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weekend short takes
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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).
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).
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What, haven't you heard of the worldwide hypen shortages? Or the global shortage of periods? There are children in Africa who spend all days separating the dots in elipses and cutting :'s in half, but still the industrialized nations use up more than 70% of the world period supply. Soon we'll be forced to use commas for most electronic communication, as the dots in exclamation and question marks will be too valuable to squander on mere E-mail or LJ postings, The effect on smiley faces will also be severe, 8-)
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I guess I shouldn't admit to my days with the student newspaper back in college, when I was sometimes known to correct typos with an X-acto knife. You can too perform surgery on a comma! But now I think of all those lost comma tails, carelessly discarded, when we should have been saving them for the punctuation scavengers in third-world countries. Oh, the horror!
(The "approved" way to correct typos was to re-typeset the line and paste the new one over the old one. But for something as simple as a comma where a period should have been, it was easier to remove the tail than to get the replacement line perfectly straight. At least for me.)
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Wasn't it easier just to correct it in pagemaker and print the page again? ;-)
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<kids-these-days>Now listen up, kids. Back in my day we didn't have this "pagemaker". We didn't have Windows, or Macs, or high-speed internet access. In fact, the internet hadn't been invented yet. We did our typesetting with honest-to-goodness typsetting machines, with the thermal paper and the hot wax for galleys and all that. And we were grateful that we had this technology; kids at the poorer universities had to use mimeographs, bless their souls. Kids these days just don't appreciate the struggles of their elders. Why, we had to code assembly with the raw ones and zeros! And we didn't always get ones!</kids-these-days>
[Cue "When I Was a Boy" by Frank Hayes.]
Hey, just practicing for my mid-life crisis... :-)