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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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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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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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