25 August 03
Three-Way Tie
The Boston Red Sox concluded a four game sweep of the Seattle Mariners today, making the playoff picture with about 31 games to play very interesting. The Mariners, Red Sox, and Oakland A’s all have identical records (76-55) and are completing for two playoff spots between each other (assuming the Yankees don’t collapse), the AL West division lead and the American League wild-card spot. The A’s are playing well, the Mariners are slumping, and the A’s may be about to claim the AL West lead, after trailing the whole season.
Meanwhile, the Central Division races in both leagues are quite tight. Unlike Aaron Gleeman, who’s quite excited to see a real race in the AL Central, I have basically no interest in what happens in either of these races. I wouldn’t mind seeing the Cubs win the NL Central, but that’s about it.
24 August 03
Baby Steps
My world has been diminutive the last two weeks—the sofa, the bedroom, the bathroom. A big outing involves going outside to sit down and watch the birds and the trains. I have to say I’ve been well spoiled by lots of people, not the least of whom is my new husband (who has managed to throw his back out; it’s like the walking wounded in here).
All this is likely to change tomorrow. I get my sutures out (hooray—they are itching like crazy). If all goes according to plan, I exchange my plaster cast for a Cam walker, and start putting tiny amounts of weight on my left foot, which will increase progressively as the leg gets its strength back. I start seeing the Physical Therapists. And I’m going back to work.
I may not last all day for a while—being on crutches is still exhausting me. It’s going to be strange to leave this little space I’ve confined myself to and interact, as if it were normal, with the world again.
Being taken out of action like this is a really good reminder that lots of people can’t walk—ever. Not properly, not without help. I’ve been given an opportunity to see what that must be like. It will have been only two weeks since I’ve had a real shower! A friend brought over a copy of Frida for me to watch, and I wondered a lot about showers and such things as I was watching it…
23 August 03
In Memoriam Bobby Bonds
Growing up in the Bay Area in the early 1970s, I remember three names in particular from the San Francisco Giants: Mays, McCovey, and Bonds. That would be Bobby Bonds, who died this morning of cancer. Last Wednesday he saw his final baseball game, watching from a luxury suite in Pac Bell Park his son the great slugger Barry play against the Atlanta Braves.
Accounts of today’s Giants game at Pac Bell Park are very moving. After a long silence in tribute, and videos of Bobby’s career and life, the Giants played their heart out, and won 3-2 against the Marlins. And people left the park with smiles, just as Bobby would have wanted.
22 August 03
Cabin Fever
We had no power all day—the thunderstorms Numenius mentioned yesterday continued all night and knocked out a lot of the county. For us, this means no water either, since we’re on a well with an electric pump.
I finished a colored pencil drawing of what I’m spending lots of hours looking at these days from my sofa, inspired by Beth’s recent watercolor and intrigued by the challenge of how to render transparent fabric. It’s moderately what I was looking for. The colors aren’t quite right, but I think the values almost are.
We’ve been enjoying the pleasure of the company of a MacGillivray’s warbler the last two days in the rosebushes and oleander—this is an unusual bird to have in one’s yard! Fall migration is definitely underway here in the Central Valley.
21 August 03
August Storm
We were up at 5 AM this morning, and took a peek outside to look at Mars in the southwest and the third-quarter moon in the southeast. Both were shining intermittently through partial mid-level cloud coverage. There were winds from the south most of the day, and by the afternoon it was overcast. Some thunder, and then a shower, rare for August! This also meant it was time to unplug the computers.
This evening there was another thunderstorm, with lightning to the west and north, looking like it was mostly over the Vaca Mountains. On the radio listening to the Giants game we heard lightning-induced static frequently, sometimes identifiable with particular flashes. There was a little more rain, giving us a total of 0.14” for the day. It’s enough to wash down some of the dust, at least.
20 August 03
Fellow Achilles Sufferer…
In June of this year a piece of mine was published in Faultline. The subject was the competition for the design of the California quarter (twenty-five cent piece) and the invitation by the hapless governor for Californians to vote for their favorite. Tied to the article were cartoons by Keith Knight depicting alternative suggestions for the quarter design.
Well, as many of you know I snapped my Achilles tendon on my wedding day, August 10, a week ago Sunday, and I’m recuperating from surgery—slowly.
Chris Clarke, Faultline’s editor, noticed that Keith had suffered the same injury on August 12. We are all three in shock at the news and Keith and I are comparing stories about narcotic painkillers. Keith wasn’t getting married, he was playing tennis, but he was celebrating his first wedding anniversary. He has a funny strip about this which you can see on salon.com (if you don’t subscribe you’ll be subjected to a million annoying popups; beware).
19 August 03
Tufte On Powerpoint
As long as we are ranting about various pieces of Microsoft Office, it’s time to recommend reading Edward Tufte’s recent essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. As somebody who has lived through far too many Powerpoint presentations, I am appreciative that Tufte has taken on the fundamental cognitive limitations of talks given using Powerpoint (or, to be fair, other but similar presentation software). Such a style has become a clich, and I am thankful whenever somebody eschews slides for notes on a chalkboard. As Tufte points out, you can put far more information on a printed handout than in a set of Powerpoint slides, so why not pass out the handout and actually engage your audience in conversation? My worst Powerpoint peeve is gratuitous use of animation: I will automatically give anybody who uses animated text fade-ins 15 demerits.
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.
17 August 03
Tomato Season
Trucks like the one at right are a common sight these days around Yolo and Solano counties. Not all the tomatoes stay in the bin, and road intersections are dotted with the carcasses of tomatoes that flew off from trucks making the turn. The squished fruits will make for a nasty slick on the road come the first rains. The scent from a tomato field is a slightly evil one: they are, after all, nightshades.
Not every tomato is engineered to survive mechanical harvesting and transport at the bottom of these bins. But this is also the time to find luscious organic tomatoes in the Farmers Market and the co-op. People’s gardens are burgeoning as well: yesterday Fernanda brought us over some delicious cherry tomatoes from hers.
16 August 03
The Transformation of the Logbook
Another post on Weblogs As Place for the Ecotone Wiki...
In June 1997 Numenius and I moved into a 1930s cabin in the hills above Santa Barbara. Neither of us had ever lived anywhere like it and we decided to keep a journal, a logbook, of the house, not unlike a ship’s log (this is when we both started reading Patrick O’Brian which might have had something to do with it). We were left with copious instructions about watering the 40 fruit trees (an inventive mixture of graywater from the outdoor and indoor showers and bucketing plus drip irrigation), so this made some practical as well as romantic sense. It was also the dawn of the biggest El Nio for 100 years, and looking back on the logbook we kept for that time (the year stretched into two), the drawings we made of the passiflora and the Channel Islands we could see from bed, the accounts of the arrival of the hooded orioles to nest in the banana tree, not to mention the account of the landslide that closed Highway 154 for weeks, it was the chronicle of an incredible time. Yet it also made us aware that all time is incredible, even when it’s spent in somewhere less inherently interesting than the Trout Club.
This logbook was emphatically not our journal-which we each still kept, individually, not for public or even each other’s consumption-and while there are some cryptic references (the hooded orioles we named Horace and Sally, for instance, might need some explaining to outside readers), it was a sort of halfway house between journal and weblog. We made entries on alternate days, logging rainfall (plenty in that year of floods) and the activities of the copious local rodents.
We continued with our logbook after we moved to Davis, and we continue it still—it’s hard to shake the habit. The logbook is always a black bound unlined sketchbook (we’re now on our fourth), still recounts the activities, birds, and other notable events of the day as they pertain to the HOUSE.
The weblog has extended this place somewhat, but I feel they are related. While anyone is able and welcome to read our logbooks, nobody ever does, because they are physically bound, literally and figuratively, in our living room. Feathers of Hope extends the space that this shared activity has created and also the scope of our joint writing. The weblog is a place where I can write something-this, for instance-and know that at least fifteen, and probably many more, people than that will read it. One of them lives in Davis; another in Sweden; another few in England; another in Australia. Many are in North America.
I write this with a cast on my left leg, on a laptop (which is conveniently on my lap), looking out the back window to oleander bushes which despite the increasing heat are still miraculously blooming. The space makes it seem as though these fifteen (or more) people are in the room with me. The weblog seems to be an extension of my living room. It is always in need of some tidying, but hey, everyone’s welcome anytime. The kettle’s on the stove. I’d get it for you if I could get up…