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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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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!
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Especially when the original reason for what was, after all, a hack and not a logical decision have gone away. We aren't much concerned with bits of lead type falling out of the racks any more. Meanwhile, in some circumstances putting the terminal punctuation inside the closing quote when it doesn't otherwise belong there is actively misleading. (And yes, parentheses are just like quotation marks as far as I'm concerned.)
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 remember learning about dashes. My current understanding is that dashes are primarily for "infix" clauses -- you know, the things you sometimes insert into the middle of an otherwise-normal sentence, like this -- but that semicolons should generally be used when you have exactly two related clauses. That said, I have been known to use a dash to offset the second of two clauses when I want a more striking effect; I only do that in casual writing, however.
I've also wondered where the hyphen in e-mail disappeared to. Also, where have the periods disappeared to in acronyms?
Maybe punctuation just wants to be free. :-)
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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.
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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.
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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*
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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...
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Yes, "em" dashes. Unfortunately, we have to use a hack to get em dashes by sticking two en dashes together. Wasn't Unicode supposed to fix this?
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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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Hey, we should play chess sometime... I'm tired of all the 9-year olds beating me... ;-)
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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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HTML numeric——
HTML named——
(You can get honest non-hyphen en dashes similarly.)
I don't remember which of these is most correct when, but FWIW they work in win32 Phoenix 0.5 and IE 6. The numerics even work in Netscape 4.08.
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For some reason, I thought that there wasn't anything in 'normal' html that would work; perhaps because I remember a friend of mine who is more exacting about this than I complaining. Wait 'till I tell him the good news!
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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... :-)
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