weekend short takes

[cellio]

Dani and I have been (slowly) working our way through the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD. We may have to pick up the pace; I just noticed that the second season is being released at the end of April. :-) (Of course, we don't have to watch everything immediately, and we will be distracted by West Wing around then...)

Dani moved the SCSI card to my current computer (its third host machine), so I have access to my scanner again. During the software installation I saw pop-up hype along the lines of "take advantage of the full power of Windows 95". I had forgotten that this software is that old. I'm just glad it still works; I gather that a lot of 95/98 code stopped working on 2k.

Win 2k couldn't correctly detect the SCSI drivers on the CD. I had to run the setup program from the CD myself. That was surprising.

This afternoon lyev came by to drop off some "Dragon" magazines (he's cleaning out his house and I expressed interest). We chatted for a while about music, dancing, gaming, and assorted other stuff. He's a neat person; I should spend more time talking with him.

The cable guy also came today to try to figure out why we have selective, sporadic, bad reception. It's a recent problem, since the digital-cable experiment, and it's particularly bad on UPN. Fortunately, I was able to demonstrate the problem to him live on one channel and via videotape on another (different problem). How do you schedule a service call for an intermittent problem? He found the culprit, a bad connector between the house and the pole, and fixed it, so with luck that'll be the end of that.

Recently I've been reading Lapsing into a Comma by Bill Walsh, a language snob with whom I apparently have a lot in common. The book is part style guide, part collection of rants, and some of his rants sound very familiar. :-) We do have some areas of disagreement -- he believes terminal punctuation must go inside close quotes, and he has a problem with "email" -- but it's an entertaining read so far. And his case against "email" (he thinks it should be "e-mail") does make a good point: no other letter-hyphen-word construct in the language has lost its hyphen ("A-frame", "t-shirt", "D-day", "C-section", etc).

Comments

[rectangularcat]

I agree with you. Terminal punctuation goes after quotes or parentheses for that matter. I am quite distressed at how too many people mangle punctuation. I am a little too much fond of ellipses though... (!)

More people need to use colons and semi-colons. I wonder how the current use of dash has come about. I don't remember learning of it in school in the manner apart from hyphenation.

I've also wondered where the hyphen in e-mail disappeared to. Also, where have the periods disappeared to in acronyms?

Isn't it fascinating to see how languages evolve!

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

[We do have some areas of disagreement -- he believes terminal punctuation must go inside close quotes]

My English teachers pounded it in to me this way too. Then I started programming, and that made me start caring a lot more about what /exactly/ was in a quoted phrase rather than "what might have been in the phrase" plus "some sugar", so generally I put final punctuation outside the close-quotes. Unfortunately this has given me a somewhat inconsistant quoting style, when I try to integrate what I was taught to be grammatically correct versus what seems most intuitive or useful given the context.

[jducoeur]

On the Babylon 5 front: I don't know whether this is re-watching, or watching for the first time. If it's the latter, then you should avoid the commentary tracks like the plague. They're a lot of fun, but they're basically wall-to-wall spoilers for upcoming episodes...