The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by joann:

janetl #169:

Beg to differ. My, er, prep lasted over twelve hours. More than enough said.

Leroy #73:

I saw its predecessor tooling along my street in Palo Alto back in the 80s. Is the one you see white?

Caroline #167

Section headings good. Then outline, outline, outline.

Then resolve to get one little point written. And so on.

About structure: Sometimes you'll find that what you're writing is not one straightforward thing. My art history diss ended up being structured like a math proof, getting a lot of preliminary lemmas out of the way before going on to larger things. What's interesting is trying to put it together so that you have the minimum of backtracking and the maximum forward momentum.

Firefox update:

I've had to switch to Chrome. I tried all the suggestions except XP's restore thing (which frankly scares the crud out of me), tried turning off Symantec, and went back to an earlier release (3.5.3). None of these had the slightest effect whatever.

Chrome, OTOH, has no problems, nor has any other program that I run. I give up.

My dissertation trick was the same as my writing trick generally: AICHC, AssInCoffeeHouseChair.

Works for a liberal arts diss; I don't know what you'd have to adjust for something requiring a science lab. (And as for a CS diss, that's always seemed to me to be just like Working.)

Each weekday, head over to coffeehouse around lunchtime. Grab really big latte or iced something, plus something with calories. After consuming calories and reading newspaper as warmup, take printout of previous day's production and edit it for typos and stupidities. Get out yellow pad and start writing. Keep going for a couple of pages or until the coffee runs out, whichever takes longer. If you literally have no more to write about, read a couple of articles and take notes, or read a whole book, ditto. Then do a little bit of outlining or mind-mapping, or draw a flow chart of what you've got. At that point, you can go home. (or grade exams, if it's one of those semesters.)

Next morning, it shouldn't take more than half an hour or so to transcribe what you wrote into the computer. Print it out for the next coffeehouse round.

My all-too-frequent saying to my long-suffering spouse: "it's done when it's done". And eventually it was. I began the process over two years before the diss was due, and didn't vary except during the semester I was teaching two afternoons a week.

It did mean that I had to organize my time somewhat differently, with frequent necessary swings by multiple libraries scheduled to happen in the late morning, along with any teaching-related work at the slide library.

OK, I give up. AKICIML. I'm at my wit's end, what remain of them ...

Firefox (3.5.5) has decided to "work to rule". Just about anything that involves a link or a click is taking serious wall clock time, like up to a minute. It's like the system is so busy committing disk I/O (I can see the little light on *solid*) that it keeps forgetting to look for the mouseover interrupts or something.

This started happening yesterday, when the system came back up after a Windows patch.

I had this problem a few months ago, and fixed it by eating all my browsing history and clearing the cache.

That didn't work this time. Neither has making sure there's only one Firefox running, deleting the session restore file(s) (there weren't any), disabling extensions and a few obvious plugins, and maybe a couple of other things.

I've run a couple of quick virus/malware scans, and nothing turned up. I mean nothing.

I've lost count of how many times I've restarted Firefox or the computer itself.

I can't find anything obvious and different using either Firefox help or google-fu generally.

Anybody got any other thoughts? (Other than saying IE--no bloody way--or Chrome, which is kinesthetically alien to me.)

XP Home, SP3 on a Dell Latitude X1 laptop. It makes no difference whether the laptop is plugged into the large screen, which mouse I'm using, whether I'm using the house wifi or the one at the nearest coffeehouse, yadda yadda.

M'aidez! e grazie mille, to mix my languages for all their worth.

Does anyone else make the old-style fudge recipe because they just can't handle the smell of condensed or evaporated milk during preparation? (It's fine once cooking/assemblage has been done, oddly enough.)

Lee #39:

What are the odds a bunch of them are actually the same people?

4300 words since Oct 30 on my formerly-languishing thing. I keep having to make serious efforts to make my characters keep talking past each other, for otherwise the whole thing could be wrapped up in another 5K or less--not the best idea.

So far I've had to look up the requirements for an American and an Englishman to get married in Italy in 1907, and the history of engagement rings. Next, I'm after Marinetti the Futurist.

Earl #92:

There was the rather well-publicized case a few years back in which Fay Weldon's The Bulgari Connection was the result of seriously well-paid product placement by the jewelers of that name. Eighteen thousand pounds, for at least twelve mentions of Bulgari. I have no idea whether this was in addition to her regular contract.

Using it as a kick-start for a project I'm already about 30K into that's been mostly languishing for the duration of the new-house project (now at its 6-month completion anniversary). I'll be only writing on weekdays, though. (So I started Friday. So sue me.)

Dropped in on the neighborhood kids' carnival in the pocket park in the afternoon; looked like the parents were having as much fun as the kids, with music from the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" going from someone's Ipod, a bouncy castle, face painting, a haunted house, and people on their porches offering up things like SomeMores.

About 8:30 or so it became clear that our two largeish bags of candy were not going to do, so DH nobly contributed a bag of wrapped dark chocolates. The last kids came by around 9:45. We ended up with a very small surplus, but it seemed like I was answering the door every five minutes. I would guesstimate about 75 kids. We'd had no idea what to expect, it being our first year in the new house, but online comments suggest that even people who'd been around last year got blindsided by the demand.

Lots of supermarket costumes, but some older kids did their own; I was particularly enchanted by a coven of teen-age witches (or maybe vampire-slayers, hard for me to tell), and some adults were also in costume, or at least masks, including one tie-on bright yellow pig snout; not too surprising, since this city is very big on Halloween-celebrating.

Our decor was more fall-ish than Halloween. Last weekend we held a housewarming, and then this week my mother came to visit, so no giant Shelobs or carved pumpkins (which I regard as dangerous anyway, after the great Pumpkin Melted Slime Incident of many years ago; a couple of my books have never been the same since).

Janet #59:

Red hair is always a help. I'm also a person people ask for directions, but since "Map Geek" is not a well-known forehead logo, I can't figure out where they get it.

Mostly people don't ask me for help in hardware stores, which is kind of funny, since I misspent several years of my youth working in one.

Where I wish I could turn invisible is bookstores, not that there seem to be as many of them around these days.

I've found that waving my hand in front of their eyes and saying "Excuse me, I have a question for you" generally tends to have *some* sort of results. I've never had to escalate it up to "Excuse me, you $^%TY&( SOB".

Terry #85:

Any hairdressers around, who could give us the benefit of their experience? How often do they sharpen their blades, are they jealous of their scissors, do they buy super-fancy ones, stuff like that?

James #301:

But they are not one-to-one, and onto, as the math people like to put it.

Brooks #3, Jim Macd #6:

I should note that although I have a high tolerance for things jalapeno, when I got a jar of these, I decided they were about two degrees too hot for ordinary use, such as on nachos. (I usually use Mrs. Renfro's; most jalapeno slices are too mushy, but Mrs. R and Vlasic both produce really crisp ones.)

truth is life #298: most branches of Christianity have their own forms of mysticism, ranging from the formal monasticism of the Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox Churches

I hope "formal monasticism" was a mistyping, because monasticism != mysticism, at least in my rather dog-eared book.

Faren #128:

I'm wondering when summer quits, for a cat kept at an almost constant 77 or thereabouts in a ridiculously well-insulated new house. When/how does she decide that it's fall? I think her ear tufts are getting longer, but I may only be imagining it. (Oh, and do you have a hairball problem of occasionally appalling scope? And does it get better/worse in winter?)

Mona the part-Norwegian Forest Fur Factory

For proper effect, I should have included some pictures of giant drifts of creamy-white fur from her ample undercarriage, as they float about the house.

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