18 August 03
Not Just Annoying
Warning: Extended Rant Follows
A story on BBC online this morning highlighted the security risks of using Microsoft Word. Especially in documents that are edited by more than one person, a perceptible trail of who did what is apparent to anyone with the knowledge to go in and look for it. This is the case with the plagiarized document which is embarrassing Tony Blair’s government—the document which supposedly “sexed up” the reasons to go to war with Iraq.
I don’t work in a field that’s very sensitive in this way, and I don’t share Word documents very often. They get sent to me as attachments all the time, so I have to have it on my computer at work. But I almost never write straight into Word any more: a text editor is fine for my needs, and if it needs to be designed, I use Adobe InDesign.
I am sure that hundreds of thousands of hours are wasted each year by hapless office workers trying (and failing) to disable the default automatic formatting features in Word. I share an office with someone who practically bursts into tears wrestling with this horrible software on a regular basis. I offer my copy of the O’Reilly Word 97 Annoyances (now apparently out of print).
Word used to be not too bad when it didn’t try to do everything for executives. (Word Perfect was better, back in the mid-80s, and I’m sure it still is.) It’s just that Word is now so powerful, so bloated, so full of features that most people never use, that it’s simply too cumbersome for ordinary office use, which is where it gets installed by systems administrators following orders from executives.
(You know, the people who love Power Point.)
Then there’s the infantile phallic paper clip helper who seems to be trying to establish a relationship with me. Yes. I know how to type a letter. I even know how to type a memo. There used to be a way of strangling Mr. Clippy by sticking him in a folder named “Dead Actors”; Microsoft has capitulated to demand and made it somewhat simple to turn the feature off.
But why should we have to? Why should we have to buy books to figure out a way simply to do our jobs without having the *?!* software get in our way? Why does Microsoft continue to churn out software that ignores the abilities and needs of most of its users?
And now, like the rest of its products, it turns out that Word is full of security loopholes too. I’m investigating Open Source alternatives to Office. My Mac runs Jaguar; it’s about time I became more familiar with Unix.
13 August 03
Tofu-Cilantro
2 bunches cilantro (fresh green coriander)
2 green peppers
2 jalapeño peppers
12 oz firm tofu
soy sauce
Finely chop cilantro and peppers and stir-fry in a large saucepan or wok. Add cubed tofu and 2 tbsp of soy sauce. Cover and let simmer for 10-15 minutes. Serve over basmati rice.
This is Pica’s favorite dinner which she was quite glad to have after returning home from surgery this afternoon, which went well. The jalapeños today were deliciously picant.
12 August 03
A Different Wedding of Place
We weren’t the only people to get married on Sunday: Yuri Malenchenko married Yekaterina Dmitriyeva by video link—from space. See this report from the BBC.
Photographs from ours are dribbling in and making their way slowly onto our gallery—hope to have a huge chunk of photos to sort through by this weekend.
10 August 03
The Marriage Of The Place Bloggers
What we did today: rose before dawn, heard curlews in the field (Numenius americanus), drove to a hilltop above Winters, had our hair done by Pica’s sister, watched friends and relatives gather, processed down towards a maypole structure to a fiddler’s hornpipe, professed our vows (see left), got enveloped by rose petals and love, and became husband and wife.
After the potluck brunch, the calamité. Pica was dancing a merry jig entitled “The Bride’s Favorite” when a loud snap almost stopped the festivities — Pica suspected her Achilles’ tendon was no longer functioning. No tandem exit for the bride and groom today. A trip to the hospital confirmed her suspicions. We await more news following an MRI tomorrow morning.
We are in good spirits and can’t complain about the number of attentive friends, relatives, and complete strangers!
This was a wedding of place. We invoked the watershed and gave the birders present the task of finding a golden eagle, a totem bird for us. They were successful after the accident! Both Pica and Numenius saw the bird.
We will be uploading photos from the wedding to a gallery here. [note, August 20: many more have been added…]
25 July 03
The Madness Of Crowds
If you should be in a public space such as a train station sometime, and you notice a crowd inexplicably gather, spontaneously burst into applause for no apparent reason, and then disperse, take delight! You may have witnessed a flash mob. (From Slashdot).
24 July 03
Not Ranting About Dentists
I’m not going to rant about dentists, not about how they get you at a pre-pubescent stage and slap braces on you which, for those of us who grew up with un-fluoridated water (or even with it), consigned us to a steady stream of root canals followed by crowns, which despite flossing consultations consigned us to a steady stream of gum problems, which then consigned us to terrifying visits to periodontists, resulting in the loss of said gums and ultimately our teeth on which we’ve already spent thousands and thousands of dollars, which we could have avoided if only they’d given us dentures at age eleven instead of all this trauma. No steaks, granted, but we might have invented the world’s most delectable pap, just think of the wasted culinary opportunities….
Instead, I’ll talk about the rain. It rained this morning, audible rain, rain that made you leap out of bed to go and stand in it and even have fantasies about the green returning. The jackrabbits and magpies were in ecstasy.
19 July 03
Cooking With The Sun
We’ve had lots of fun these past several years with this solar cooking kit from Solar Cookers International. The persistently sunny Sacramento Valley summertime weather is excellent for using solar cookers. Place the food in the black pot, keep the apparatus pointed towards the sun, and several hours later, your meal should be ready! Today’s was beans with red and yellow peppers.
6 July 03
Al of the 71
Butuki of Laughing~Knees had a post today about a homeless man on the subway in Tokyo and an ugly scene of intolerance. I originally wrote the following piece in response to Fred First’s request for stories about town “characters” while I was visiting the East Coast recently. I’m glad to have the chance to post it today, reminded of it by Butuki’s post and by the oft-repeated statistic that most Americans are three paychecks away from homelessness…
When I lived near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I took the 71 bus to Mount Auburn Cemetery in May for an hour or two or warblers before work. At that time in the morning the bus was often practically empty, but usually Al would be riding the bus.
Al knew all the drivers by name and rocked back and forth in a sing-song about how many cans he’d found in the garbage on his last run and how much he’d won on his last scratch ticket, which is where he invested all of his can redemption nickels. He had ample opportunity to buy tickets: early in the morning the drivers all stopped for coffee on Huron Avenue and Al hopped out with them to try his luck every time. He seemed pretty much to break even.
I never knew where Al lived or whether he even had a home—or whether his home was actually the 71 bus. (He had no bags other than those with his cans inside, so that didn’t seem very likely.) When I visited Cambridge last year, I heard the legend that Al’s parents had left him a fortune when they died, along with their house. It’s possible, but it’s also a kind of Cambridge legend.
I saw Al again on the morning of June 23 this year as I waited for the 71 to take me into Harvard Square from Watertown and on to South Station. His hands and jacket were their usual grimy selves but he seemed to move more slowly than before, a hazard when your strategy for crossing Mount Auburn Street is simply to barge out into the traffic.
Al didn’t recognize me-after all, I left the area seven years ago-but he did manage a half-smile back. It occurred to me that he probably faces far more scowls than smiles most places he goes. As age starts to grind him down, I hope he has some guardian angel other than the 71 bus drivers to look out for him…
5 July 03
Historical Maps Online
I’ve been doing a bit of browsing lately for websites that feature online historical map collections, particularly for the United States. A couple of repositories seem prominent. The first is the Perry-Castaeda Map Collection at the University of Texas Library (their historical maps are here, and they also have a list of other historical map websites.) The second site is the American Memory digital archive for the Library of Congress. The page giving their map collections is here. Their Panoramic Map collection is especially interesting, giving bird’s eye views of cities from 1847-1929.
19 June 03
Food, Glorious Food
Staying in a house where two of the other occupants experienced, as I did, English boarding school food (three different schools, identical kitchen) has led to some interesting musings on what the effect of that has been on us: we all agree that we spend more than the average bear on groceries. In my case, I also go to the local co-op several times a week in order to have fresh food all the time, as green as possible, organic mostly, and not inexpensive. Nor do I eat meat.
I can’t help it. When you’re still recovering, decades later, from battered spam and spotted dick (a suet pudding with currants in a long tube shape, served with custard), which you had to gobble quickly, where the kitchen’s response to the oceans of stodge they crammed down the gullets of ravenous teenagers was rhubarb stewed to oblivion, and where the only fresh fruit was orange quarters at half-time in field hockey matches (too bad if you weren’t on the team), you develop a certain aversion to institutional food. The odor of overboiled cabbage that lingered through the wooden hallways until the next installation of overboiled cabbage made going to smell the corpse plant last week an almost nostalgic experience for me.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out on Saturday. Apart from the magic, the only thing that distinguishes the experience of these children from our own boarding school experiences is that the food’s good. So we eagerly await the publication of the book (I’m getting it delivered here and left copious room in my bags for it) in an effort to rework the memories.