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

[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.

[cellio]

I think every English teacher teaches it that way. I think it's part of the employment contract. :-)

I, like you, followed those instructions until I started programming (and, later, writing about programming). When you're writing about programming syntax or error messages or whatever, it is erroneous to muck with the strings. And sometimes you can write around the problem, but not always. I eventually decided that accuracy trumps outdated grammar rules, and not just in technical writing. Every now and then I have to have an argument with an editor, but I am usually successful.

[reasdream.livejournal.com]

for me, it depends on the quote itself. I know that's just crazyness, but if I'm quting a source, then I want to put the punctuation inside, if the source has punctuation. Sometimes, though, if I'm putting a period inside the quotation marks and the actual source continues, I feel as though I'm lying to the reader.

But then, I'm not a programmer. I'm a historian. Well, I hope I'm still one once college is over. And punctuation goes outside the parentheses for me (otherwise the scentence just gets lonely). I guess I feel the same about periods and quotation marks. "hey". vs "hey." The period looks so lonely in the second one.

Of course, you're reading the opinions of a person who, when she was a kid (read: 8) used the chess pieces and board to create stories about peace through better understanding (pawns = royal children) rather than actually play the game. I still stink at chess. *sigh*

[cellio]

If the punctuation is in what I'm quoting (and it's important there, like if I'm describing a string literal), then yes, I've got to find a way to include it. It sounds like we take pretty much the same approach, actually.

I'm no good at chess either, but I never did anything creative with the pieces. :-) Actually, I was a pretty good player for a 7-year-old; the problem is that I'm probably still a pretty good player for a 7-year-old...

[goljerp]

I was a pretty good player for a 7-year-old; the problem is that I'm probably stilla pretty good player for a 7-year-old...

Hey, we should play chess sometime... I'm tired of all the 9-year olds beating me... ;-)