, more of everyone.

114:
Fragano, reply here from Xopher,
As he heats up a lunch made by Stouffer:
Your verse birthday greet
ing was really quite sweet.
Now get back to work. What a loafer!

Mary Aileen 122: Aieee! Aileen! Aileen! Mary Aileen!!! Yes, I do know that, I just spaced it. Sorry. Oh Mary,* Mary Aileen, I lean my head down and moan.

*I don't usually use archaic gayspeak, but in this case it seems called for.

So, why does everybody think Real Names=True Names? Am I the only one who read Elfquest and A Wizard of Earthsea?

Mary 125: Not everyone. In Wicca we never say "real name," because our in-circle names are just as real as our outside-circle names. We call them "Craft name" and "legal name" respectively. My ML name is Xopher, but it's no secret that my legal name is Christopher Hatton. I just like Xopher better for this purpose. There are online places where my name is Criostoir (or Críostóir if they'll allow it); I'm known as Absentminded Perfesser on MySpace.

All of those are "real names" in the sense that none is a deceptive alias, but none is my truename either.

The truename of the universe IS the universe.

Foolproof method for media destruction:

Watch the first half of Serenity. Pause to deal with latest household catastrophe. Come back to find youngest daughter watching Little Mermaid. Look around and see your dvd on the floor, under a leg of the step stool used by daughter to reach dvd player...

Teresa #@86:

I over-research, and then I can neither bear to leave out all the interesting links I've found, nor clutter up the surface text with full-scale references to them.

Also, you're an eensy bit of a typesetting geek. Fire bad, tags pretty.

I want to mention this in a public place, and more folks I know read Making Light than any other place.

I'm separating from the Other Change of Hobbit. This is a result of mutual agreement that it's time I moved on, it's reasonably cordial, and it's for the best for all concerned.

Disconnecting from a relationship of well over thirty years is always difficult. I hope that folks who have found OCH a pleasant place to shop will continue to do so. I wish Dave and the others involved only the best.

I'm sad about this, and I think overall it's the best thing for all involved.

Best wishes, Tom.

Tom 129: I'm sorry for your loss, and theirs. Severing a relationship of that long standing is always a loss, even if both parties agree that it's best.

Xopher @#126: none is a deceptive alias, but none is my truename either.

The truename of the universe IS the universe.

Exactly. *That* would make for an interesting comment reg system. It would either discourage trolls, or possibly enable them to wield unspeakable power.

Elder gods would have free run of the place, because you would have to invoke their true names in order to block them...Maybe someone could come up with a CAPTCHA so they couldn't register in the first place. A CAPTEGHA, I mean.

Answer: A typical saturday night at my house.

G. Jules @#75:

Basic tech writing, in my experience, involves two skills:

1. outlining to about 3 levels (headings, number lists, bullet points)

2. screen capture

With these two things, you can produce reams and reams of procedural docs that can be handed to whoever inherits a job. Producing more sophisticated stuff, like a technical overview or a cost justification, is really a business-writing skill with technical stuff tacked on. Even for that, the 3-level outline is a good starting point.

Probably what you really need is a set of templates, and then the person just has to practice filling them in. You can buy doc suites that have a heap of ready-to-fill specialized docs; he selects the kind he's trying to create and customizes it a bit and then fills it in. Or you can create the templates yourself as a starting point for the non-writers around the office, and teach them how to use them. It's easier than teaching writing from scratch, and it's less daunting for the trainee.

clew @#39 Short Ricardo: if Albany and Boston both need zymurgy and yarn, and Albany is better at making both, *both* cities will be better off if Albany specializes in the one it has a bigger advantage at and they trade the results. Usually this is explained with equations, but you could probably do it with pie charts.

Until Miami comes around and produces one or both of these with a level of efficiency that the original producer city can't match, or at the same level of efficiency as the original producer city but to such an amount that the profit margin for producing it falls dramatically, or some new technology shows up that renders one or both of these products obsolete. In any of these cases, both Boston and Albany would be screwed if they had followed your advise and specialised too strongly in producing one particular commodity.

And, by the way, equations and pie charts are all fine and nice, but do you have some empirical evidence, too? What results did large-scale comparisions of the long-term economic development of highly specialised regions on the one hand, and highly diverse regions on other hand, with regard to enduring economic well-being, lead to?

Clew's Humorous Reductio ad Absurdum of JJacobs: so nu, why stop at cities? Why shouldn't the *boroughs* be self-sufficient? Neighborhood councils? Blocks? Households? Individuals? At one of these scales, it becomes obvious why we benefit from trade; why not trade at *any* level?

First of all, that's assuming that Jacobs argued that cities should be self-sufficient, and that trade doesn't benefit us. When and where did she say that? How on Earth do you get the idea that she said that? Doesn't her emphasis on export addition show that she didn't see trade as a generally bad thing?

Second, how do you get the idea that something that works well on one scale or level must therefore work well on another scale or level,
too?

Besides, one of Jacobs' main points was that cities and their surrounding regions work as economic entities in ways in wich smaller or larger units don't, so you can't simply choose an arbitrary level of territorial economic analysis. A simple empirical analysis of where businesses and individuals usually find most of their business partners (including employees, employers, customers and stores to buy from) could easily verify wether she was right or wrong there.

Peter (27); I don't think what Zack is describing is mercantilism -- I think it's autarky. She gets to mercantilism later.

Could you please explain how you get the idea that Jacobs was in any way in favor of autarky?

Rule of thumb: No documentation should ever be solely in somebody's head.

I'd like to testify to this:

For the last two years, I've been Catalog Librarian at a medium sized art school. The library hadn't had a catalog librarian in at least two years before I started and no one had updated the manual since 2000. My assistant had worked there for just shy of a year and only knew how to use the software enough to give me a crash course. When I asked the Executive Librarian for some training, she laughed and ran away. No one working there knew how to do my job and my supervisors had only the vaguest interest in telling me what sort of end result they wanted. I'm paraphrasing but, "Just do your job," was what I was told.

So, yeah: write down the most obvious steps because there's always the chance that you and your replacement may end up doing an improv show that resembles The Office crossed with The Lake House.

Xopher (124): Don't beat yourself up about it. I know you know; I mainly mentioned it so that the people who *don't* know wouldn't think it was all right. All right?

who's that guy who blogs about politics and posts old masters paintings in with the verbiage? I know he has, or had, a blogspot blog.

by th' way, I like the use of numbers for th' comments.

Tom Whitmore @129:
Well, drat. I'm sorry to hear it, mostly because it's such a pity that the long term relationship has broken down!

Where will you go from here, as it were?

Xopher,

Happy birthday!

I'd write you a sonnet, but I did that already.

So many happy returns, Xopher Prime!

Lee @ 53... Rule of thumb: No documentation should ever be solely in somebody's head.

Especially when the zombies show up and eat your thumb and your head.

Diatryma @101:

I am becoming addicted to footnotes. Please send help.

Welcome to the club*.

-----
* Actually, I have nothing to say in the footnotes**.
** This makes them footernotes†
† Particularly as they get lower down.‡
‡ Erm, yeah.

Rule of thumb: No documentation should ever be solely in somebody's head.

Oh, yes. For several years now, there has been a lot of turnover in the department I work in (which is a problem in itself). Because few of the procedures are documented, the institutional memory around here has huge holes and gaps in it. The usual answer to "how do I do [x]?" is "Um... I dunno... go ask Person Y." And, of course, Person Y refers you to Person Z, who...

And then, even if you finally find someone who knows how to do it (nice to meet you, Person G) and can explain it to you, by the time it needs to be done again six months or a year later, they've moved on to a new position and their replacement has no more clue than you do.

abi 140: Yes, you did, and the stun hasn't quite worn off yet.

Mary Dell @134: Would you believe that we have templates, and it's filling them out that's the problem?

First, Happy Birthday, Xopher.

Second, Keith @ #136, I was responsible for producing customer bills for a former employer, and I thought I had thoroughly documented the process (multiple multiples of steps, all to be done in specific order). I went on vacation for six weeks, encompassing two billing dates. Not only did I spend the better part of two hours on the phone each date (once while in LA, the other in Tucson), when I got back and walked into the office, I didn't get a "Hey! Have a good time?" greeting, I got "YOU! Write things down!" instead.

For the next year I spent each billing date flowcharting as I went through the process.

#101, Diatryma: use name is what i say.

i also recently have been saying "i use elizabeth for paperwork and betsy for people" really quite a lot, because when i am filling out official paperwork it seems like it should have my legal name on it, which no one who actually knows me uses. (now that i've grown out of the 'ELIZABETH ANNE LUNDSTEN YOU GET DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!' phase of my life, anyhow... ;)

G. Jules @#145: Yes, absolutely. I have a group of well-rounded sysadmins & engineers working for and with me, many of whom are astoundingly literate, so aside from some ESL & grammar quibbles, everyone can produce good procedural doc on demand. But I'm very, very, very lucky.

Mary Dell... I have a group of well-rounded sysadmins & engineers working for and with me

"You will bow down before me!"

Serge @#149: Hell yeah! There have to be some perks to this management gig.

Keith@136: welcome to the club. Oh boy, do I welcome you to the club. Similar experience in a larger setting -- a whole Tech Services department's worth. Ouch. Still trying to get a handle.
Names are interesting, and True Names more than. I have a complicated relationship with them, as I have two legal names (under the jurisdiction I was born and the jurisdiction I am a citizen of), then I have three nicknames, depending on which time of my life and which level of closeness the person attained.
And, since my father is the God of the Dead, well, I get to have another personality overlaid on this one. :-) :-)

betsyl @ 147, I'm Caroline to about half the people I know, and Carrie to the other half. Close friends and family know me as Carrie. Co-workers (even those I'm friends with), advisors, supervisors, and professors know me as Caroline. I answer just as quickly to either name, and both of them feel like "me," but they're just used in separate spheres.

I have two advisor-types who started calling me Carrie, and one friend who deliberately greets me as Caroline because he likes the name better. In both cases I can't help but feel a sense of role conflict every time, even though I get over it every time.

It is possible that I am two very similar people at once, one of whom is just a bit more formal than the other. I seem to have two equally true names.

(I'm Caroline here because Caroline is who I am when I'm doing any kind of analysis, and mostly that's what I do when posting here.)

Teresa:

http://nielsenhayden.com/110.html still says "John M. Ford can be reached at [email address]."

#148 ::: Mary Dell wrote:
G. Jules @#145: Yes, absolutely. I have a group of well-rounded sysadmins & engineers working for and with me, many of whom are astoundingly literate, so aside from some ESL & grammar quibbles, everyone can produce good procedural doc on demand. But I'm very, very, very lucky.

Is it a bad thing that I'm wondering if "well-rounded" is a euphamism for "overweight" ?

Zack @26, clew @39 --

Despite invocations of Ricardo, what Ms. Jacobs was talking about _isn't_ self sufficiency and the replacement of trade; she noted that import replacement, the process by which you start making what you used to import and start spending the money you used to spend on that specific import on other, more diverse imports, explains the bootstrap process of city economies.

This is important because a pure Ricardan view leaves an economy specialized for cheap labour or raw materials or basic agricultural goods in a bad place, with respect to becoming a more capable economy. (Never mind the ugly results of being even a very capable specialized exporter when external circumstances change.)

There's a faction in Toronto politics which takes Ms. Jacobs' views very seriously; I am personally quite glad of this.

Optimizing an economy for profit isn't optimizing it for people.

Graydon @ 155

As colonies, we weren't legally allowed to do things like making glass or other important items. We were supposed to be buying them from the cousins in England, to help their economy. IIRC, it was one of the things that led to 'When, in the Course'.

Graydon @ 155... a pure Ricardan view

"Vengeance is a dish best served cold... and it is very cold in space."

P J Evans --

Jacobs is, first and foremost, an historian; I don't know if you've read Cities and the Wealth of Nations, but she tackles the question of "where do city economies come from?" by starting back in the neolithic, and looking at specific examples along the time between then and now. The theory clearly arises from the data.

Serge #157: I've heard that one as "Revenge is a dish best served cold, on White House china"

Serge @#157: Tee hee!

"Let them eat static!"

the tale's been told
time does not heal
memory's cold
we can't appeal
lies now are bold
we're told to feel
that brass is gold
under the wheel

the eye is filled
with many tears
the hopes then killed
the constant cares
innocents grilled
morons with airs
the grain is milled
it has been years

rules now are made
to hold pain back
but there's no shade
we know the lack
hate makes the grade
all fades to black
one more parade
then we attack

the ones who died
are all now dust
the ones who cried
have lost all trust
we know who lied
and feel disgust
no blushing bride
no golden crust

we feel the shame
of showing fear
we take the blame
we were not there
there's been a claim
no one would dare
snuff out the flame
let in the air

too little time
too swift a shove
under the grime
a single glove
it was a crime
they say above
the moment's prime
still we may love

6. The Larch. The... Larch.

Albatross @99

There are all sorts of edge cases, yes, so I'll clarify that I'm talking about people who are predominantly abusive jerks online and who are invariably described as "rather nice, actually" by people who meet them offline.

Raphael #139; That is a good takedown of Zack's interpretation of Cities...., but is totally irrelevant to his wondering why his interpretation is not recommended by economists. Pray direct your ire at his (common) reading to him, not me.

The original question:

something I feel intuitively ought to be true -- that cities and nations ought to strive to produce their own goods for local consumption first, rather than becoming ever more dependent on global trade. I know nobody in mainstream economics takes the book seriously, because nobody in mainstream economics tries to argue that. But I don't know why.

I'm pretty sure that mainstream economists *do* recommend trade based on Ricardo; at least, one has to me. I don't know how they deal with Graydon's point that pure Ricardan trade is at best metastable; I brought up Late Victorian Holocausts and I don't remember where the conversation went; into a mass of detail, I think.

Jim Henry #153:

This may be a feature, not a bug. Consider the higher efficacy of letters to Santa Claus or to Juliet.

An "occasional table": the only commonly-occurring piece of quantum furniture.

Chapeau, Fragano.

Joe McMahon... And what of Schrödinger's hat?

I'm a QA person, but I spend a lot of time writing documentation.

Right now I'm working on:

When the Server Goes “boink:”
Expected Pre-Escalation Analysis for * and ** Problems

* Name of proprietary operating system

** Name of specialized server software

Serge, 168: As every knitter knows, Schrödinger's hat lives in the UFO* box, where it is in a state of uncertainty about whether it will be done in time for the recipient's birthday.

*unfinished objects

Previous thread #909 ::: MD²: Welcome to the club. You do realise your brain will be eaten ?
Then turned to light.

Thank you, and I do like the 'turned to light' bit a lot, but, erm… brain, what brain? (imagine Yorkshiremen saying that last bit, and you are getting close). If you find anything edible in my head, you sure are welcome to it! But I am afraid that, as German independent movie maker Achterbusch had it,'Whether someone's got a brain, only the butcher can prove decisively'. Quite ghoulish, the man. Also, I am rather good at making escapes
In any case: why do zombies like brains so much? It gives you Mad Cow Disease or the Creutzfeld-Jacobs syndrome or something. Does that not matter to a zombie? Don't they have any left? And, yeah, sure brain's rather a tasty dish, but brains only - what a bore!

Say, what do I do if I myself am not finished with the previous thread? My most beloved friend Frank was visiting and I was off-line. Do I publish reponses I still really want to publish here, or there? If I do want them to be read? Since I noted the occasional zombie lurking about in this thread as well... Is there some sort of rhythm, like, a new thread once a week? or every 1000 posts? I suppose I could figure it out but I am too lazy.
Pray, tell me!

As for names: an alias is an alias, is it not, and not deceptive by necessity. I would use a different name every day and time I post something somewhere but usually am too lazy. With four given names, I think I am entitled to share a little of my lifelong confusion. Imagine all those official forms that require the full treat but never grant the space! I do, however, stop myself normally because the main difficulty in that (aside from confusing everybody else, becoming sort of borderline, and probably, trying to evade consequences such as being taken serious erraneously) is remembring who I was where. It would confse myself mre than anyone els. So it is a mattr of intrnal rgnstn wth m. RGH, utdsmvowlmnt wrks evn thn! NNNN!
I swear I shall be Essex to thee forever!
Whew, tht ws close! This parrot joins the choir invisibile.

CD cleaning? Usually, a soft cotton cloth does it. I LOVE thin-worn shreds of discarded t-shirts for that, well-washed, of course. Boobs when in a hurry only. That would be MY boobs most of the time. I also use water, soap, and finger if it's more obnoxious finger prints and other organic residue (worked in a library), but if there are scratches, that polishing stuff for mobile phone displays works wonders. It comes in very small tubes and is expensive, but lasts a long time and does a great job. We are talking only the shiny side here, that toward the laser.
As for the total wipe: why not just wait? I had some back-ups which were only about five years old that my current computer refused to acknowledge. They were readable on some older machine at work though, luckily.

#15 ::: Avram: You forgot Radio Shack's Male-to-Female Converter.
Could I get a working version the other way round somewhere, then? I bought me a "Mini-Gender-Changer", but only realized at home that of course it was female-to-female. Blast. So.

Work for money. Don't seem to be able to do it right and tend to get notice. Need money, like worthwhile work, miss the space inbetween.

Btw, probably pertaining rather to thread 90, since that was about logical puzzles: are you aware of the fact that most people have more legs than the average person?

Hence, statistics and quantification of most sorts for me, then, probably because I slip through the holes, always. May be ok if it's used just to get ideas of situations, but if legislations, health systems etc. are based on it, no.

#170, from TexAnne: ah, so it's a knitted object! Nit kat Knit wit!

Xopher, many many happy returns! The world's a better place for you being in it; at the very least, this leetal corner of teh internets would be the poorer without you.

So here's a raised glass and a Blessed Be for you on your nativity, and here's to many more to come.

Doesn't anybody do the following anymore?

An interesting property of the number 91:

Subtracting 91 from a number causes the tens digit to go up by 1, while the units and hundreds digits step down. For example, starting with 336, we get 245, 154, and then 63. Since 91 is 7 times 13, these steps leave unchanged whether the resulting number is divisible by 7 or 13. So this reduction provides a convenient simultaneous divisibility-check for the divisors 7 and 13, which are notoriously hard to do arithmetic with.

If the number is more than 3 digits long, it may be necessary to subtract 910 instead of 91 at first: this operates on the thousands, hundreds, and tens digits of the number, as before incrementing the central digit while decrementing its neighbors.

Occasionally it is necessary to actually subtract 91 in the ordinary way, but one should never need to borrow.

An example: 958 -> 867 -> 776 -> 685 -> 594; at this point take away 91 in the ordinary way to get 503, and then 503 -> 412 -> 321 -> 230. This last is the product of the primes 2, 5, and 23, and therefore is not divisible by 7 or 13; hence neither is the starting number 958.

This reply was brought to you by the number 91 and the letter FLOOB.

Serge #167: Merci.

Essex: Wilkommen! With an email address like yours, you'll fit right in. (And that's the outer limits of my German.)

You can add comments to Open Thread 90 if you like, though the thread begins to load ever more slowly. Threads are closed after 1000 comments or so because it does bad things to the brownies, or the electrons, or the hamsters, or something.

TexAnne @ 170... No matter what the subject, it always comes back to knitting, eh?

#173

An interesting property of the number 91...

When I was little, my dad brought home href="http://www.amazon.com/Trachtenberg-Speed-System-Basic-Mathematics/dp/0313232008/ref=sr_1_2/102-5978349-5882517?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189558803&sr=1-2">this book by a guy who spent far too much time in solitary courtesy of the Gestapo. He worked out complex systems for doing all kinds of arithmetic functions in the head, and the kind of cross-checking you mention. Our copy survived several moves but I can't lay hands on it right now.

In memory of what happened 6 years ago, I present a reminder of what America is supposed to be about... The Consitution, handbound by Abi...

I'll try again.Trachtenberg

wrt documentation: amen, brother. I managed to move a lot of work off my desk and onto the people who made it by documenting a complex procedure -- and since the doc was empirical, \listening/ to everyone who asked a question and clarifying the doc as needed. I get a lot fewer interruptions now...

Writing doc can even be therapeutic; I've left references ranging from Dorothy Parker through Lost in Space as part of little essays explaining the thinking behind some oddball piece of code. Having just spent most of two days trying to figure out WTF somebody was doing with a peculiar piece of code 10 years ago, I'm likely to keep it up. I got lucky on this bit -- somebody had some 10-year-old paper that came from the process of putting the code in the system -- but other cases I've just had to guess (and document the guess).

Happy birthday, Xopher.

May each of your puns be a groaner,
May each of your loves be a moaner,
May your purse be filled up with kroner,
Now that you are a year growner.

Ice box, flash flood, dry run.

Studfinder ... I think I saw one when I was leaving work today. It had 4-inch (or close to that) heels and knit trousers just the socially correct side of 'dipped or sprayed?' and was mincing down the sidewalk. Obviously (in the physical sense) female.

Or maybe it was a studsearcher.

Ok, because I get to say it...

military intelligence/justice.

Xopher, many happy returns.

Serge: Thanks for the picture of the binding.

abi, we need to talk about pictures, because now I want one bound. I have lots of recently taken ones, some soon to be displayed.

In the too fun/silly dept: Geologists are an alcohol based life form (via Uncyclopedia)

Xopher, Happy Birthday! (I think I'm making it by four minutes.)

Tom, so sorry for the separation. It's always hard with long relationships.

And for the kitschish, a Star Trek montage to The Time Warp.

"Floob is for Floob-boober-bab-boober-bubs...." - "On Beyond Zebra" was one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books.

Going back to the original post, The Set of Things That May Be Oxymorons, or perhaps it's just The Set of Things Ambiguously Named...

...it might just miss membership in this set, but my wife was struck with joy when hardware stores began selling tools specifically marketed as "cordless screwdrivers".

The Unicode glyph for Floob

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday. It was about as happy as I've had in the past five years or so.

Because, of course, one needs the proper tool to unscrew one's wireless bra.

Carol #179: That price is ridiculous. I do have a copy (somewhere in my boxes). I remember being given it while in elementary school to learn to do arithmetic from, and being told my great-uncle wrote it.

I've seen copies for sale intermittently, but at much more reasonable prices.

Bob Oldendorf ::#187:

"cordless screwdrivers".

That fits this topic (which I think of as "terms that are obscurely or complexly bemusing or inherently Wrong")

Of course, hardware stores have been selling cordless screwdrivers for at least seventy years, to my personal knowledge. (I must have at least a hundred -- maybe two hundred -- Around Here Someplace, because it's often easier to buy a new one than to excavate.)

I'm a day late, but I wanted to wish Xopher a Happy Belated Birthday. I've been (mainly) lurking here for some years now, and I've always enjoyed both the variety and the depth of your comments.

#190 ::: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) commented:
Because, of course, one needs the proper tool to unscrew one's wireless bra.

One might have fewer issues screwing in one's wireless bra.

Political Science

And let's not forget Civil Service.

And here we have John Podhoretz's childhood memory of growing up with Madeline L'Engle as a neighbor. (And, it turns out, five blocks from where I spent 11 years of my young life.) Proof positive that neocons do have hearts.

Randolph @ #196, it could also be said to prove that nurture overtakes nature. His acquaintance with Engle just couldn't overcome his family ties to that madman Norman.

(Belated) Happy Birthday, Xopher!

Rule of thumb: No documentation should ever be solely in somebody's head.

Boy howdy, is this one true. The Director of Operations and Education at the small nonprofit where I work gave one week's notice (loooong story), and we're all scrambling to try and pick all of her brain before she heads out of the door.

Finally, I have not been around here the past week or so, so it's probably been mentioned in the other open thread, but I was pleased to see that Riverbend had posted and that she and her family were safe in Syria, although the post itself was enough to make me want to cry.

I was thinking about "panic" gaining a "k" in the past participle (and in the present as "I am panicking"), and moved to check my spelling even came across a helpful general rule (from the BBC world service, no less: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/learnit/learnitv328.shtml ) -

"Verbs ending in -c change to -ck before -ing, etc, is added"

I'm sure you can agree that this is very helpful in the general case, but that rather highlighted my problem...I can't think of ANY other English verb ending with a "c" in the present tense. Is this a "general" rule with only one application, (sort of grammar googlewhack...)?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Sorry, I just couldn't think of anyone else to ask. Next time I'll try a knitting question, honest :D

Tonic and magic can both be verbs, but neither "-cing" nor "-cking" feels pleasant for either, so I think my general rule is "write the sentence some other way".

(Shorter BBC: "Everything's -cked")

Russ: mimic, mimicking.

traffic, trafficking (ie, illicitly trading.)

Ok; I'll buy magic -

"What the hell are you doing?"
"Magicking the parrot, of course."

Which is enough to give a second application of the rule.

...but how are you 'verbing' tonic?

Dave Luckett #202; To traffic need not be illicit.

Re: #184 In the too fun/silly dept: Geologists are an alcohol based life form (via Uncyclopedia)

Not only funny, but disturbingly accurate. *grin* As an undergrad, I did my field work in Australia. We took our final exam at the bar.

Mary Dell @ 132: ...Wait, you mean that CAPTCHA is an acronym? It's not just a clever way of saying "capture"?

I am so not behind the curve. I am very, very hip. Really!

(Please let me not be the only person who didn't know that. Please?)

Russ @203:

"My nerves are shot to hell. I shall tonic myself with a very large whisky and a very small soda."

A bit of a stretch, I admit.

Linkmeister @#197:

it could also be said to prove that nurture overtakes nature. His acquaintance with Engle just couldn't overcome his family ties to that madman Norman.

Wouldn't that be nature over nurture, then? Although I won't argue that liking L'Engle is natural.

Heresiarch @#206:

I am so not behind the curve. I am very, very hip. Really!

Wired magazine, baby. It's what all the cool middle-agers are reading these days. Yee Haw! I mean, W00t!

Anyway, it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Which by my lights would be CAPTTTCHA, but apparently not.

clarification: "I won't argue that liking L'Engle is natural."

actually means "I won't argue against the notion that liking L'Engle is natural"

Or perhaps I could simply say "it's certainly natural to like L'Engle."

Sorry, I have morning brain.

Russ #199: frolic::frolicking, mimic::mimicking, wick::wicking, fuc...whoops, never mind!

And, perhaps as a variant of the rule, we use the term "colicky" as an adjective for babies with colic issues.

Those last two aren't verbs ending in c, though.

"Tic" as in twitch becomes "ticcing", not "ticking". Collision avoidance with "tick"?

TexAnne... Remember when The Fountain came out, one year ago? You expressed great disappointment upon our telling you that at no point in the movie did Hugh Jackman take his shirt off. All this is to say that the filming of Wolverine starts in November.

"Think of it... A shirtless Hugh."
"A shirtless me?"
"No. Not you. Hugh."
"Me?"
"No! Hugh!"
"Me?"
"I'm outta here."

Open thread, so though I'm off topic, maybe I'm not irrelevant...

A friend just sent me an announcement about this writing contest. No entry fee. $10,000 cash prize, with additional money possible if book is picked up by a publisher and does well.

http://www.mackinac.org/articlebef.aspx?ID=8361

There *is* a free market/libertarian political agenda to the group and to the fiction that they're seeking, but I thought it might be of interest to some folks here.

TNH and PNH, if this is totally inappropriate, please disemvowel the heck outta me.

#153: Thanks, fixed.

#73: Unfortunately, like Teresa with her geek-cakes link, I can no longer remember what thing from the blogger who writes as the Talking Dog I actually meant to link to; it doesn't seem to have been a post on his actual blog, so I presume it was a comment somewhere. I've "fixed" the link to post to his front page.

Oh! Cordless screwdrivers!

They are among my favorite retronyms--along with "snail mail" and "black and white tv."

To the guys who tonicked my panicking, frolicking in my ignorance but while mimicking magicking it away...thanks. I knew I'd come to the right place :D

Damn...remove either "but" or "while" from #216. Your choice which.

Dave #201 Sorry I duped you!

So, I think I have one exception to the c-ck rule: arc::arcing??

Or you could add commas-- 'but, while mimicking, magicking it away'.

Ick!

xeger @ 194

Reminds me of a girl I dated in college who insisted that her first sexual experience was so uninteresting that five minutes later she was completely unscrewed and a virgin again.

Mary Dell @ 209

Sorry, I have morning brain.

Rubbing the lobes with coffee will remove the fuzz and restore the normal color.

Heresiarch @ 206

I was clueless on this one too. I guess you only know this stuff if you're middle-aged; after that it's all uphill both ways in the snow.

Serge @ 212

You'll never get to First Base with a line like that.

On the previous open thread, Paula Lieberman suggested Perhaps there should be a lulu.com or otherwise "published" printed collection edition of various selected poems as Poetry from Making Light....

Hmmm... I would probably like to have one of those, but I think half the fun is watching the improvisation unfold in real time. Not just "how do they think of these things?" but "how do they think of these things so quickly?"

5. Comment Registration Systems which require the use of True Names.

A betrayal of what made the Internet interesting in the first place, but I'm a bit of a hardliner that way.

Also, in my limited experience, principally used as a preemptive strike by those who want to find a way to discard a comment before actually reading it, of the "you aren't a Name! You clearly have nothing to contribute" variety. Ugh.

And I'm with Graydon on Jacobs. The problem with Ricardian efficiency is that you inevitably end up with an economy specialized in doing things unwanted by those other economies that didn't follow the Guidelines in their past. It's part-and-parcel of that nasty little problem bog-standard neo-liberal economics has with long-term planning and development.

Yet-Another-Manuscript-Display-Site:

Novelmaker.

NovelMaker is Publishing 2.0!

NovelMaker.com is the world's first truly interactive community for fiction writers, readers, critics, literary agents, editors, and publishers.... Those reviews and ratings may take new and unpublished writers into a realm never before accessible to them – a large, interactive community participating with them in the creation, and potential commercial success, of new works of fiction...

Literary agents seek talent, and worthy works of fiction. Until NovelMaker.com, they have relied on over-the-transom submissions, query letters, and word-of-mouth. But with NovelMaker.com, literary agents can read new works of fiction online, see the results of ratings and reviews by users on our site, and see whose works may be commercially viable – because our large, online community has voted!

For editors and publishers, the opportunities are limitless. We will post their upcoming titles for free, and give them the opportunity to review new works of fiction, provide comments, and, most importantly, see what will sell based on our community response to new works. What better “testing ground” for an editor looking for the next best-seller?

You will be astonished to hear that NovelMaker's founders consist of a banker, a lawyer, an inventor, and a computer programmer.

Sarah S (#213), when I hit the Disclaimer section of the entry form for that competition, alarm bells started ringing, You're giving them permission to poke their noses into your whole past life. Fourth and fifth paragraphs.

It feels a bit odd in other ways, but the process looks a lot like the business of submitting a book to a commercial publisher. Sample chapters, an outline, and $1000 for ten finalists who will compete for the $10000 prize by finishing the book.

And you can win even more if the book is published and sells 10,000 copies in the first year.

I'll let the professionals comment on the publishing side, but I think the nosey parker clause stinks. It's not limited to spotting another Atlanta Nights, or uglier fraud; it reads like a carte blanche

"Whatever the writer of this book has written, he has written by my authority and for the good of the state."

(Yes, I'm feeling very cynical today.)

Self Storage. The idea of just putting myself aside for a while until I really needed me again has always had a certain appeal.

Bruce Cohen @ 223... You'll never get to First Base with a line like that.

THIS First Base?

#199 ::: Russ

picnic

I hadn't yet read it written this way, just skimming through the comments, and it's no longer such an interesting comment to make, but can't you think of the items in the heading as things that don't work the way you might imagine they work?

Dave Bell @ #227

Agreed. That's a creepy clause. I can understand why it's in there, though, since there's such a decided agenda to the work they're looking for. They probably want to make sure that the winning submission isn't written by someone who's anti-market and anti-freedom...except when they're being paid to be pro-market and pro-freedom.

But yes, creepy.

Serge (212) and the other Jackman fans watching the film will be agog to see him as soon as possible. In other words, they'll be hoping Hugh's on first.

*koff*

Meanwhile, Patrick (#214). I suspect what you were attempting to link to at Talking Dog was this little mention (dated Sep 3) at http://thetalkingdog.com/archives2/000913.html

Making Light, the place where a person can use the word 'agog' in reaction to someone's pleasant physical appearance and readers know what that means.

I'm having to convert between degrees and radians, and octal, binary, decimal, and hexadecimal...

Serge @#234: Not to mention Gog and Magog.

Dave/Sara: That clause is creepy (for a publisher). It's as broad in scope as the similar clause used for security clearance background investigations (as used by the DoD and most police forces).

Which seems counter-intuitive (though not surprising) for a "L"ibertarian venture.

I really liked this bit "Entries that advance themes or characters who promote government-sponsored solutions; vilify entrepreneurship; degrade personal initiative, self-reliance and responsibility, or regurgitate discredited myths and misconceptions about liberty and free enterprise will not be favored.

One wonders just which discredited (and by whom) myths and misconceptions are heretical, and which are orthodox.

Even were I hoping to be the next Shulman, I wouldn't be doing it through so top-down and controlling a medium (not that I think them likely to spend the thousands, to tens of thousands of dollars such a background investigation would take; and thats with the help of an honest participant answering a whole lot of intrusive questions).

Were I them, I'd not care what else someone had written. If someone can crank out a good story, which feeds the tropes they want, it doesn't matter what else they've written, nor what they "truly" believe. The story will sell, or it won't.

I do point out the extra 90 grand is pretty much illusory. They don't publish the book, so the winner has a year to get it submitted to a publisher, bought, on the shelves, and sold.

Looking at the guy handling the contest, well his background is narrow (went to a special purpose business college, which boasts the campus is near Dow's Chemical and Corning Plants (wha? this is an incentive?) and Northwood is for students who are ready to get down to business and who have every expectation of success. Northwood is also for students who are ready to get caught up in the college spirit. Are you ready? This will be a great time.

In October it seems they are appealing to Geologists (as well as soldiers, sailors and journalists; the first two of which certainly predate geologists as an alcohol based life form; the last can't be any later than contemporanous. Being/having been in two of those professions... well perhaps it explains my interest in rocks) by having an "Alcohol speaker" to go with the ettiquette dinner, international car show and poster sales which fill the Michigan Campus Calendar.

I am also amused that this is the Mackinack Center for Public Policy fronting this excecise in political potboilers, given the discussion of "ck" transitions.

Mar Dell @ 236... Does Gog live in Québec's town of Magog, near lake Memphremagog?

Damn it... Mackinac.

By the way, I read some of Mr. Marshall's writing.

For myself, Blyechhh.

The rest of the Mackinac Center's page is about what one would expect.

Alex #226: You will be astonished to hear that NovelMaker's founders consist of a banker, a lawyer, an inventor, and a computer programmer.

Doomed to fail without a VP of e-Piracy...

I'm considering...self-publishing. Not for me, for my mom.

Before everyone jumps on me! I'm conflicted about this. I come from a nice academic family that believes strongly in traditional publishing*. But mom has a collection of very good poetry, of a sort that was fashionable about 50 years ago. Her family and friends would all like copies, and the bookstore at the small college where she teaches would probably be pleased to carry it. We'd prefer to go the normal route and try to publish poems in journals and such, and then try for a small press collection. But. She's 80 years old and not in good health.

I'm looking at Lulu and googling "self-publishing" and feeling squicked, but I think this may be the best way to go for this sort of thing. I haven't proposed it to her yet, because she will also be squicked initially, but I think she would ultimately really enjoy having a book in hand that she can give to people.

So, what does everybody think? If I do this, what's the best way to go? I can do a nice cover design, but beyond that, I don't know what to do, other than to avoid PA and other vanity presses. Selling at amazon or whatever isn't really important, so much as having a small & renewable supply of good-looking books in hand that we can distribute to interested parties.

*Dad's books

Mary Dell, I suspect that you may find more fans of Lulu around here than you may think.

Every sensible professional I've ever seen talking about the subject has said that self-publishing/POD is perfect for the kind of thing you're talking about, which isn't something a traditional publisher is likely to bite on in any case. I own a couple of Lulu books (including the one linked above), and they're perfectly nice little trade-sized paperbacks; for a book of poetry that looks and feels like an actual, yanno, real book, it's probably just about right.

Open thread!
A quiz to discover which book of Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles you are - of possible interest?

Mary Dell @ 241 ... not that I'm any sort of authority, but I've heard from more knowledgeable people that poetry, especially poetry meant for a fairly limited audience, is a good choice for self-publishing. And Lulu is both easy to use and honest, going by what I've read on Absolute Write and here.

-Barbara

Submitting one's manuscript to the Mackinac Center: mackinacking?

Barbara @ 243

ROFL!

Mary Dell @ #208, I was thinking that Norman was a member of the immediate family, thus a nurturer (although the idea of Norman Podhoretz nurturing anything other than a rabid wolf seems unlikely), while Engle was part of the younger Podhoretez's environment, thus nature.

If I've got the concept precisely backwards, somebody tell me.

#221 ::: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) reminisced:
Reminds me of a girl I dated in college who insisted that her first sexual experience was so uninteresting that five minutes later she was completely unscrewed and a virgin again.

Perhaps she'd have had better luck if she'd tried nailing instead of screwing. Then again, I can imagine that it could hurt a lot if you got nailed the wrong way.

Barbara @243:

Of interest all right. Should we use this to flush out Dunnett-lovers, do you think?

Linkmeister @#246: If I've got the concept precisely backwards, somebody tell me.

Indeed you do. Nurture is your environment & experiences; Nature is what's bred in the bone.

Jann @ 248... Should we use this to flush out Dunnett-lovers, do you think?

There goes Elmer Fudd.

Mary Dell @ #249, Oh hell. Getting that reversed in my brain is going to be a struggle. Ah well.

243, 248: I'm Checkmate.

And oh by the way, Barbara, thanks...now I need to go back and reread them all, in my copious spare time. I borrowed them in early grad school, and I've forgotten nearly everything, except my mad crush on Lymond.

I'd just like - again - to thank everyone who wished me a happy birthday, belated or not, as well as those who meant to and didn't, and those to whom it never occurred; not to mention those who will decide, at some point in the future, that they ought to have wished me a happy birthday.

Henceforth I will take it as read that everyone wishes, or will wish, that I had a happy birthday on September 11, 2007, unless they explicitly tell me they don't, in which circumstance I hardly think I owe them any thanks.

Seriously...thank you all. Yesterday was a rotten day, but significantly and noticeably less rotten because of the wishes expressed here and via email.

You are my family.

Mary Dell @ 241: In my understanding, what's sleazy about PA & company is not the simple fact of "publish on demand." It's the fact that they con people by claiming to be a real publishing house. They promise fame and fortune, when that's not something you get through POD. It's not that POD in itself is bad -- it's that lying through your teeth and pretending you're a traditional publisher when you're demonstrably not one is bad.

Lulu is one of the decent POD companies. They don't lie about what their business is and they don't lie about what you're paying for. Seriously, just look at the difference in the Lulu website and the PA website -- even just the titles. Lulu says "Self Publishing," PA says "Book Publishing."

So yes, if you are publishing something for your own purposes, and just want something nicely bound that you or she can give to friends and family, Lulu is great.

O HAI! I CAN HAS YASID?

Um. That is to say, can the phosphorosphere please perhaps shed some light on the provenance of some story identifications?

Date that stories were read is unknown, alas.

These may all be shorts in the same collection (the first one is most certain):

1) Man sits down in guard's chair in British Museum, near Egyptian exhibit. Falls asleep, wakes up after Museum is closed for the night. Sees guard, who is, by the way, rather swarthy, messing about in tomb/sarcophagus of a particular mummy that is on display. Guard explains that he is actually 4000-year-old Egyptian sorcerer who discovered elixir of immortality. Mummy was his former colleague, who discovered antidote to elixir of immortality, which sorcerer now wants.

2) Journalist goes to interview general. Finds that general has lost all his limbs.

3) Man waits for train in Underground. Falls asleep. Wakes up, sees that next train is in twenty years...

Xopher @253:
If I recall correctly, you are also in the "there but for fortune" set of people with regard to that late unpleasantness which has rather interrupted the unbridled joy that should always greet your natal day*.

If my recollection is correct, that's another reason to be grateful for a date which not only saw you into the world, but also saw your continued existence.

-----
* and my parents' anniversary as well

Let me consult my handy-dandy parts-of-speech dictionary. Let's see: arc, bivouac, frolic, magic, medevac, mimic, panic, physic, picnic, politic, shellac, sync, talc, traffic, zinc; and of those arc, sync, talc, and zinc are exceptions to the 'k' rule.

y, 257: But of the exceptions, talc and zinc aren't verbs, and sync is short for synchronize; in fact a more common form is synch. So the only real exception is arc.

Owlmirror,

Your story #2 is a theme that pops up in several places. I think there's an English folk song uses the idea, while it was but the work of a moment to Google up The Man Who Was Used Up by Edgar Allen Poe.

Medivac: I always have trouble putting this verb in the past tense; ck, cc, ce, all of them look wrong to me.

Which is a pain, because I get to talk about it, having been medevac'd.

The dictionary I am consulting definitely lists both talc and zinc as verbs, giving forms such as talced, talcing, and zinced. It also lists sync as informal, but gives synch only as a variation of sync; a bit of Googling says that sync in any form is several times more common than synch.

abi 256: You are, in fact, correct. And as a matter of fact the two facts are not unconnected; part of the reason I decided to go in at 10 that day instead of 8:30 was that it was my birthday and I decided to be self-indulgent.

Xopher (253) and abi (256) felicitations, and I too am nil nisi bonum about a date on which my wife survived open-heart surgery (as I mentioned in OT90). In response to abi's question, the recovery is going very well at this point; she's getting out of the ICU on the early side and may be returning home before the weekend. Then it's 6-8 weeks of light duty while her sternum recovers from the lizziebordenation.

All this arose from preparation for a hip replacement which, though postponed, will be safer with her ticker tocking on all cylinders.

Ways to bend English in the service of marketing Web 2.0.

Happy belated birthday, Xopher!

[reads #253]

Oh, good, now I don't have to say it. What a relief!

Serge, I don't know if you remember, but a little bit ago I said I was moving Forbidden Planet to the top of my Netflix queueueueueueueueue?

Well, weirdly, as soon as I did that, it went from Availability: NOW to Availability: LONG WAIT to Availability: VERY LONG WAIT, and now it's been moved to my "Saved Movies," where they keep movies they don't actually have. Did they only have one copy, and someone stole it? I don't understand.

Ah well. I guess that's why Yog-Sothoth gave us video stores.

ethan @ 266... My offer still stands.

Serge, only if you literally never want your copy back. I try to be a good man, but I know myself.

ethan... Hmmm... I do watch it once a year so I guess I'd want it back. Say, do you want my DVD of Fantastic Four? That's something I'll never watch again.

Xopher #253
Wow.

Exploiting the open thread:

Did anyone else know that Larry Craig voted against the Patriot Act extensions, and that Bush apparently called him a traitor in public for it? Isn't that interesting?

It makes me wonder what fraction of Republicans, or congressmen in general, who voted against the Patriot Act or other laws of that kind, have since run into scandal or something.

Am I missing something here? This seems creepy as hell to me. Maybe I *do* understand why the Democrats went along with the warrantless wiretapping stuff now....

Dave Bell @ #259: Excellent, thanks! That does indeed look exactly like the story that was described, including the bit about the General appearing to be at first a bundle on the floor until all of his parts are attached.

When the story was described to me, I was strongly reminded of an unnamed General who appears briefly in L. Frank Baum's John Dough and the Cherub (on the Isle of Phreex, no less), but none of the other details matched.

Kathryn @264:

They're just stealing from the ways that people have been kre8tyvlee naming their kids for years.

albatross @ 271

Well, he does appear to have some personal problems apart from his not voting the straight Party line. (Apparently his private life has been the subject of rumor, speculation, and suppressed news coverage for about 25 years. And his kids are known to be his wife's from her first marriage.)

Mary Dell @ #241: Other people here know much more about this than I do, but I can confirm Lulu as a good way to go. An octogenarian friend of mine recently published a small run of her autobiography through Lulu. More accurately, one of her sons took her manuscript and, thanks to Lulu, gave her a birthday present of a small run of a nicely designed and produced paperback which she in turn has given to her grandchildren and sold for a modest sum to selected friends. I was one of the friends. I wouldn't have got to read her story otherwise, and I'm very glad I did.

<OT>
Being in love with someone who's emotionally unavailable is bad.
Being in love with someone who's physically unavailable is worse.
</OT>

Jonathan Shaw @ #275, agreed. The baseball blog I frequent published a collection through Lulu

A 325-page book featuring the top selections from this website from 2002-2005.

y @ 257: All those exceptions to the K rule have another consonant before the C. None of the others do. I expect that's why those four are exceptions.

Demosthenes #225, Graydon, et alia* on Ricardo and fair trade etc.:

Interlopers (like ?Miami? in a post above) disrupt a trade balance in the short term, but it's still possible to have the net benefit of trade to a city be worth the risk. (Ideally, the city would invest some of its profits in risk-management like, oh, farmland preservation and education and small-business incubators.)

And planning to export rather than importing only works if you can enforce it on another market; if the plan is good enough that every city can use it, we all have to import as well as export, at which point Ricardo-with-caution is relevant again.

Xopher @ 276... What happened?

Dan Hoey #263: There were a couple of important things I learned through my own quadruple bypass.

1. Supervised rehabilitation is a good investment.

2. Don't try to tough it out and not take enough pain medication due to fear of addiction. I received a fairly severe tongue-lashing from a charge nurse on that point, and it's one I won't soon forget.

Sarah S @ #215:

I've never seen "cordless screwdriver" used in such a way that it might be considered a retronym. In my experience, it invariably refers to that variety of electric screwdriver that runs off a battery, thus not requiring a power cord.

(Incidentally, my favourite odd Father's Day gift of those I saw advertised this year was a cordless screwdriver, or possibly a cordless drill, that came with a free remote-control car designed to run off the same battery pack.)

The old-fashioned manual-power screwdrivers are still just called "screwdrivers", with no additional qualifications.

Dan Hoey: Look into getting some Occupational Therapy. Not just for her, but some for yourself as well.

OC isn't about employment, it's about how one occupies one's time. It's actually about everything one does.

PT is about being able to use your body, OT is about making it, even when impaired, do what you want it to.

Xopher - I should have wished you a happy birthday, but was a bit late to the party. May you have happy unbirthdays, starting....now.

Serge 280: Nothing. That's the problem. It keeps not happening.

Xopher #285: Sing it, sister.

Let's pretend I said something less gay that means that same thing.

The Zombie Feeds Tonight

We-de-de-de De-de-de-de-de De-zom-um-um-ba-way
We-de-de-de De-de-de-de-de We-zom-um-ba-way

CHORUS:
A-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh, a-zombieweh

In the graveyard
The haunted graveyard
The zombie feeds tonight
In the graveyard
The eerie graveyard
The zombie feeds tonight

CHORUS

Near the village
The peaceful village
The zombie feeds tonight
Near the village
The quiet village
The zombie feeds tonight

CHORUS

Hush, my darling
Go hide, my darling
The zombie feeds tonight
Hush, my darling
Go hide, my darling
The zombie feeds tonight

CHORUS

We-de-de-de De-de-de-de-de De-zom-um-um-ba-way
We-de-de-de De-de-de-de-de We-zom-um-ba-way

OtterB, #224: Yes, that's certainly part of the fun -- but the results are frequently of high enough quality that I'd greatly enjoy a more physical record. We have poets here who put every Poet Laureate of the past 50 years to shame.

Paula, #235: There's a quick-and-easy trick for converting from binary to octal. Divide the binary code, from right to left, into groups of three; then convert each group to its decimal equivalent (which will be 0 thru 7), and hey presto! you've got your octal number. Works for binary-to-hex too, if you use groups of 4 and include the letters. Furthermore, you can also do it in reverse to go from hex or octal to binary.

Xopher, #276: Ouch. Sympathies. However, based on personal experience, I'll argue that your second statement holds only if the first statement doesn't apply.

Earl, #281: ISTR hearing that one is actually less likely to become addicted to drugs which are being taken for physical pain, even if taking large quantities. I could, of course, be remembering this all wrong, and welcome enlightenment if so.

Random thought triggered by several comments: perhaps it would be a useful idea to have a "Reclaiming 9/11" party, where people who have birthdays, anniversaries, or other reasons to have happy memories associated with the date could get together and talk about them without fear of being shot down for daring to be happy on a Day Of National Tragedy. I'll bet the concept would become popular.

My new laptop has Windows Vista.

Windows Vista is like:

You go to an art supply store. You want a pad of bristol board, an X-Acto knife, and a can of fixative. You know where the store keeps them and what brand you need.

As soon as you walk into the store, a perky young clerk rushes up to you. "We have CRAYONS!" she says, in a happy enthusiastic voice, as though talking to a toddler. "Look all the cul-orrs! What's your favorite cul-orrr?"

When you try to explain that you're not interested, she looks puzzled and hurt. "You're looking for . . . bristol board? Is that wood? I think we have craft popsicle sticks?" She asks another clerk if the store has boards of wood.

"There's some basswood in the miniatures section? But it's really not a board?"

You explain that bristol board is a kind of stiff paper.

"OOOOOHHH!" the clerks shout, and you find yourself dragged to an aisle stocked with construction paper, and you're handed a pair of plastic safety scissors because they're safer for kids than X-Acto knives.

You get away and try your best to find what you need. You can see in the distance the sections where you know where the stuff you need is, but there is a maze of displays and new aisles in the way, full of Spider Man and BRATZ fuzzy-poster art kits and tubes of glitter and, for some reason, a rack of Baby Einstein videos and people selling car insurance.

And if you ask anyone for help, they bring you up front and try to sell you crayons.

Bruce @ 222: "I was clueless on this one too. I guess you only know this stuff if you're middle-aged; after that it's all uphill both ways in the snow."

Before middle-age too, apparently.

What gets to me is that I didn't get it precisely because it's such a good acronym--the idea of "captcha"-ing bots masquerading as human was so natural it never even crossed my mind that it might be an acronym.

abi @ 256

If my recollection is correct, that's another reason to be grateful for a date which not only saw you into the world, but also saw your continued existence.

I second this sentiment. And Xopher, I really want you to feel good about it the way we do, though I know that's not easy to do; there must be many mixed emotions involved. Yes, I do feel like part of your family.

Thinking of the 9/11 conflict between personal joy and national sorrow, I briefly considered 11/11 and wonderwed what people did. But then I recalled that 11/11 was the day the shooting and killing stopped. While there was the sombre remembrance of the dead, and the uncanny silence at 11am, every 11th of November, it marked the End, not the Beginning.

We don't seem to do much about VE-Day and VJ-Day, but, as British life has evolved, we have that day to remember the dead of all wars, and mark in our minds that wars do end. That, after solemn music and the laying of wreaths, there are people who came back, marching past the Memorial to the brighter tunes of military ceremonial.

It seems obvious to me that 9/11 should be forgotten by most of us. Aside from personal grief, there is nothing good in remembering it. It is a gnawing canker in the soul of America, maybe even a cynical drumbeat to call men to the colours for an endless war. But until this endless war is ended, there's no dawn; no light to contrast with the darkness.

Maybe every political War on X is a false war; a cynical exploitation of patriotism. Maybe it has roots in rhetoric: some national struggle against a national problem. But war is a corruption of civil society: a throwing away of the normal rules of social intercourse. Even a police officer has to explain every death he might inflict. The soldier may question himself, yet is encouraged to kill.

Remembering 9/11 is turning us away from peace, whether it be the peace of Kings or Constitutions. And, unlike past wars, against the new Dark Ages that humanity can conjure, we have no clear marker for victory. There is no enemy capital to fly our flags over, whether that flag is the Stars-and-Stripes over Tokyo or the Golden Arches over Moscow. This is being fought as if it were a war between State and State, when the enemy is neither State nor Culture. It is a war between liars: between those who lie about the ideals of our culture, and those who lie about the ideals of Islam.

And all that 9/11 tells us is that this cannot end until we deny the deceivers.

Dave Bell @ #292, my maternal grandmother's birthday was 11/11/1892. I wrote a brief birthday message to her back in 2002 on what would have been her 110th birthday.

She always felt joyous about her birthdate, as I recall.

Xopher: If you are feeling conflicted about the date: You are not expendable. That you didn't die isn't your fault, and having been there would have made nothing better.

And you'd be pissed off at how people were playing with the fact of your dying.

Just my two-cents.

Dave Bell @ 292

I agree that one of the great tragedies of 9/11 is how the deaths and injuries have been used for political advantage by cynical political operators and religious zealots. But that doesn't detract from the fact that the US suffered a real psychic and emotional blow that day, that we have still not recovered from.

That's not to say that the trauma justifies any action we've taken in revenge or retribution, or any bigotry we've explained by 9/11, but it is a problem that needs to be dealt with. Until the people of the US have recovered from the collective fear and anger and returned to a more rational view of the rest of the world all of world society will be distorted by it. I'm not at all trying to disown the rest of the people of my country for their feelings. I feel, however, that I have dealt with those emotions in the last six years, and don't feel I need to let them dictate my thoughts and actions, but I don't see that response yet from many of my compatriots.

The British reaction to the London bombing stood in sharp contrast to the American reaction to 9/11. I suppose it was because many people still alive in London remember the Blitz, and most of them remember the IRA bombings, so it's not a novel sensation, but one they've had to deal with before. That may be why I've been able to process it more easily than many other Americans, having been under fire myself. It's also true that on the morning of 9/11 I was recovering from a surgery which left me partially paralyzed and had no idea if I would recover any function in my right leg; I was horrified by what I saw on TV that day, but my emotional state at the time didn't have room for personal fear of harm from terrorists.

The US reaction to 9/11 is very much that of a person traumatized by violence: pulling in to oneself, away from others, denial of the trauma, irrational anger, etc. I wish there were some way to pull a vast couch up the country and have therapy sessions for the entire nation; failing that we're going to have to pull ourselves out of it the hard way, by finding all the reasons why disassociated anger and fear are detrimental to us, and why there are things in the world to be joyous about, no matter how much horror and evil may still be extant. In this respect we owe it to those of us who have birthdays, anniversaries, surgery, and memorials other than at Ground Zero to celebrate them as well.

We should always remember those who died in the Towers, just as we remember all our dead, because that's one of the things that makes us human. But remembrance is what we owe them, and ourselves, not martyrdom.

Bruce, #295: A very large part of the problem is that America's political leaders and media powers are deliberately perpetuating it. It started the very day after the attack; you couldn't turn on a TV anywhere without seeing those horrible videos over and over and OVER again. I saw people I knew, unable to turn away from the TV, effectively driving themselves into PTSD. Some of them have been in that state ever since -- and the people who should be helping to lead us (collectively) out of it are instead doing everything they can to maintain that mindset. Bluntly, they keep picking at the scab in order to make sure it NEVER heals... because they can use people in that wounded emotional condition to further their own ends.

This is why I suggested "Reclaiming 9/11" parties upthread. On further thought, I think it might also be a worthy idea to spread thru the blogosphere. Next year, let's have an explosion of "Reclaiming 9/11" posts, wherein we give appropriate remembrance and then declare a moratorium on discussing the attack and turn the conversation to other things.

#295: Good Things on September 11, according to Wikipedia:

Hungary opened its border with Austria. Thousands flooded into the West, and the Iron Curtain finally started to crumble. Within a year, eastern Europe was free. Today, a dozen former satellite states between the Oder and the Dnieper have fair elections. Europe, a battlefield either actually or in waiting for most of the 20th century, is prosperous and at peace. You can, at last, take a tram down Wenceslas Square and say to your neighbour "I don't think much of our present government".

Mars Global Surveyor reached its destination. After twenty years' hiatus, NASA was back at Mars. In the six years of its mission, MGS mapped our nearest planetary neighbour in unprecedented detail - and found evidence of flowing liquid water on the surface, not historically, but within the last decade. The volume of data now coming back from Mars is immense - and MGS was the first step in this new wave of exploration.

Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat met at Camp David, and agreed the accords (signed six days later) - the first significant step towards peace in the Middle East between Israel and its neighbours. Almost thirty years later, that peace holds.

Perhaps less globally significant - the referendum on the Scottish Parliament passed, and the Parliament was established again after an interregnum of about three centuries.

Good things on 9/11... That's the day writer Sharon Lee was born. I make a point of remembering that, and of reminding Sharon.

Good things on 11 September:

The first act passed by the [Catalan] Parliament when it was created in 1980 declared September 11th as the Catalan National Day in the following terms: "(...) In times of struggle, the Catalan people used to mark a special day, the eleventh of September, as the National Day of Catalonia. A special day which, while representing the painful memories of the loss of liberties, on the eleventh of September 1714, and an attitude of struggle and active resistance to oppression, also embodied the hope of total recovery of its nationhood. Now that Catalonia is back on its path to freedom, the representatives of the People think that the Legislative House should sanction what the Nation has already unanimously decided. Therefore, the People of Catalonia, by the powers vested in its Parliament, establishes the following law
"Article one. The eleventh of September is declared the National Day of Catalonia.
"Article two. This act will come into force on the day of its publication in the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat.
"I hereby order that all citizens to whom this act is applicable cooperate in its implementation and that the Tribunals and Authorities to which it corresponds see to its compliance."

Lee #296:

Yeah, for whatever reason, the emotional impact of the attack was massively amplified by showing those images again and again and again. It's like someone really wanted us to get those fixed in our minds. And the images were arresting.

I think a lot of the impact of this on national policy has to do with the main targets and victims of the attacks. These weren't random people on a bus or plane, they were largely people at the top of our society--the wealthy and powerful. The anthrax attacks re-enforced this for media types.

The emotional impact hit everyone, but I can't help thinking that the policy response might have been different if 3000 poor and powerless people had died. (Or even 1000 such, as in Katrina.) The people who were in the best position to make policy, and who usually would have hit the brakes on emotionally satisfying but unwise policies were largely frightened and enraged, and so they didn't. We got the Patriot Act by an overwhelming vote. We got invasion of Afghanistan, and even invasion in Iraq, with substantial support of the people who would normally have questioned such a thing.

People make bad decisions scared and mad. If Bin Laden and company's aim was scaring and enraging our decisionmakers into making bad decisions, it succeeded.

Our equivalent of 9/11 isn't 11/11, it's 11/5. Four centuries after that religious fanatic conspiracy to blow up a public building was foiled, we still remember, remember the fifth of November. We stopped torturing again (after we started again after stopping the first time), and the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed after only two and a half centuries and a Gordon Riot or two, but America has a long way to go if it wants to match us for long memories. The year 2401 at least.

Lee, albatross

ISTM there are components of both intentional malice and traumatic obsession in the media deluge of images. And I agree completely that some of it was the result of an unusual fear in high places that, for once, they were vulnerable to the fortunes of war, rather than being the arbiters of the fates of their subjects.

It is time we reclaimed the day and our psyches from the onslaught of denial and despair. Fragano, the Catalonian attitude sounds like something well worth emulating: this day marks a time of sadness and grief, out of which must come a renewed commitment to our real values. We owe this to the memory of those we honor on that day.

So, in no particular order, here are some people we should thank the day for:

Leo Kottke
Harry Connick, Jr.
Lola Falana
O. Henry
D. H. Lawrence
Carl Zeiss
Pinto Colvig
"Bear" Bryant
Herbert Lom
Amy Madigan
Moby

Xopher @ #276: as someone who endured a 4 1/2 year long-distance engagement , I venture to say that the badness level depends on whether the unavailability is temporary or permanent.

Stefan @ #289 : and every few minutes all the lights go out and the staff take simultaneous smoke breaks.

Dave Bell @ #292: I suggest rather that 9/11 should be remembered, and that on every anniversary we (the U.S.) should ask ourselves: are our current policies making a repeat of 9/11 MORE or LESS likely? As the bumper sticker says, "We are making enemies faster than we can kill them."

Terry @ # 294: and Xopher would still be spinning in his grave to have his death blamed on Teh Homasexyulls.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #302: Hear! Hear!

(Herbert Lom? Now that's an example of a good sport.)

Born on Sept 11... Virginia Madsen.

Oh goodness... This coming Saturday, the Skiffy Channel will be... ah... treating us to Adrian Paul in Highlander: the Source. As their slogan says, Saturday is the most dangerous night on television...

Bruce #302:

Cue falling towers
Terror season; be afraid
We'll protect you, dears.

Re #287: Since the whole thing about zombies came from Afro-Caribbean culture, are there any genuine (so to speak) songs or chants relating to them? Do any of ML's many scholars have info on this? Just curious.

As for birthdays, 9/11 is by far the most difficult at the moment. But I expect it's not much fun for 12/25 people either -- for quite different reasons. The whole thing could be grouped under Awkward Birthdays, or some such label. (I was relatively lucky, as a 9/3 kid. B'day usually falls on Labor Day, which is very appropriate for my Mom's efforts, and the only negative is that my husband always has to work on the "holiday". And no, I'm NOT angling for belated congrats on making it a measly year further into middle age.)

Happy birthday anyway, Faren.

I'm enjoying Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond, which is the first of his books I've read (someone gave me a copy a few years ago). Is the sequel The Virginians as good? Which of his other books are or aren't worth reading?

Stefan: That's a pretty good analogy. I prefer to say instead that it's like having your computer designed by the Transportation Security Administration. "You've just tried to copy a file. Do you really want to do that?" "Yes." "Please show your identification card, comrade!" "Here." [pause] "OK, you may copy that file." It's a daily battering with annoyances.

Also, the quite capable graphics card in my work computer runs like mud under Vista, even without turning on the special effects. (And sometimes it will inexplicably slow down and run even slower.)

To those of you who aren't required by your employer to use Vista, don't. If you need to replace your computer and can't find a source to buy XP computers, you'll find it less traumatic to switch to a Mac. Seriously.

Clifton @ 311

I understand XP is selling as well as Vista. ('We just bought new computers last year. Why do we need to replace them?' is probably being said a lot this year.)

I don't know what Teresa's doing for Cylert these days, but today I ran across a plea from another user who's run out. Issues can spread very far, very fast via Twitter; hopefully this new crusade will cause a few ripples.

Lee 288: Ouch. Sympathies. However, based on personal experience, I'll argue that your second statement holds only if the first statement doesn't apply.

Perhaps. And vice versa, though.

"Reclaiming 9/11" party...without fear of being shot down for daring to be happy on a Day Of National Tragedy.

I like this idea a lot. I think I'm just about done with the "I can't celebrate my birthday because it's on the DONT" moping.

Stefan 289: Ugh. And there's no way to turn all that off? If not...I'm going Apple next time I need a computer.

Bruce 291: Xopher, I really want you to feel good about it the way we do, though I know that's not easy to do; there must be many mixed emotions involved.

Yeah, though not as mixed as it was at first. I literally spent a year wishing I'd gone in early that day. I have since dealt with that feeling in therapy, thank gods.

Yes, I do feel like part of your family.

Good; I'm glad it's mutual.

Dave 292: But then I recalled that 11/11 was the day the shooting and killing stopped.

EVERYONE SANG

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

--Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967).

Terry 294: I know that now. It was hard to realize at first, and I keep having fantasies about showing up at 8:00 on that day and screaming at everyone to get out. Less and less.

And I AM pissed at how they've used the deaths of my coworkers. Only the prospect of being a vengeful ghost makes it at all tempting to be dead!

And you're not expendable either, despite your occasional declarations to the contrary.

Bruce 302: You forgot Ferdinand Marcos, though his birth isn't exactly a reason to celebrate. On the other hand, any of you know Stuart Stinson? He's also a 9/11 baby.

Lila 303: How about if every couple of weeks or so you keep being told the separation is going to end! today! and then it doesn't, and that keeps happening for a year?

Yeah, I know, DTMFA. But he's got a hook in my heart (I suspect it's in a ventricle), and I can't imagine surviving pulling it out. I just want to figure out what's wrong and fix it.

Faren 308: My BF was born "late at night on December 24," which given that December 25 is considered an unlucky day to be born in his native Greece, probably means he was born on the 25th. And if anyone is a Kallikanzaros, it's him! (I just hope he's as immortal as Zelazny's character.)

And my mom's BD is 9/4.

Since the whole thing about zombies came from Afro-Caribbean culture, are there any genuine (so to speak) songs or chants relating to them? Do any of ML's many scholars have info on this?

There's always Zombie Jamboree (the song that killed calypso) originally recorded by Lord Vader and his twelve penetrators, but presented here in a more familiar version.

Xopher #313: Sure there is. Wipe Vista and replace it with Windows XP. Or with Linux (of whatever your preferred flavor is). I've made a solemn vow that, until work forces me to do so, I'm never using a computer with Vista on it, and that I will never ever own one unless it's absolutely necessary.

Faren, #308: Actually, 12/25 isn't as bad as the few days immediately before it. My partner's birthday is 12/21 and his daughter's is 12/25. She was always able to handle it by celebrating her "half-birthday" on 6/25, and everyone understood that and got on board with it. He didn't have that option, but still had all the problems of having a Christmas-season birthday. The one year his parents agreed to let him have a party, all the kids he knew were either out of town or busy with family stuff, and he ended up with a bunch of people he didn't even know -- mostly the kids of his parents' friends or their friends. Not. Fun. Birthdays are still a huge sore point for him; I've been trying to work on reframing that, but I've got almost 50 years of bad mojo to counter and it's not going very fast. :-(

My birthday is in early May, and every 7 years or so it falls on Mother's Day and I might as well forget about going out for a nice birthday dinner, because every restaurant in town is packed for the Hallmark Holiday. (Now that my mother is dead, I don't plan to recognize Mother's Day ever again.) But that's a very minor annoyance by comparison!

Xopher @ #314: Yeah, that would pretty thoroughly suck. You have my sincere sympathy, and a wish that your situation works out as well as, or better than, mine has (27 years married as of this December).

Lila @ 318... 27 years married as of this December

Congratulations! On Sept 25, my wife and I will have been together for 22 years. (We were married a few months later, 2 days before Challenger blew up.)

Today at work I was assigned to observe someone I hadn't met yet to learn the job he's doing (whee, data entry!!!), and I noticed that he had on his desk a battered old paperback copy of Dangerous Visions. I don't generally think of myself doing this kind of thing, but I realized that I immediately started talking to him differently than I do to anyone else at work, more friendly and more like my outside-of-work self. It's especially weird to me that that happened so automatically because very few of my Real Life friends are SF people (sadly).

I don't know what my point is, here. I just didn't know what to make of my reaction.

My birthday's on February 2, so it didn't become relevant till I became a pagan. It's not like Groundhog's Day (or even Candlemas) is a huge deal for anyone.

I think the Reclaiming 9/11 party is a great idea. And on a related note, Dubya's official bio is no longer the first hit when googling "miserable failure"; apparently Google's changed its serach algorhythms to thwart googlebombing. Alas.

Lee 317: She was always able to handle it by celebrating her "half-birthday" on 6/25

I tried that for a while. Then Al Qaeda bombed the Madrid trains on 3/11, and I gave up.

Paul A. wrote at #282:

I've never seen "cordless screwdriver" used in such a way that it might be considered a retronym. In my experience, it invariably refers to that variety of electric screwdriver that runs off a battery, thus not requiring a power cord.

"Cordless electric drills" or "cordless electric screwdrivers" is how I think of them. And "them", plural, is the proper term. I have about five, one -- the first one I owned [1] -- which won't recharge anymore; two that I can't find the recharge-cords for; and a big one that's more a drill than a screwdriver, with removable batteries that's more like what a pro would use -- it's really too much for 99% of the use I have for it [2], so mostly it sits in the basement waiting. But the fifth is really nice. It has a pistol-like grip that makes it easier to hold while screwing or drilling.

[1] When I bought my house, the cordless/rechargeable screwdriver/drill was one of the first new things I bought, and it was the most useful thing for putting together diy stuff like IKEA furniture and doing other small stuff. I think everyone should have at least one, and remember where the recharger is!

[2] I bought it because I needed More Power to drill a bigger hole in the front door to install a new lockset. The little cordless screwdriver/drills that I normally use are too weak for a heavy-duty drill job like that, or for masonry drilling.

The old-fashioned manual-power screwdrivers are still just called "screwdrivers", with no additional qualifications

Unlike, say, acoustic guitars. Or manual typewriters. I think "desktop computer" fits into the retronym category by now, too. As the handheld PDA/cellphone sort of thing gets more powerful and common, maybe "laptop computer" is starting to edge into that area.

Landline is my favorite retronym.

xoper @ 276

Amen. until very recently I ended up in a lot of long-distance relationships. They suck. Esp. when the light at the end of the tunnel keeps receeding.

Faren @ 308

My birthday usually falls during thanksgiving week. The years where I've had pumpkin pie with candles are numerous- and my friends can never come help me celebrate. And it's no fun to turn 21 on a national holiday where the only people you can drink with are your (teetotaling) parents and grandparents.

Dave, #292: Thinking of the 9/11 conflict between personal joy and national sorrow, I briefly considered 11/11 and wondered what people did. But then I recalled that 11/11 was the day the shooting and killing stopped. While there was the sombre remembrance of the dead, and the uncanny silence at 11am, every 11th of November, it marked the End, not the Beginning.

A better analogy, for us, would be December 7 -- the "day that will live in infamy", the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The earliest Pearl Harbor Day that I would have been old enough to have any real memory of would have been the 20th anniversary, in 1961, and in fact I don't remember anything about it. Perhaps those who are old enough to have memories closer to the event could compare-and-contrast the way America responded to that vs. 9/11.

I do remember thinking, as one of the many thoughts I had on 9/11, something to the effect of, "Dammit, we were JUST getting to the point of letting go of Pearl Harbor and now here's something else that will fit right into the same slot."

ethan, #320: I do that too -- or did, when I had a day job. I don't think it's an unusual reaction to discovering that you have an "outside" connection with someone at the office.

Xopher, #322: DA-yum, boy, if you didn't have bad luck you'd have no luck at all!

Re "cordless drill" and its predecessor tech:

Well, there was the "Yankee Screwdriver" which was... um, hard to explain; it had a spiral drive, you pressed down on the top and it went clockwise screwed in the fastener, and then when you released the pressure, the drive ratchet was released and it unwound so you could press on it again.

They didn't work very dependably, which I suspect is why they were replaced early on with driver bits in (corded) power drills.

I own two Makita 10mm 9.6v drills, which turns out to be a lot more useful than having one of those hinky pilot hole sets where you flip between drill and driver ends on a hex-mount bit, especially when you're setting a bunch of screws, not least because two people working together can drill pilot holes and set screws at the same time (I do a lot of coersion of my adult offspring on big projects).

With drills, as with all other cordless tools, from blood glucose meters to saws, all praise is due the constant improvement in battery tech.

We used to live in Capitol Hill in Denver, where the wild life mentioned (okay, not the zombies) strolled.

Peter Lorre sings:

In the early morning rain
With blood upon my hands
And an aching in my skull
And my teeth all full of strands
I'm a long way from my isle
And no one likes my smile
In the early morning rain
I'll start leaking in a while

Out on ho stro' number nine
Big Lucille is set to go
Stuck my hand up through the grass
Lucille going down once mo'
Dura matter tasted good
Tho' her pimp was sure aghast
We sure dirtied up the 'hood
Brains all eaten up at last

Hear the mighty loa roar
With a new way to get high
Grabbed the bod of that crack ho
Far above the clouds she'll fly
She won't feel it when she lands
Likely splatter in the park
Entrails scattered on the sands
Masticated before dark

This old grind has got me down
Shreds are falling off of me
Want to creep back underground
Cold and rotten as can be
You can't jump a jet plane
With a rotten zombie brain
So I'd best be on my way
But at least I feel no pain

I don't think Landline is a retronym. I seem to recall using long before cell phones were common (much less ubiquitous).

I know that, in the Army (and I'm told in ham/shortwave radio) we make the distinction between radio comms, and wire-based (a cable dog carried a spool of about 1,000 feet on his back).

The TA-312 field telephone is the classic, being capable of running 12 phones on a 3 mile circuit (with the interesting ability to operate a s voice activated/powered phone when the batteries are out; by the simple expedient of reversing the mouth/earpiece. Ringning is done with a generator; built into the phone, so getting attention, even when out of juice is no problem), and is always referred to as a means of landline commo.

There's some (anectdotal, like mine) support for this at Eggcorns

A friend says they were using it in '64, when he was in the AF in Nam, because they had radio, and land comms.

Lee: I think people didn't have the same sense of Pearl Harbor because it became a starting point for something everyone had a stake in.

This one (to separate it from what I was told was the seminal event of the age.... the shooting of JFK) didn't have that. We were told the world changed (which differentiates it from the shooting), and yet... we were called on to do nothing.

Rather the thing we were told we had to face is that the only thing we have is fear itself.

Our gov't tells us to wallow in it (with colored alerts, and links of every possible thing to terrorists with fell intent, until that fails to pan out and they just ignore it... which adds to the miasma of fear).

So the trigger for all that fear is kept alive; since none of the purgative effects of purpose which it could have been harnessed to actually took place.

We are in a state of arrested development.

On birthdays: my daughter was born on April 1st. She was due on March 27, so we joked that if she gets teased for having an April Fool's birthday, we'll just tell her it's her own fault for being late.

Terry #330:

I think this is the kind of problem that can't be solved in a spectacular way, which is kind of what you can get from a conventional war. I can't see that we will ever objectively get a victory, so much as just notice that AQ-linked attacks fall off. It's not like killing or arresting OBL, or any of the thirty-five #2 men in Al Qaida we've captured or killed, ends the war.

I suppose a lot of other weird aspects to the war on terror also appear in conventional wars. You can suspect that the government is using the war as a pretext for power grabs and rewarding friends with sweetheart deals in a conventional war, and you can learn not to believe most of what you're told by the government or media.

albatross: But I don't think it had to be that way.

We might rather have been told, "There are people who are willing to commit heinous acts to change what we do, who we are, and how we act.

We are not the only nation to face such problems, the Basque separatists in Spain, the Tigers in Sri Lanka, the IRA in Ireland; and the UK, all have afflicted those nations.

Like them we will remain true to our ideals. We will mobilise our police, streamline out intelligence. See where are failures were and close our vulnerabilities, but we will not cower.

As FDR said, "The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself," if we give in to fear we grant them a victory, in a struggle which will never end; just as poverty can only be ameliorated, not eliminated, so too will those who feel marginilised magnify their greivances, while those who are marginal will manufacture them.

If we overreact, and give up our liberties, villianize those who share nothing more than nation, language or religion with those who have attacked us, be they Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Jew; Nationalist or religious fanatic, then we not only grant them a minor victory in a skirmish, but cede to them the field of battle. For if we let them make us demonize those with whom we have no quarrel, we will forfeit allies.

No, rather we shall affirm what we have always been. We have made mistakes; and for those we must own up, but nothing we have done justifies the targetting, the killing, the terrorising of a nation, much less the random killing of those who were not Americans, but merely victims of circumstance.

The FBI, the CIA, Interpol, and all those who are willing to aid us in the search will bring the investigative powers of the offended to bear. Make no mistake, the people who did this will be found. The case will be solid, and they will be brought to justice.

We will persevere. We will find them. We will show the world, in open court, that they did this.

And they will be punished."

That would have put things in context. It would (had it been done) have kept the wealth of world sympathy which we were given.

We would have gained stature; for not resorting to the temptation to lash out. And; if we did that (made a plain case) we would have allies from those who are now against us.

But we didn't have anyone in power who could see that. If we did, they didn't care.

Oops.

"Our" failures. I did that all first/only draft.

What if.. What if Al Gore had not had the Presidency stolen from him?... That of course assumes another big what-if, that the Democrats wouldn't then have done something stupid to prove to Fox News and to the GOP that they're not a bunch of wimps.

Very well said, Terry. It's a shame, no, more than a shame, it's a tragedy that we hadn't a President who could have delivered that speech.

Xopher #314: Your bf's name doesn't include 'Conrad', 'Constantine', 'Nomikos' or 'Karaghiosis' by any chance?

"Internet People": the vid so nice, it was Particled thrice!

@#337: Names are merely the wind blowing by.

Did he have a club foot? Did he ever say "Feathers or lead"? Was he tall, and unusually strong? Did he remember more about the past than made sense for someone of his apparent age?

I have no idea why I used the past tense.

Say, speaking of Zelazny, I seem to recall reading as the introduction to a Zelazny story, "Sing, O muse, not of what was, nor of what is, but another tale", or something like that.

Google has been unhelpful in tracking it down, since I may be misremembering the provenance, and I am almost certainly not remembering the exact phrasing.

I appear to have been one of the odd ones (so what's new?) who had a different fear on 9/11. My fear was that "they" would use it as an excuse to commit things like the USA PATRIOT Act. I really, really, did not like being proved right.

VCarlson #341: The moment my mind calmed down enough to have reactions, that was my first.

Shellacking.

Another common exception: siccing (though sic can also be spelled sick [in that sense] according to Web. 11, so sicking is also acceptable--though I don't like it).

I wear a headset radio during my evening dog walks, so I can listen to NPR or KBOO.

Tonight, I'm going to bring along my MP3 player and listen to an audio book about the history of the first Ponzi scheme.

You know, so I don't have to hear fracking @$$4073 commander in chief shove more bullshit our way.

In my line of work, I deal with computer systems that panic.

Totally lose it, in other words. The Windows equivalent is the Blue Screen of Death. Macs display a sick computer icon.

Systems panic a lot during the early phases of testing a new release.

Some of my co-workers describe a system as panicing due to (circumstance).

That looks SO wrong.

Panicking. Ah, much better.

Stefan, a capital plan! For supplemental reading try the (new, in e-book form!) Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.*

Hmm. Who would be a good candidate to read that for an audio book?

*I've always thought Herb Caen would approve of the name of the guy who concoted the Mississippi land scheme: John Law.

Grr. "concocted."

so I don't have to hear fracking @$$4073 commander in chief shove more bullshit our way.

...not listening. Not listening!

Birthdays: Mine is also April 1st. And as I showed up two weeks early, there are stories about in-labor Mom saying, "No, really," to it's-April-Fools-Day Dad.

Side effects of the 4/1 birthday:
Some kids have a rotten sense of humor. But the sense of humor that you build is fun, if skewed and sometimes dark.
Saying "Wait, it's what? Really? *My birthday* is on April *Fools* Day?" totally straight faced (or really sarcastically) in response to ID-checking people can be fun.
People that know me rarely forget my birthday.(Can't imagine why. It's not like they see me and think of a foo-- oh. Never mind.)

Oddity. My Lj RSS feed just stuttered out Rats, Ship, Sinking to More Republican gay bathroom sex

I say stuttered, because it gave all of them to me as they happened.

Lee 326: I don't actually think it's entirely a coincidence. I think they chose the date because it was six months displaced.

Only in the middle of the night do I actually believe they will bomb something on any date whereon I celebrate my birthday.

Fragano 337: No, and he doesn't have a limp either. But no one ever said Conrad was the only kallikanzaros.

Owlmirror 339: He's small but perfectly formed, doesn't say "feathers or lead?"—yet, and remembers a good deal less about the past than you'd expect. And given his past, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Xopher, I think you should pick a birthday, any day you like, and make it a tradition to blow stuff up. Pumpkins! Cucumbers! Old, nasty computers filled with viruses and dust! The possibilities are endless.

Ooh, I know somethng, just for a change.

Owlmirror (#255), your first story is The Ring of Thoth, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. You can find it at the Gaslight website. Much good to be read there, yes!

Regards
Jo

Eeh, I know something, that is. I'll blame keyboard dyslexia, but we all know what it is, really...

Regards
Jo

This talk about choosing birthdays reminds me of people who tried to time their kid's birth so that it would happen on the first minute of january 1, 2000. Ah, those innocent days...

J MacQueen @ 354... I'll blame keyboard dyslexia

Did you ever the story of the man who sold his soul to Santa?

Thanks, all, for the info about self-publishing my mom's poetry. I gingerly ran the notion past my parents, and they both loved the idea, as did my proper-academic-author brother, so I guess this is an okay way to go for this sort of thing, despite it being kind of against our religion. In fact, Dad wants me to put together a book of his poetry too, and maybe a little pamphlet of my late grandma's magazine articles, and whatever else they dig out of the attic. So now I get to geek out about book design and start making typographic ornaments and lino prints and stuff, while they edit the collection. Whee!

Dan Hoey, I second Terry on OT. I've had it after every surgery and renal failure and it's really helped. A local hospital now calls it "Skills for Living."

Paul A., #282, I have a ratcheting screwdriver, which is a manual screwdriver, so there are indeed different types of manual screwdrivers.

Xopher, #314, that's survivor's guilt. I'm glad the therapy helped. I don't think mine needs therapy, but every now and then I'm overwhelmed by the thought that the three good friends who weren't as sick as I was (and am) have all died.

JESR, #327, my "yankee" screwdriver is a Craftsman and I've had it replaced by them once -- a drill bit broke. It's a big help to me since I'm not very strong any more.

(I tried to post the first two last night and the page kept freezing, so here goes....)

My work life has been too full of drama these past couple weeks. See dragonet2 at LJ if you want details.

The thing I remember most about 9/11 was hoping that people I cared about were okay. I didn't know that I'd know and care about a lot of folks living in NYC and how close some of them came to peril.

Making Light is one of the bright points in my life. Meeting and getting to eat dinner with Patrick and Teresa at Conquest this year reinforced that my choices were right.

Happy belated birthday, Xopher, and many many more.

Marilee: Living with an OT to be; that's not a bad title. It has the advantage of being something the patient can get her mind around.

There is, as I'm sure you know, a lot more to OT than just that.

Maia says I should have had some OT when I got to Walter Reed, and more when I got to Madigan. Mostly I made do, and it was more skills than serious changes in lifestyle that I needed, so I was able to do it by myself.

J MacQueen @#353: Thank you kindly! A shining example of the luminescent power of the phosphorosphere.

That must be the story.

Marilee, it is possible that you are much easier on your tools than I am; my past is littered with broken and bent relics of Craftsmen past, and I once lost a pair of Felco pruners in the compost pile.

Hey!

Self-published poetry!

Re Stefan Jones at 289 and "skills for life:" my husband thanks you with the incisive analysis of Vista; the IT department of which he is part views with trepidation the moment MS will say that Vista is the one, true, and only operating system. Your piece did nothing to reduce the lingering fear, but he laughed anyway.

Serge@356: Have you read Fredric Brown's "The Angelic Angleworm"?

CHip @ 365... I confess not having read that specific story by Fredric Brown. What is it about? An angel with geometry problems?

Someone should write a story about an angel who got a framing sword because the guy in charge of office supplies was hard of hearing.

Ad apropos of tools, I was Very Proud of my little Black & Decker cordless electric screwdriver. Until I got into my 1912 house.

It is no match for aged oak, and whatever is the structural framing for the wall behind the livingroom bookcases (both sides of the fireplace) is even proof against my Makita, I gave up when a drill bit broke in half and shot past my face...(I think it's 1912 oak framing and it has aged in place into rock-hard wood(\).

I got my professional Makita electric drill/screwdriverthe Christmas after we moved in and am still very grateful for it. Because the B&D one just went "Dink" when I tried to screw down a threshold piece in hardwood floor, then ran out of juice. At one screw....

JESR #364: Vista is de debil. I look forward with dread the first time I have to rationalize Vista's malefic behavior to a consulting customer. It used to be that the standard fall back position for gnarled and twisty Windows tech support issues was to reformat and reinstall the operating system. The new standard fall back position, as far as I'm concerned, is to reformat and install Windows XP Service Pack 2.

"The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history" -- Peter Gutmann

Paula Hem Murray... apropos of tools

The wench with the winch wrenched her wrist as she hoisted the boy's buoy.

When I graduated from college, my grandfather gave me a toolbox and some tools-- we'd hinted quite heavily that this would be a good gift idea. The idea, as I saw it, was to get his old tools, the ones he wasn't using, and possibly one of his grandfather's. He looked at his garage, thought, "Okay, that's not happening," and bought me a bunch of new ones.
I do have some old, old wire-stripper looking things, though.
I'm not completely thrilled with the tools, if only because I haven't gotten to know them yet. I bought a new toolbox so I could fit the hacksaw in, and have slowly added bits over the past year. My main tools are a magnetic screwdriver with changeable heads, a hammer, glue, and the Magical Glowing Knife.
When I want to use real tools, I visit friends who are learning woodworking. Routers are wonderful fun.

Diatryma, the best thing I did (after our house was robbed and my late mother-in-law's tools were stolen) was to start going to garage sales and estate sales and buying old, crummy, grease- and sawdust-covered toolboxes; I got a whole millwright's case of grand old files that way. You can get other people's grandfather's tools, that way.

You sort of have to develop a feel for these things, though- sales that advertise tools are usually jammed, and often salted with WilMar and HarborFreight junk.

Paula Helm Murray: Ah, old wood.

My grandmother's house was old (it had been moved to it's present location in 1896, a distance of some eight miles from it's previous location, which my grandfather remembered).

Back in the late fifties my grandfather (just barely keeping a promise to do it before she became a grandfather) was installing indoor plumbing (this was in Cleveland; just off the lake, how the world slowly changed).

Since he was there, she wanted him to replace the linoleum. The floor had buckled some. He (and muy uncle, whose wife was expecting my cousin John, who is nine years my senior) went to plane the ripples.

The plane chipped.

He sharpened the blade, and it chipped again.

The third time it chipped he'd exposed about half an inch of the wood, and could see the grain.

"Mildred, your linoleum's gonna have lumps." He'd been able to see that the wood was hickory, and not less than 70 years old.

So I keep meaning to post this to an open thread, and <hamster>wow, like totally Sept. 11 apropos, dude</hamster>:

I have applied for my citizenship on September seventh, 2004 and passed all checks including the criminal background check and concluded my interview on December 10, 2004. Instead of approving my application, I was told that I needed to wait for my “name check” from the FBI to complete. Before filing suit, I waited for over a year without ever getting an answer from USCIS as to if and when my application will ever be approved, contrary to federal law, which strictly stipulates that the government has to make a final determination within 120 days from the date of the interview. Furthermore, I was approached and harassed by the FBI and was pressured to become an informant. All of the above caused me to resort to legal action.

—Zuhair Mahd, case background summary

A blind Palestinian computer whiz in Denver fought the FBI and Department of Homeland Security without a lawyer - and won. Now his case may help force the FBI to expedite background checks on aspiring citizens.

U.S. District Judge Walker Miller has ordered the FBI to complete a stalled background check within 45 days for Zuhair Mahd, 33, who passed all U.S. citizenship tests in 2004 but still couldn't get sworn in.

—Denver Post, March 29 2007

The government began a last-ditch effort to deny citizenship for a blind Palestinian computer whiz in Colorado who recently won a lawsuit forcing the FBI to complete his long-stalled security background check....

U.S. District Judge Walker Miller in Denver last week ordered the government to prove why Mahd "should not be immediately naturalized." A hearing is set for Aug. 31.

—Denver Post, August 15 2007

A federal judge bristled with what he called "sheer disbelief" at the government's failure to follow his order in the case of a blind Palestinian immigrant stalled in his quest for citizenship....

On March 22, he had ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to complete Mahd's background check within 45 days after Mahd filed a federal lawsuit on his own, his first legal case.

U.S. Attorney Troy Eid notified Miller that the check was done, with results forwarded to immigration officials, yet no documentation has been given to the court.

Today, before Judge Miller, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Weishaupl argued that the judge has no jurisdiction to handle this case.

"I have the jurisdiction to determine whether my order has been followed...," Miller said.

"What you are saying is: 'You have to have a name check.' But then there's nothing to show whether it's been done. I am not satisfied," he said.

—Denver Post, August 31 2007

I did actually attend that hearing, and it was incredible. And by "incredible," I mean, it was a farce. I blogged my reaction at length already. Short story: They went around the mulberry bush something like 15 times: "But where is the documentation that the name check was done?" "There is no documentation, but it has been done." "How do I know that?" "Because a decision could not have been made on Mr. Mahd's citizenship application unless the name check had been done. Besides, you don't have jurisdiction in this." Lather, rinse, repeat. Burden of proof? What burden of proof? We don't carry burden of proof. We outrank the Judiciary. What we say is not to be questioned. I'm not exaggerating. Read the court transcript [PDF].

I can't find them now, but apparently one of the news stories online got a whole bunch of nasty comments along the lines that Zuhair and Judge Miller ought both to be deported. Sort of thing makes me despair for the country. Have to remember that people who comment on newspaper stories are part of a statistically insignificant self-selected group.

Anyway. Thought this sort of thing would be of interest to the ML community, and that more eyes should be on the case since (I think) it says so very much about what the current administration stands for. Zuhair's comment, over lunch after the hearing, was that the denial of his application explicitly cited his actions in bringing a lawsuit against the government as proof that he had not the necessary "attachment to the values and government of the U.S." for citizenship. That they'd deny him citizenship for, essentially, having the temerity to hold the government responsible to rule of law, says a lot about the kind of unquestioning obedience they want to see out of existing citizens. *shudder*

Tomorrow's Sept 14, the deadline for the defense to enter proof of the completed name check (and its actual results) into the record. I'm sure Zuhair will email me the moment he hears what happened with that.

Thanks for listening, y'all. *hugs*

And a belated happy birthday to Xopher. Another turn around the sun completed! Slainte!

Terry, when I was learning to make furniture, I found some gorgeous clear pine 1" X 12" at an architectural salvage store; it had been usd as shelving, lose on its brackets, and was... unflat.

I soaked it, set it under weights on a flat surface, and left it out in the sun.

Later, I told my daughter "don't try to straighten old pine, or change a man's eating habits."

About Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time:

When my wife and I were in Boston for the 2004 Worldcon, we visited a bookstore where I found, among other things, a table of "Banned Books", which included the L'Engle (and The Diary of Anne Frank, too, for that matter). I've never read A Wrinkle in Time (would dearly love to, I have to say), so I have no idea what it is about that book that could lead it to be banned--but I figured if anybody would know why, it would be Fluorospherians. So, any ideas?

Adrian@374

According to a cursory google, _A Wrinkle in Time_ has been challenged because the Happy Medium is an occult figure who uses Witchcraft, and apparently it was also challenged because some dipstick objected to having Jesus included in a list of people who fought darkness and upheld the light (philosophers, scientists, visionaries). Oops, did I say dipstick out loud?

In the realms of... Christ on crutch.

Over at hullaballoo I've found someone who lives up the stereotype of the anti-war type who hates the troops.

She would say she loves the sinner, hates the sin, but since she thinks Xopher is wrong, in spades; I am not only expendable, but the value of it isn't in the end attained, but merely that I, or any other soldier, end up dead, "seen as a positive, in the struggle against the American, imperial terror occupation".

But, she hastens to add, by way of clarification that this is being tactful, and she has no hard feelings.

Well, I sure the fuck do.

Ok, enough whining, but damn she pissed me off.

Re the Extermiknit Particle:

Nice one. It reminded me that I hadn't uploaded ny first Photoshop mashup to my webpage. It contains a Dalek.

Earl Cooley III @368: The new standard fall back position, as far as I'm concerned, is to reformat and install Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Several months ago, I wanted to buy a new XP install CD at CompUSA, and was told that I couldn't; that they were only selling Vista.

I had a friend who bought a second-hand computer, but that computer didn't come with a XP CD, and had apparently been set up by a vendor with a one-time install license. Also, the previous owner couldn't remember the Administrator's password. Doing a fresh install seemed reasonable, but we couldn't go any further with it. It wasn't a pressing concern, so it hasn't been done.

Is it still possible to buy a new XP install disk?

Terry @ 376

I'm sorry you had to deal with that. Take comfort from knowing that she's not at all typical of her biological species, at least the ones I know. She sounds to be about the same mental and emotional age as our old friend Swtjstr. Say, maybe we should get the two of them together for a blind-on-blind date?

Giant lizards from another star have feelings too!

Seriously, that's stupid. One can clearly disagree with the Kaiser's foreign policy, without wishing for the German Army to all die. Luxemburg didn't want Liebknecht dead, just because he was serving at the front. And that's an extreme example, completely ignoring the complexities of Iraq.

But, well, she's a bit of an idiot, and a very extreme outlier. Most people disagree with her.

(Not, I'm sure, that you (or anyone else here), needs that pointed out...)

Xopher: Belated happy birthday, and thank you. I think you've just given me a reason not to stumble over the name of the date. Instead it henceforth shall be Xopher's Birthday.

Possibly we may start a cult and all pretend to be Xopher? No, not feeling sufficiently ambitious. Maybe next year.

Bruce: I know that, which is why I said I was whining. I think it was shocking, not so much what she said (I've had people tell me, in the abstract, as well as in the; decidedly, particular, that they wanted me dead) as the casual way in which she did it.

No hard feelings? What? How am I supposed to take that... you think my death would be a positive thing, and Christlike I'm supposed to accept that.

Or maybe I'm just supposed to accpet the guilt she shoves on me, and allow that being allowed to expiate, in the furtherance of her political agenda is reasonable.

She doesn't understand people if she thinks either of those are going to happen.

And she daft if she thinks I'm not going to jump on her for it.

But thanks for saying so. I shouldn't allow my being upset with her to keep me from saying that (and the same to everyone else who feels in a similar way; like Xopher you need not say it, I'll just take it as read).

Diatryma @ 370: Veering back towards the original thread -- when "wire-stripper" shows up without the hyphen, I think, "Ah! Like unto a wire mother. That could be useful for conditioning. Ish."

I used to work at Radio Shack and sell gender changers. Also known as female-to-female or male-to-male couplers. Your schoolboy joke goes here. One of my genderqueer friends wears one around hir neck and enjoys the reactions when explaining the purpose of this little connector doodad to others.

Rob Rusick #378: Is it still possible to buy a new XP install disk?

Yes, and you'd want to get the full edition and not just the "update" edition. CompUSA has them in stock on their website, and my local store has a few in stock as well, so your mileage may vary from store to store on availability. Amazon.com also has full versions of XP for sale.

Rob Rusick @378: Yes, XP is still available, at least here in the UK, but only if you look around at specialist suppliers. You may have better luck online.

However, if the only issue is resetting the password, there is an easier way: See this article as a starting point.

A question for the Making Light Brains Trust...

Where does the word "padawan" come from?

On the net, it's thoroughly entangled with the Star Wars story, but does it have any origin out of that?

I'm sure I saw the word used in a non Star Wars book series some time between the original trilogy and the sinister arrival of Jar-Jar Binks. But when did it pop up in Star Wars?

Terry Karney #372: (just barely keeping a promise to do it before she became a grandfather).

For some reason, this makes me think that your life was scripted by Joanna Russ.

Dave Bell #386: Padawan is a town in Sarawak (East Malaysia).

In Boston*, Microsystems (the largest computer store in the area) is now advertising "WINDOWS XP!!" systems.

*(okay, really Cambridge)

#382: That one has been posting on Digby for a while. Most ignore her; that's why there may be little apparent response.

Diatryma @ 370... My main tools are a magnetic screwdriver with changeable heads, a hammer...

What? No sonic screwdriver?

"How much have the village elders told you?"

"Only that people have been disappearing."

"It's been about six weeks… The first few who disappeared, people thought it was just the usual… Zombie warriors, giant insects… Hideous extra-dimensional intelligences from Herr Klopman's well…"

"That's the usual around here?"

"The rents are very cheap."

(Not that bizarre a conversation for Agatha Heterodyne, powertool girl extraordinaire, and her friends)
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070912

Terry: It's people like this who convince the ignorant that if you're against the war, it's because you hate America. She's giving aid and comfort to the enemy with every word she writes.

Xopher: I've been away, and I missed your birthday. I'm sorry. Happy birthday, brother.

I don't ask much of my tools, really. I like the changeable screwdriver (now doing its duty as a cat toy-- I have a weird cat) and as long as I have a hammer that is not also a jar candle, I'm pretty much good. The wire-stripper-cutter-thingything might be useful someday, assuming I have wires to cut; I've done it before with a pair of fancy tweezers.

#392 ::: Serge - I consider it a good thing that I recognized the quote before hitting the end of the first line.

For Science!!!!!

xeger @ 395...

For Science!

Oh, and those giant flesh-eating rabbits were pretty scary, eh?

vian@375
Many thanks for the info re A Wrinkle in Time.

#389 Jon

Do you mean MEI/Microcenter? It's in a strip mall in Cambridge on Memorial Drive, overlooking the Charles River, with the border of Cambridge and Boston in the middle of the river, some minutes' walk from MIT and Harvard, and BU on the other side of the river.

================

Meanwhile, on the continuing topic of don't let the schmucks continue getting away with raping the planet and its inhabitants, it occurred to me that Alito, Scalia, and Thomas a lice, and that Kennedy and Roberts have a lot of lousy characteristics, too (they aren't at the level of lice, I regard Scalia and Alito and Thomas as almost completely lacking in redeeming social value. Roberts is far less of a louse than the louse he replaced. Alito, however, again, no redeemng social value, a rightwing theocrat let-no-mercy-season-justice white male bigot replacing a relative centrist woman--that's like replacing an Indira Ghandi with Ayatollah Khomenei....

Do I have some alternate-reality version of Vista on my computer? Because I don't find the occasional extra click to verify some procedure all that odious.

As someone whose geekitude lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from technoware, choosing between staying with Vista, where something freezes up maybe two or three times a month, or going back to Windows and having to reset two or three times a day, is not a difficult choice.

The gist of what I've heard about Vista is that installing it is a royal, major, hemmorhoids-and-lighter-fluid pain. When it comes pre-installed on a new computer (as in my case), it's a lot more likable.

Terry @ 382

However much you are aware of how your friends feel about you, it still does need to be said at least once or twice. Having your humanity denied in such a casual way is a chilling thing for anyone with any sensitivity at all, and sympathetic words are an antidote for the chill.

I think the person who said those things to you must be very lonely, living in a universe containing only herself and her sockpuppets.

Serge # 396

Nah, they were lightweights. How can you be concerned by an adversery that lasts less then 3 pages, and doesn't even get in one good damage-point hit before being disarmed?

On the other hand, the costume that girl is wearing could cause serious charisma loss among female-oriented party members. It has to be measured in square millimeters of coverage, and leads me to ask once again how a girl is expected to keep a decent complexion with all her skin exposed to the elements and hungry magical broadswords like that.

A hundred posts later... (at what speed do we go, Holmes?)

#175 ::: TexAnne: Thanks a lot for both the kind welcome and the info! Technical reasons again where one might suspect a deeper meaning...

#282 ::: Paul A.: Now that seems such a sweet idea! Wow! You pick the drill from your toolbox, put it onto the van (it WAS a van, I hope?), drive it to the place where the hole is to be made - nnggghngngnh-, and, when finished, drive it back to the toolbox again… nnnghgghggnnnnggghngngnh! I'd love that! Might be a great help to keep some order among them tools, too, instead of having to yell or to whistle each- and everytime they are needed. On the other hand, I might get the idea to play "tool export"…

#276 ::: Xopher :
Being in love with someone who's emotionally unavailable is bad.
Being in love with someone who's physically unavailable is worse.

MEN!!! My sympathies as well, no less. Erh... You ARE male, Xopher, are you not? I would not know. With such a statement, you just MUST be! No offence or discrimination intended!

#288 ::: Lee : However, based on personal experience, I'll argue that your second statement holds only if the first statement doesn't apply.

Now that, I would not contest.

Earl, #281: I remember hearing that, too, and a long time ago. But where did I get that from? Is it true, or merely wishful thinking?

Bruce, 399

One of the metrics for level of effort using computers is the number of keypresses. I find Vista utterly obnoxious, for my needs and computer employmeht... just try to get wireless working on a UMPC with it, and try to find out where all the pieces have to be gotten to and settings to set to enable it... the instruction blow dead goats for navigation and getting to the different piece parts, and all the help is Simon Says Do/Try This serial linear crap--and I am not a serial linear sort (INTP, not FSJ and such, who apparently are ferociously serial-linear in nature as regards reactions and cogitation.) I want the instructions and options in front of me while I'm doing them, NOT "here you are at this stop not allowed to look ahead of behind or jump around (me jump around from topic to topic? Never... snort 'When I get to heaven, tie me to a tree, or else I'll start a-roamin' then you'll know where I'll soon be...")

I tend to have scads of windows open (there are 46 open on this machine at the moment) and use up all available display space (got two 1600 X 1200 displays covered). This drives most people bonkers, they can't handle the apparent chaos and confusion level....

But back to Vista, getting derailed by the stupid Do You Really Want to Do This popup is counterproductive in at least five ways:
1. It wastes my time
2. It distracts me and derails my chain of thought, with the computer interrupted what I was doing thought-processing-wise (third party interference when multitasking...)
3. It doesn't work--that is, it becomes automatic to Just Close the Damned Popup whatever the Damned Popup is, without even thinking about it... automatic response, such as driving past the exit you meant to get on because your daily default is mindlessly blowing past that exit because it's not the one you take to e.g. go to work
4. It's annoying to having to keep closing Damned Popup that waste my time and distract me and do nothing really useful--I don't have control over it
5. I don't have control over it to have the notifications that I consider worthwhile/useful show up instead of crap that some jackass who's less competent than I am THINKS that I should be forced to comply with (that he--occasionally she, but usually he) himself probably does NOT have enabled on his or her DEVELOPMENT system.
6. I am supposedly a Power User sort, and get irritated with Simon Says Do Everything the Way I Tell You To... I want an environment from me, stripped of stuff that for ME is irritating and distracting, I want elegance, and maximum display area for MY crap, not some braindead lobotomized flatworm vidiot sort who thinks animated icons and sliding menus and neat wonderful things... me they give migraines to and annoy me immensely. And I resent the display space eaten up for "features" that are pure annoying visual clutter/noise/garbage to me. the FIRST thing I do when setting up a machine is go on a search and destroy mission to try and shut all that crap off, if possible... it's NOT, though, in Vista....

One of my workgroup got a computer (laptop, IIRC) with Vista on it. He couldn't get it to run wireless and secure network at the same time.
He returned it and got a Mac laptop.

I'm glad I got my new computer a couple of weeks before Vista was released.

The Windows firewall appears to be in the way, among other things...

"See your network administrator"
Right, su-u-u-r-r-r-e-e-e....

#401: Must be painful pulling off all that double-stick tape.

(Someone I knew tried that kind of costume in college. Ouch ...)

Paula @#398: Thanks for the correction.

I had noticed a gray market in XP systems developing for a while, but MicroCenter's ad was the first explicit recognition that dealers have realized that some just won't buy Vista.

I run XP in Classic mode, which is generally ice and clean.

I've hit what are essentially public use systems (naive users) which have UK keyboards running with US keyboard drivers. I'm not sure what the system or software localisation is set to; they're seriously locked down.

Last time I installed XP it told me the localisation it was picking up from the previously installed system, and asked me if I wanted to change that.

I've recently been told by an Employment Agency that they only people who they put forward for user support jobs either have experience, or have done user support while at school.

They didn't have computers when I was at school, I've worked on PCs with a soldering iron, I can sport a hard drive with dodgy bearings, and I don't have a single magic piece of paper.

Side thought: I know some of you have done freelance work supporting publishers: what qualifications did you need to get started?

(Yes, I am feeling snarky about some things.)

I have not yet touched Vista. My Windows XP laptop was on its way out (hard drive intermittently failing), and I found a used Macbook Pro at a very good price, so I switched operating systems. I now understand why Mac people act so annoyingly cultish about their OS. Because I really like it. Most of the little annoyances that I didn't even notice in Windows XP are noticeable by their absence on the Mac. And I was never, ever partisan about my operating systems; I figured as long as it worked, I didn't care. But now, it's just so nice....

(My MD/PhD labmate needles me about it constantly. "You've gone completely over to the Mac! There's no PC left in you!" But even he admitted to being impressed with Scrivener, which I am presently employing to write a paper about a system for simultaneous optical recording of voltage and calcium from cardiac tissue, although it's intended more for novelists.)

Jon #407, Dave #408

Microcenter is in arguably in one of the geekiest areas on the planet--within a radius under two miles there are MIT, Harvard, BU's about the same distance (it's got a remote sensing lab section for satellite remote sensing, Northeastern and Wentworth aren't that much further away, and there are all the researchers and electronics engineers and scientists and computer nerds in the general facility at the schools and at the businesses located for proximity.... and they want stuff that works for them, not the masses.

I run XP in classic mode, and most of the machines I work on are in XP in classic mode. Who wants to play games with the OS when trying to get -work- done?!

(Belatedly) I also appreciate those recommendations for Lulu. My Mom has a family history -- ancestors, many of them French-Canadian immigrants to California, who ran a hotel for gold miners and such in a Sierra town that no longer exits -- presently typed and crudely stapled together, but she'd love to have it as a genuine bound book for current family members. When I told her about Lulu, she was quite interested. Now, all I have to do is find their website, and that shouldn't be too difficult.

Dave @#408:

My background's in physics/math, I spent time writing MATLAB code at WPAFB.... now I do user support at a tiny liberal arts college.

The biggest concern they had during my interviews wasn't whether I knew my stuff? But whether I had a thick enough skin to deal with the users.

Ummm... folks, extreme geeks with PC hardware run Linux. As to Vista, Dell (like most manufacturers) tried going Vista-only on new machines, but last spring, they resumed shipping XP on even home systems because Vista was losing them sales, and as of right now, they still are, though not on all models. (I'm pretty sure they're not the large manufacturer that resumed XP shipments, but I'm a bit too rushed to Google around for others).

Microsoft is Not Pleased...

(BTW, this is not an endorsement of Dell; I haven't bought anything from 'em in years, and vaguely recall hearing mutters about their customer support that I'd look into before buying again. Just the first one I thought of...)

Bruce Cohen #401

The most notable thing about the girl to me was that she apparently doesn't possess nipples. The cutout in the center of her costume was definitely exposing some places that shouldn't have been as featureless as they were.

Make that "I'm pretty sure [Dell's] not the *only* large manufacturer that resumed XP shipments." Sigh...

For fans of Hayao Miyazaki, and knitters, may I present: knitted forest creatures.

Terry 376: I assume you mean this jackhole. This is the same person who, later on, says "Scratch a liberal, one invariably finds a fascist." Then in yet another post, "I never made claim to any infallibility, however infallible I may be or appear to be." She also goes on record as opposing "reasoned dialogue," in so many words.

This is not a sane person. This is a person who is in the grip of serious mental illness.

OTOH, I can also be quite unreasonable when people wish my friends (like you) dead. I flame her here.

A J 381: As long as I get to be Xopher Prime, go ahead and start your cult. If not, I'll get my big brother Optimus after you!

Essex 402: I don't understand what you mean. I'm not talking about sexually unavailable; I'm talking about a complete lack of physical presence at any point. That, I think, would matter to anyone of any gender.

"And here, ladies and gentlemen, is Xopher Prime in his prime. Over there, in his villain's gallery is Bizarro Xopher, and Lex Xopher, and..."

Caroline #409:

I do wish you hadn't given a link to Scrivener. I write novel-shaped things, have written a Java application to help me track/change scene order, and totally fell in love with Scrivener just from looking at the page. There's one small problem--my Mac laptop, not used since sometime in 1999, cannot run anything later than 7.5.x. I run XP Classic and am reasonably satisfied with it. Or was until just now, blast it.

Stefan #345:

Would you feel any happier if I pointed out that "panicing" may be read as "pan icing"--IOW, "everything freezes"?

Bill, #412, I suspect they don'r want a script-reading robot, which I reckon is one of the really big factors in making users and staff frustrated with helpdesks.

It's the repetition of "reinstall Outlook Express" and "I don't use Outlook Express" which does no good to either side.

Even sales is, in a very definite way, a search for a solution. Ideally, it's a solution which involves the customer spending money in your store, but any customer who will come back is worth something.

The problem is when management mistake a script for a checklist, and plonk their staff into the uncanny valley of psudo-human robots (or pseudo-robotic humans).

When shopping for laptops, I deliberately did not consider one of the Mac variety.

Not in spite of loving recommendations, but because of them.

I'm taking Bruce Sterling's observation that laptops are like hamsters to heart. There's no sense investing too much in a hamster, given that they don't live all that long.

Or pay so much that you're afraid to carry your hamster with you . . . well, the analogy kind of flops on that point.

#413: Ummm... folks, extreme geeks with PC hardware run Linux.

I am eagerly anticipating Ubuntu Linux's latest release "Gutsy Gibbon" next month. From what I hear (and, please correct me if I'm wrong) it will include graphics card support that will automatically configure one's system, or, at the least, default to a minimum standard, without forcing the non-techie to go through the command line. Once that's there, it's goodbye XP.

joann 419: I see what you mean. Scrivener itself is dead cheap, but I can't afford to buy a Mac right now.

____ 420: I thought "pan icing" was the frosting for pan cakes.

tips on XP vs Vista vs. Mac OSX:
one workaround not discussed yet is running Windows XP inside its own little window on your Macintosh, in a virtual machine. (VMware makes one that has a nifty tool that lets you clone your current computer and run it on a Mac.)

The really handy part of doing this is that the virtual machine is just a file you can do anything to it that you can do to a file. Run multiple versions. Make backups that actually work. Open files in the ancient version of Word that created them, instead of using a (flawed) import filter.

Most importantly, if you really like Windows, you can take it with you intact when you get a new computer. Virtual Machines can run on Windows XP, Vista, OSX, and Linux, so you can choose what operating system you want to be tied to. If you are diligent and organized about backups, you could one day, be able to go back not just to a specific document, but the precise setup of your computer the day you created it.

Caveats:
1. VMs mostly run well only on new multi core processors, and run okay on older hardware, where older == 2003.
2. Changing your current xp or win98 computer into a VM requires some technical expertise.
3. Running a virtual copy of xp on Linux (Ubuntu) is probably the most cost-effective way to go if you want new hardware, but requires the most technical expertise. The alternative trade off is buying a muti core Mac.

#413, there's something called "practicality." Linux is not what Most of the World Is Using for daily work.... I learned my lesson hanging onto being an Amiga user for way too many months, I would have spent a lot less time unemployed had I migrated to Windows instead.

One thing can be forgotten: does that machine/OS run the software you want to use?

There are work arounds. Things are getting better. Intel Macs are very good at running Windows software at need. I'm less tied to Windows/Intel than I was a year ago.

#420, joann,
Would you feel any happier if I pointed out that "panicing" may be read as "pan icing"--IOW, "everything freezes"?

Or everything is covered in buttercream frosting.*

*yum!

Gah. I keep reading that Particle as "Ballad of Modernism."

TexAnne #429:

Here you go.

All of our houses are machines for living,
machines for living, machines for living;
all of our houses are machines for living,
that is the mode of le Corbusier.

We build in hard concrete, it's brutal and simple;
we don't need to use any natural wood;
our buildings rise truest, without a dimple,
we're for good living, and that's the great good.

All of our houses &c.

The 20th century's the age of eruptions
we'll build a new heaven without any pause;
avoiding the tricks, and all the corruptions,
construction must follow by linear laws.

All of our houses &c.

We'll house the hard workers in tall-rising towers;
the metro and buses collect and disperse
the ones who in sanitary, well-lighted bowers,
will be educated and rarely will curse.

All of our houses &c.

Later generations could never demolish,
the towers we have built here of solid concrete;
we've made things correctly, given them polish,
but made them unsuited for soft human feet.

All of our houses &c.

I bought a MacBook as a work computer for telecommuting, once my ancient and crochety Kubuntu laptop reached the point where I wasn't willing to use it anymore. And I really seriously intended to only use my MacBook for work, and the occasional road trip, while I stuck to my nice Windows XP desktop. After all, I didn't really like the Mac OS, I was used to Windows, all my games run on Windows...

I haven't turned on my desktop machine in nearly two months now, and I'm planning on buying an iMac when I finally decide to replace it. I'm currently looking for an old copy of XP to use with Parallels so that I can still play all my Windows games, but if I can't dig an old disk out of storage I'll just buy a new copy of XP. (Like I'd buy Vista? Ha!)

The only part of all this that irritates me is how amazingly smug my husband is about all of this. He's a power Linux user and programmer, who told me years ago what I really wanted was a Mac with a Windows emulator so that I could still play my games. And it turns out he was right all along. If only Macs weren't so darn expensive to upgrade; getting a gaming machine to a decent 4 gigs of RAM costs more than a Mac Mini alone.

R.M.Koske @ 414... That's one of the reasons they are what Kathryn Cramer calls improbable breasts.

OK stupid question, but I honestly haven't looked into this: everybody's listing all sorts of ways you can virtually run Windows on your Mac. Is it possible to do this the other way around? I've got a 3.5 lb Dell laptop I love dearly (just my size, says Goldilocks), and there's not really any more money where the moolah for that one came from, but would like to run the occasional mac program starting, obviously, w/ Scrivener.

Fade Manley @ 431: If only Macs weren't so darn expensive to upgrade; getting a gaming machine to a decent 4 gigs of RAM costs more than a Mac Mini alone.

Only $250 at The Chip Merchant.

Jules @ #385, thanks for that link to the Admin password recovery article. I haven't had the problem, but I've been wondering how I might solve it if I did.

I don't recall the sequence of events when I opened the box and began installing this machine, but it evidently didn't include writing down whatever password it was I used to start. I am occasionally too impatient for my own good.

The Macintosh Way is something that my nightmares rejected as unreasonable (and my nightmares used to be really horrible things, there are horror novels which the Horrible Things were pleasant in comparison... nightmares involving charnel house horrors, lakes of blood and gore, severed limbs... all in vivid color. Ick.). It never occurred to me in nightmares, even, that the user interface models prescribed by Apple, were ways that people would consider reasonable to do things/think. {I wanted the user interface stuff that e.g. Xerox had that was diagrammatic and links entities to one another, showed topological in effects maps of how objects related to one another, and allowed the user to define all sorts of different links and connectivities and grouping, and treated drawings, bitmap images, text documents, and mixed mode documents, all as linkable entities. I wanted hypertext etc., not (ugh) icons that I looked at and had the reaction of "What the fuck is that supposed to me/do?!

(My ancestor fled out of Egypt millennia ago and have been using an alphabet-based written language for at least that long, alphabet yes, icons, yetttccccchhhhhh! I could read at 3, and use words, not icons, as paradigm, and always have as symbolic language.)

What an Apple employee means if he mentions he's being "Sent to Mordor".

(Now I really want to see pictures of the place!)

Fragano, you are my hero.

Here's an interesting article about why the Employee Freedom of Choice Act would be a better cure for our economic ills than draconian policies on illegal immigration. Some of the numbers he quotes made my eyebrows go up -- not in the "I think that's bullshit" way, but in the "If that's really the case, then there's cause for serious concern" way -- but I wouldn't have a clue where to look for confirmation. Can anyone shed some light?

Lee #439, It sounds to me like that legislation does not sufficiently address the needs of America's downtrodden millionaires. For the Greed Is Good Tribe, spaying the Unions is a top-of-the-fold bullet point. The only practical use for such legislation is to provide politicians who cater to the Union vote a hand-wavy thing to point to and say "see, we tried!"

Paula #403: ...all the help is Simon Says Do/Try This serial linear crap--and I am not a serial linear sort (INTP, not FSJ and such, who apparently are ferociously serial-linear in nature as regards reactions and cogitation

Now that's an interesting thought: documentation versions written to cater to various Myers-Briggs Type Indicator categories. heh.

Stefan Jones @ 422

You may have outsmarted yourself. I've been buying Macs since 1991, so when I decided I'd buy a laptop for my primary computer in 2000, I bought a PowerBook. It's still running seven years later, has the latest OS 10.4.10 installed. But it's only a 400 MHz G3 processor and I can't put any more memory in it (replaced the hard disk twice with larger disks).

Now, I took that 'Book everywhere with me, to work, on planes, on a 2 week stay on the beach in Florida*, and I have never had a hardware problem with it except that the keyboard got a little flakey with age (and a tech showed me how to fix that by popping the keys off and fiddling with the mechanism).

I'm keeping it around to make a server out of, now that I've got a brand new MacBook Pro. I'd say that's a pretty good lifetime for a hamster.

* That was actually my son's wedding, and the laptop got a workout as logistical records keeper, photo repository, speech composer, slide presentation projector, etc., etc., both on and off the beach.

R. M. Koske @ 414

Yeah, I noticed that, and thought "Hmm, maybe a misguided attempt to stay PG-13?". But as I said, my immediate thought was that someone who's putting her skin in the way of large, sharp objects really ought to be protecting said skin a little better. Unless she's wearing invisible armor with a very negative armor class, in which case I guess the skin will distract some of her opponents.

But I suppose we'll never be rid of the Warrior Babe image as long there's a new crop of 14-year-old hetero boys every year.

Regarding Windows->MacOSX switching:

There's one significant file gui difference that switchers need to be aware of:

Folder replacement (i.e. dragging a folder from one place to another place where a folder with the same name already exists) has replace semantics and not merge semantics.

In Windows, when you do this kind of operation, the contents of the two folders get merged, with windows popping up a window with every duplicate file and subfolder in the destination folder asking whether you want to overwrite the existing file. Files in the destination folder that don't overlap with the source file are kept in the new, merged destination folder.

In Mac OSX (as of 10.3.9, I'm uncertain if Tiger or Leopard fixes the lack of notification or lack of undelete problem), there is only one query for confirmation for the folder being moved. If you answer yes, the contents in the destination folder are replaced entirely with the contents of the source folder, and any additional files in the destination folder that did not overlap in the source file are gone as far as Finder is concerned. Completely. With no undelete.

The proper way to execute a merge in Finder is to go into the folder, select the contents of the folder, then drag and drop them into the destination folder. Of course, subfolders suffer the same problem as described, so you have to manually do the same to each subfolder if you want to preserve merge semantics in the subfolders.

Fortunately, I figured out this semantic without losing too much data. Just a couple of days of notes when I was trying to merge the contents of my Mac OSX laptop with my Windows desktop using Finder on my laptop. On the other hand, if I use my Windows desktop to move files off my laptop, it still preserves the merge semantics.

This is also not one of the things OSX mentions in their switchers guide (at least the last time I checked), but if you are used to doing folder overwrites as a poor-man's multi-computer sync, as opposed to using some proper syncing or version control software, this semantic change from Windows is something to be aware of.

Speaking of Macs, I just discovered a neat Easter Egg in my MacBook Pro. I bet it's been in OS X for awhile and I just didn't notice. Point the cursor somewhere on the screen with a lot of detail: small text or a photo or something. Hold the Control key down, use the 2 finger scroll technique on the trackpad (which I love; it allows 2-D scrolling, doesn't require me to move my hand someplace else, and is much more reliable than most trackballs or scrollwheels I've used). As you scroll up, the view will zoom in towards the cursor; as you scroll down, it will zoom back out. Max zoom appears to be about 12X; the anti-aliasing is quite good; text which is unreadable at normal size is readable at full zoom.

It's so much more convenient than magnifying glass utilities, and doesn't have to started up; it's always there. Between zoom and Free Ruler, a free app that puts a ruler on the screen, you can do precision measurements in apps that don't support it.

@423: Actually, graphics card setup is already automatic for most supported hardware in Ubuntu (and any other half-decent Linux distro). What's new in Ubuntu Gutsy, IIRC, is a last-ditch fallback mode which gives you some kind of graphical feedback in case you have to manually set parameters to deal with some particularly weird monitor, or some other issue like that. If you're worried, I'd recommend either googling around to see if anyone else has put up a page describing the tweaks needed to make Linux run well on your particular model, or just booting an Ubuntu LiveCD and playing around a while, before installing to the hard drive. (And having someone experienced around for guidance can't hurt --- particularly if you've never installed an OS from distribution media before. Even Windows installs are no damn fun, which is why it almost always comes preinstalled). Most desktop machines these days work fine, particularly with Ubuntu.

(BTW, the things I particularly look for when I'm reading installation reports, in addition to the graphics hardware, are how well the wireless works, and for laptops, suspend to RAM).

@426: To steal a line: Reasonable people adapt to their environment. Unreasonable people persist in adapting their environment to suit themselves. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable people. Extreme geeks are not reasonable people --- though they will occasionally deign to run OpenOffice.

#446: That is exactly what I need, because I have some sort of funky graphics card (a low end NVidia) that won't go into display mode when Ubuntu boots up. I'd like to have the system run along in a default graphics mode long enough for me to get the proper drivers installed. Thanks for the help.

Bruce Cohen @ 443... we'll never be rid of the Warrior Babe image as long there's a new crop of 14-year-old hetero boys

If that is indeed the reason for that lady's appearance and accoutrement(*), to whom were the giant flesh-eating bunnies supposed to appeal?

------

(*) I am certain there are other reasons. I just can't remember what they are right now.

Bruce Cohen #445: I just tried that out, having never heard of it. Unfortunately, in my excitement I forgot that the scroll-ball thing on my mouse is broken and will only scroll up and side to side, not down. I tried everything I could think of to get my display back to normal, but ended up having to shut the computer off. Whoops!

It is cool, though.

TexAnne #438: Thanks. I blush.

I just typed this sentence into a Microsoft Office email composition window:

"I’m working on a doc which will eventually be provided to service."

It flagged the word "which" with the squiggly green underline that means I made a grammar error.

I right clicked.

It suggested I replace "which" with "who."

Which is correct if by "doc" I meant an M.D.

(Slaps forehead, glances at clock.)

Serge @ 448

Giant flesh-eating bunny eating carrots?

ethan @ 266: Yeah, I had the very same item in my Netflix queue and had noticed it dropping to "Very Long Wait" (do they have an "Excruciatingly Long Wait" category?), but hadn't noticed that it had dropped into the "Saved" category until you pointed this out here. I guess that's what they do when the last copy gets lost, stolen, broken, or something. Do they have some kind of triage system to decide whether such things are ever worth buying another copy of or should just stay forever in the unavailable column?

I've had "Clerks: Uncensored: Disc 1" at the top of my queue for ages, and while it sometimes shows "Available Now", it keeps switching to "Very Long Wait" and I never manage to get it. Below it in the queue is "Clerks: Uncensored: Disc 2", but their system seems to be smart enough not to give you the second disc of something when the first disc is ahead of it in the queue and unavailable, so they don't send that either even though it's always shown as "available now". Also, "Star Trek: The Original Series: Vol. 9" is down in "Saved; unknown" even though volumes 1 through 8, and 10 through 40, are all in the queue and available now (but there's other stuff ahead of them so none has been shipped yet).

Stefan Jones, fighting withtoo-helpful WP software above:

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the persistant irritating interruptions and wrong-headed "helpfulness" of WP software is a sign that the people who write the specs find basic composition an onerous task, and cannot imagine anyone writing for fun, fluently, playfully, with no terrible grinding angst and struggle.

The idea that constant correction could spoil the flow is foreign to their experience.

#451 ::: Stefan Jones @#451

It sounds kinda porny with "who," too.

Dan #453: When on Earth is Netflix going to get the season sets of TOS rather than those stupid two-episode "volumes"? Doesn't matter to me, because I bought the season sets, but it's very silly of them.

I e-mailed Netflix asking what the chances are that they'll get Forbidden Planet again, but haven't heard back--I think they've gotten tired of hearing from me because I write them so often to complain about how the "watch it now" feature is inaccessible to Mac users.

ethan: That reminds me, I need to complain about the PC-centrism too.

That ethan...

Netflix "Watch It Now" doesn't work in the Mozilla browsers either, and I refuse to switch to M$IE for them.

Dang. Netflix moved Truly, Madly, Deeply to my Saved list...so I poked around a little and discovered that it seems to be out of print. Waaaaah!

TexAnne... That's a great movie, and with Alan Rickman as the romantic lead, to boot.

After dinner, I switch from figuring out how to make Vista less sticky and cloying to upgrading the Linux box that runs my PVR.

Kind of like going from trying to get work done in a room crowded with nosy and obnoxiously solicitous Care Bears to juggling rusty flatware.

joann@433: I looked into that about a year ago for reasons I'm not going to get into here, and as far as I can tell, the answer is that it's theoretically possible (some people have successfully installed development versions of Mactel OSX inside VMWare running on Linux or Windows machines), but too difficult to be worth the effort from a practical standpoint, and illegal in most places as well (you can't just use an OSX install CD--you need a specific hacked disc image).

ethan... I'll reiterate my offer once more. (Re-reiterate?) If it turns out that I want to watch Forbidden Planet before you've gotten around to it, I'd then ask you to send it back, if that's ok with you. Interested?

Oh, my.
The Particle in Swedish? The first few photos are amazing, and it just went on from there. I must learn Swedish so I can figure out what happened.

I've got a friend who just turned ten (son of a friend, also a friend), and he has recently gotten into Diskworld in a big way. So I've sent him to the diskworld cakes particled here occasionally, and he's getting a lot of fan stuff for his birthday. Now, I've been a loyal SF reader ever since "Dar Tellum: Stranger From a Distant Planet" in second grade, but somehow never managed to go to any conventions. Friends went, told me about them, I read about them here, but never got around to acting on the info.

So I'm hoping some of you can tell me, are there any conventions that would be suitable for a precocious ten year old who likes Terry Pratchett? If it were commuting distance to eastern Massachusetts, he'd be more likely to get an adult to bring him. I know that people here have talked about bringing kids, but you/they are examples of adults who know which ones to go to (with friends who will be there), bringing kids, not newbies bringing newbies. And the point of wanting him to go is so that he found kindred spirits to talk with, not a chance to feel isolated.

For that matter, while I'm wishing, is there a website sort of like ML but for the much-younger set? SF, hobbies, word games and even news but by people whose experiences started in the '90s?

Is the game still running? May I suggest toilet water, bookkeeper, hotel de ville (at least, it confused me for way too long). Zoonoses (but only if you mispronounce it). My son just misunderstood handicap (in racing) as something jockeys wear that is mysteriously helpful to them.

And if there is "universal remote" surely there is "universal joint"

Wow. SciFi's Flash Gordon figured out how to make the Hawkmen stupider. An impressive feat.

That was the dorkiest episode yet. OTOH it also had the most shirtless men. I give it a C+ overall.

joann @ 443 and eliddell @ 463 - (running OS X on non-Apple hardware)
I looked into that about a year ago for reasons I'm not going to get into here, and as far as I can tell, the answer is that it's theoretically possible (some people have successfully installed development versions of Mactel OSX inside VMWare running on Linux or Windows machines), but too difficult to be worth the effort from a practical standpoint, and illegal in most places as well (you can't just use an OSX install CD--you need a specific hacked disc image).

It is almost certainly illegal - Apple's TOS agreement specifically states that OS X is to be run on Apple hardware*. It does, however, work, for certain values of "work" -

They call the varmints Hackintoshes for obvious reasons.

At least some of the reports I've seen say that you need some reasonably mighty hardware Fu to pull this off, even with a haxxored install CD - getting it to run, and getting it to run reliably, or well, is another matter. Getting a truly stable version might well require building a new machine to meet a "best standards" spec - which would sorta defeat the purpose, since for a couple hundred bucks more (at most), you could get an Apple of some flavor anyways.

So, yeah - it can be done. If you're doing it as an experiment in anything other than pure hackerdom, lolz, or desperation, I'm really not sure it's worth it, as eliddell pretty much points out.

*The various questions of how moral/ethical/legal/intelligent/whatever such a restriction is/might be/could be/will be and whether or not it might be moral/ethical/legal/intelligent/whatever to circumvent it (and under what circumstances) have/are/forever will be argued in places that think they/might/do have more of an understanding of the implications, etc. of the question to the point where I'm really not interested in discussing various questions of morality regarding this. Besides, it will only end in tears, because it always does. kthnxbai

JESR, #362, I used mine before I got sick, too, but usually on indoor things.

Terry Karney, #376, maybe she belongs to Westboro Baptist Church.

Bruce Arthur, #399, first of all, Vista is Windows. Just the most recent release. Secondly, I wouldn't be able to use a good subset of my software from small now out-of-business companies on Vista.

R.M. Koske, #414, exactly what I thought.

Dave Bell, #421, I was without DSL for 23 days of the first month (free, so no comp) because Verizon has this lockstep requirement to go through series of techs. The actual guy who fixed it, fixed it in about 12 minutes. Almost all the recordings (which I figured out how to get around) would tell me to reboot the modem and computer. They weren't the problem!

Diatryma @#465: There's a "more info" or "about" link at the top of the page that has an English-text explanation.

I'd get the exact link for you, but then I'd have to go to the picture page again, and I'm still brushing phantom crawlies off of myself from the first time.

Thank you-- I'd looked at the text at the top of the page, but only enough to see 'not English, not Spanish' and then on to the pictures. I wonder what would happen if you put the moths and the Texas gigantic-collaborative-web spiders together?

Rob Rusik @ 378: "Is it still possible to buy a new XP install disk?"

This might be the time to start using "The Great TiVo In The Sky," as our illustrious host put it. I did a quick search and had no trouble finding some torrents of XP. (Personally, I don't mind buying things, but I do hate it when they make me buy it twice.)

Serge @ 391: "What? No sonic screwdriver?"

Pshh. Sonic's for wusses. Laser's where it's at.

*tap tap tap, tap tap tap, tap tap tap, tap tap tap*

I'm drooling over this

Oh dear Ghu-- did anyone else follow the link from the caterpillars' English-language info page to the tent caterpillar wine? (Do not read if consuming, preparing, or even thinking about normal foodstuff.)

Mary Dell @ 471