Don Quixote

Another In Our Time newsletter, this one on Don Quixote (a book I've tried reading a couple of times and just can't get through):

Well, James Naughtie has put his foot among the pigeons. How do you pronounce Don Quixote? I pronounced it in the English fashion and had there been any objections from the academics who so sturdily spoke about the knight errant this morning, I would have asked them whether any other pronunciation would have made the word 'quixotic' redundant.

For your information, we spoke to Edwin Williamson prior to the programme (who was tremendous in encapsulating the biography of Don Quixote), on the pronunciation of Don Quixote. He pointed out that Don Quixote is an archaic Spanish spelling that has now fallen out of use. The Spanish now spell and pronounce it as 'Don Quijote' ie. don-key-hoe-tee.

However, Don Quixote has always been a highly international piece of literature. The Italians have always pronounced it 'don-key-show-tay'; the French have always pronounced it as 'don-key-sho-ta'; and the English have always traditionally pronounced it as 'don–quix-ot'.

The adoption of the Spanish pronunciation in the English language has only appeared with the wide inclusion of the book onto the undergraduate curriculum in many American Universities over the last 20 to 30 years. The vast majority of English academics still refer to the book in the old English pronunciation 'don-quix-ot' out of habit and in recognition of the book's status as an international classic.

So there we are on that one.

There was much commendation of Cervantes' masterpiece on this morning's programme, but in one of Barry Ife's articles about the book, he included a review by Martin Amis. I think this may entertain you. "In March 1986, Amis reviewed a reprint of Tobias Smollett's translation of Don Quijote for the Atlantic Monthly, and he characteristically took the opportunity to get one or two things off his chest. 'While clearly an impregnable masterpiece,' he wrote, 'Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw – that of outright unreadability.' For long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole) it is 'inhumanly dull'. This epic is epic in length only, he argues; 'it has no pace, no drive...it simply accrues. The question "what happens next?" has no meaning because there is no "next" in Don Quixote's world: there is only "more".

Warming to his task, Amis goes on to describe the first 20 chapters or so as 'squalid, savage and attritional' as the knight, impelled by 'madness and high ambition', and the squire, by 'stupidity and greed', beat up sundry innocent carriers and other passers-by in the pursuit of wrongs to right. Unprovoked except by chivalric paranoia, Don Quixote tries to murder a Biscayan traveller, gets involved in a brawl in an inn, chops up 'about seven' little lambs during an attack on a flock of sheep, and 'continuing on his sociopathic way' assails some defenceless mourners, robs a barber, pummels an itinerant prison guard, and frees a band of convicts. At this point, says Amis, it dawns on the reader that there are still 700 pages to go."

So Don Quixote not only still stirs the blood, but it stirs the mind of writers.

One of the things I most appreciated was the life he had led. Not wholly unlike that of Chaucer. It is something that we may return to – the connection between the life of a writer (and other artists too, I'm sure) and the work. Nowadays we seem to be consumed with the idea of the lone or specialist writer, setting up tower on his or her own from the very beginning. Here with Cervantes we have a man who would probably have described himself, until late in life, as a professional soldier who finally turned to writing to scrape a living.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

Charlemagne and writing

Some of the scholarly chat programs on BBC4 radio have their own newsletters, as most media do nowadays. I enjoy downloading the latest In Our Time program each week and subscribe to host Melvyn Bragg's newsletter, where he adds his own thoughts on that week's topic and provides little scholarly nuggets that didn't make it into the show.

It seems a shame not to share some of them, so here's what his newsletter contained on the Charlemagne program.

Nevertheless, I was fascinated to read about handwriting and classical manuscripts. In her notes made for the programme, Mary Garrison told us that when Charlemagne started, the level of Latin learning was so low that he needed the English and Irish, who were not native speakers of Latin, to help with Latin texts and learning. They were the ones who said “this is how you spell it; this is how you pronounce it”. So there was a huge change in the literary record and the pronunciation. In terms of literacy (the schoolmasterly type) Charlemagne and Alcuin said you must put spaces between the words, you must use neat handwriting, you must spell things correctly. A new form of handwriting was introduced, and a new way of pronouncing Latin, which hastened the split between Latin and the vernacular – some people hate Alcuin for that reason. It was much as if you or I went to France and said any word that ends in ‘er’ where you would pronounce ‘a’ you now have to pronounce ‘ayr’. But this change in pronunciation is a big thing – it has to do with getting it right.

I was delighted to re-encounter Alcuin whom I first met 47 years ago at university and became reacquainted with when I wrote a novel set in the less & less called “Dark Ages”. The power of the few men who worked in Lindisfarne and Jarrow in the time of what could be called the Northumbrian Renaissance – the Lindisfarne Gospels, the works of Bede and then the passing on of learning to Boniface who became an advisor to Charlemagne’s grandfather and then to the great Alcuin himself. Again and again you find that if a cultural force is strong enough, it does not have to be particularly big to have a most tremendous influence. I always think there’s something romantic and even noble about these men, usually Celts, always monks, who took their learning and their Christianity deep into Europe after having developed it on islands around Britain.

This is some more information about Alcuin that I want to put your way. In fact, I think we should come back to him in a year or so and do a full programme on him. Julia Smith told us that Alcuin (735-804) was at the centre of theological debates at Charlemagne’s court about revising and editing new versions of the Bible. Alcuin had a vision that Classical learning composed the pillars that held up the temple of wisdom, it was a means to achieving higher ends. To this extent, he was especially passionate in advocating a return to Classical standards of Latin grammar and did much to train the successive generation of scholars in writing good Latin. Alcuin’s achievement in asserting a correct Latin was an impressive one, given that vast areas of the southern Carolingian empire (the North was German speaking) still spoke a romance Latin and considered themselves perfectly proficient (although of course theirs was a corrupt version). Alcuin succeeded in teaching Latin to these people as a foreign language, a language which many felt that they had been speaking since infancy.

His was not the most original of minds at court, but he had a beautiful skill for condensing complex patristic texts and summarising them in accessible form. He was adept at repackaging the thought of men like Augustine (theologian, 354-430), Jerome (theologian, 347-420), Ambrose (Bishop of Milan, 340-397) and Gregory the Great (Pope who lived 540-604); in mediating between the patristic thought of the late antique period and the less learned readers of his own day. Alcuin wrote digests, rather than commentaries, for it was generally assumed that most members of the church would not want to read the original works or be capable of doing so.

One discussion in the Green Room was what would have happened had Bede had assistance and, as it were, research scholars to work with him. Mary Garrison suggested that his work on tides, for instance, could have been developed to the advancement of science almost a thousand years before Newton! Some claim, but housed on Lindisfarne, he was well-positioned to watch and calculate the tides which sweep across the causeway and swirl dramatically around Holy Island.

Linksalot

Damn Interesting » Tin Foil Hats Proven Ineffective

Shakespearean Insult Generator

Creating Feeds from Feedless Web Pages
My notes from a demo I gave to a local STC SIG

Grand Illustions - Toy Collection - Dragon Illusion
"This little dragon is made out of paper - you simply cut it out and stick it together, and stand it on a table or window ledge. But when you move around, the dragon's head seems to follow you around the room. Have a look at the video, to see what we mean. The effect is really uncanny."

A Unique Gift! Your Own Optical Illusion! - Turn Your Head
"Your profile captured forever in an object of art. "

Fight the Corporate Bull with Bullfighter - Lifehacker
"It will scan your documents for over-utilization use of jargon synergy while at the same time increasing your ROI suggesting alternatives that cut the corporate business BS from your documents:"

PowerSquid roomy power strip - Lifehacker

William Shatner DVD Club
Yet another great offer I'll have to pass up.

Creating Feeds from Feedless Web Pages

Here's my first Backpack page that I created for a SIG meeting today. It describes how to create a feed from feedless web pages. It's a nice all-in-one page.

Backpack is great for presenting this kind of information and I was quite amazed at how quickly I could produce some nice-looking text modules, reorganize them, and so on.

For speed of page creation though, I like my PBWiki a little better.

Advertising and its Discontented

Danny Gregory is running a great series on his site called Advertising and its Discontents. This first story, by Trevor Romain about why he left advertising, packs a wallop. We all want to matter.

Charity Larrison's story probably reflects the experience of most of us: drifting along, still trying to figure it all out.

"A common destination with room for all"

Scott's friend Chrystal has a nicearticle on religious choices.

My family is a perfect example of American religious diversity. Two parents had five daughters and, as of this writing, none share a common religion. We have a Catholic, a goddess-worshipping Wiccan, one three-quarters of the way to Buddhist nunhood (complete with shaved head!), one Mormon, and one Unitarian. The final member attends a Baptist church, but once they formed gay unions, other Baptists quarreled about the church’s designation. So far we have no Muslims or Jews, but the week is young—who knows what the future holds?

Modest Change 3: Exercise

For the past decade or more, I've fumbled around for an exercise program I could stick with. Given my size (6'3" and about 215 lbs, as of this writing), I'll need to be strong and flexible as I get older. Otherwise, the nurses helping me out of my elderly bed will have to be pretty strong or have a pulley and gurney handy.

Exercise clubs have not worked for me. I like yoga but feel I need more resistance and cardio training. I've cobbled together workouts from Joyce Vedral, Body for Life, Men's Health, and many other books and websites.

Two books came my way recently that changed my attitude to exercising and have provided me a very good workoout that energizes but doesn't fatigue.

The first, which I saw at the library, was Five Factor Fitness by Harley Pasternak. It promises a lot and mostly delivers, despite its rather gimmicky "5" theme: a 25-minute daily workout, done 5 days/week, 5 meals a day, and a set of recipes with meals containing only 5 ingredients.

What attracted me was the book's modest size (the recipes take up about half of the book) and the modest time requirements; although he advertises 25 minutes, it's really more like 35, but that's OK, that's doable. I also like the balance in the workouts. He recommends only 2 weight-lifting exercises per workout using dumbells, which are my tool of choice and all I've used the last several years. His routine emphasizes low-intensity lifting, with low weights but more sets and reps. The workout requires at least 5 minutes on the treadmill at the beginning and end of the routine, getting your heart rate up to its optimal workout zone for at least 5 minutes the second time, and an abdominal ("core") exercise, which is also high rep and multiple sets.

What I like about the workout is that the goal is not to push yourself to exhaustion, as seems to be the case with all the other routines that promise a quick 6- or 12-week turnaround. At the end of my previous hour-long workouts, I'd be fatigued and sore and would really have to drag myself to the next workout. By contrast, the 5-Factor workout leaves my arms and legs pleasantly buzzing with energy. When I was doing my workouts in the morning, I felt energized for the rest of the day. My earlier wake-up time has pushed my exercising to the afternoon, but it's short enough that it's done and I'm showered before supper.

But while perusing the Amazon comments for the book, I ran across Cal Dougherty's review (and his other fitness book reviews) where he cites a book called Joe X by Avery Hunnicutt.

Joe X is one of those books that couches its lessons in the form of a novel and dialogue between a mentor and a novice. It's a form I find tedious in the extreme. Although many Amazon reviewers liked the novel, I skimmed through it to get to the nuggets of fitness philosophy I was interested in. (And the good stuff is all recapitulated at the end of the book in an appendix.)

Hunnicutt advocates going light on resistance, paying attention to your body, raise the weight for one exercise only and then only minimally, and look at this as a 30-year or even 40-year fitness plan instead of as a 12-week full-body turnaround.

So, I've adapted aspects of both of these books. I follow the 5 Factor plan because I've learned my body likes to be exercised regularly and the routines offer enough variety and challenge that I haven't tired of it so far. From Joe X, I've taken on the idea of low-resistance weights and keeping my eye on the long haul.

For the past 4 or 5 weeks, I've been using only 5-lb. weights, which I would have laughed at before. I bought 25- and 30-lb weights a few years ago because I felt my chest and back needed more resistance. I don't believe that anymore. It's more important to me now to establish the habit and routine of regular exercise rather than taking my muscles to failure.

The blend of these two approaches is, for me, a modest change in my exercising that's yielded enormous benefit. I feel good physically, my sleep patterns have become more regular, and my moods have evened out--the latter is another reason that regular exercise is good for me, as I tend to be sedentary.

Modest Change 2: Keeping time

I was, for some reason, totally taken by Thomas Limoncelli's book Time Management for System Administrators. (TM4SA, for short).

I read the sample chapter he had online here, and bought the book to see what the rest was about.

I've picked up and put down many a time management system over the years, starting with Day-Timers and finishing most successfully with David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology. Limoncelli's system doesn't quite displace GTD, but he has for the first time really helped me gain some traction on my task management.

I won't detail here what his system is, as the link above describes the main system pretty well. The book is written for someone who's really never used a time management system before and probably can't understand office life or office politics all that well.

I bought an At-a-Glance 2006 Daily Planning diary to implement the scheme and this has worked pretty well so far. I find myself not really noting much in the Notes or To-Dos sections; I have other home and office systems to log those things. But I do note in the planner book what I hope to accomplish each day or night of the week, and when I review my lists of Active Projects, I make sure each one has a next action written down for a specific day. (It was all to easy for tasks to stay on my GTD context lists and never move; by physically writing them down, I'm forced to confront them and make them move.)

One of TM4SA's key recommendations is that you write down what you want to accomplish each day and transfer undone tasks to the next day or some day in the future. This rankles lots of GTD purists and I understand it. On a bad day, you'll have to transfer most everything forward. But on a good day, you'll get most everything done and there's relatively few tasks to move forward.

TM4SA also recommends estimating about how long each task will take. This has really helped me figure out what I can realistically get to in an evening and so not overbook myself with ridiculously fabuloso projects or commitments when really all I have time to do is write my 1000 words and read. I've found that I really can't do all that I want when I have an evening free--instead, I have to prioritize and choose and do. Which is what time and task management is all about.

Modest Change 1: Early to Rise

Earlier this year, Merlin suggested that, instead of resolutions and big efforts, people implement fresh starts and modest changes. Here's the first of three posts about some modest changes I've made that have yielded some good benefits.

I've long known that about 70% of my problems would disappear if I just got up a little earlier. I went through a period last month where I was waking earlier than I wanted. Someone in the office suggested I just come in early like a few others of my officemates do and start logging my time. The very next day, I awoke at about 4 a.m. So I got up and made it into the office by 6:30.

My God, the quiet. I sat and focused on my project and got a good chunk done before lunchtime. And I got another good chunk done before I left for the day. I was quietly shocked at how well this weird new behavior worked.

Because we're cursed to work 9-hour days, I previously was getting in at 9 a.m. and leaving about 6 or 6:30 p.m., thus beating the rush-hour traffic both ways. Now, getting in at 7:30 a.m., there's still some rush-rush on the highways, but there's enough time at the end of the day to do my workout and have an evening of relative leisure, instead of cramming a gallon of stuff into a pint pot.

Accepting this behavior means letting go of treasured descriptions of myself as a night owl, as someone who'd rather stay up late than go to bed early. Well, that's still the case. I still prefer staying up late. But the reality of my working life dictates that early-rising more than repays the effort.

I've been able to stick with this schedule rather easily and will continue to do so. If I need to work late, it's fairly painless to stay another hour or two and log some extra time. And, I should note, I've not been troubled by early rising since sticking to my new schedule.

YouTube - Alan Moore Interview

A kindly someone has posted this BBC Two Alan Moore Interview that was broadcast March 9, 2006. The first few minutes look marvelous. If only YouTube would play the whole thing without dropping out ...

Links: Business card cubes, more tech/less work

Ned Batchelder: How to make business card cubes
Making cubes out of business cards is easy, and will impress your friends!

Wired News: Work More, Do Less With Tech
"Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research."

Links: Clipmarks, screensaver, quantum computing, & personality tests

Clipmarks | What Is Clipmarks?
"Manage the stuff you find on the web
With the Clipmarks toolbar you can clip, tag and save snippets of content from the web, without having to bookmark whole pages. Then sign in to clipmarks.com from any computer to organize your collection."
(the clips stay on the clipmarks server, so you don't have to store them locally. a busy ui, potentially useful)

Download Free Screensaver - Holding Pattern
"Holding Pattern turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view. Each time the screensaver plays a unique sequence."

New Scientist: Quantum computer works best switched off - News

Interactive Johari Window - Mapping Personality Visibility
"The Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up.

and on the flip side...

The Nohari Window - Personality Flaw Map
"The Nohari Window is a challenging inversion of the Johari Window, using antonyms of the original words. By describing your failings from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of perceived and unrecognised weaknesses can be explored."

Wikipedia:Unusual articles

This page has been making the rounds of the blogosphere. I like the made-up Simpsons words and many of the other links.

But one of my favorite entries not listed here is on Florence Foster Jenkins, which features a sound sample of the woman "who became famous for her complete lack of singing ability." If you have the Rhapsody music service, you can hear the entire album of this very painful warbling. (Like rain slurping down a rusty gutter, as I remembering reading somewhere.)

But one of the fun things about traversing Wikipedia and the web is finding that Jenkins' page links to a bigger page on Outsider Music, which links to this fabulous collection of 365 MP3 files of "outsider music."

Best Desktop Pictures Ever

In my humble opinion, of course. These are from Zeldman's old site, courtesy the Wayback Machine.

His new ones are great, too, and are certainly more uniform in size and polished in quality. But that demonic clown and the electric blue trapeze artists just send me.

Addendum
The Beauteous Liz reminded me of another set of desktop pictures that appeals to my sensibilities: the Daze of Our Lives archives of Victorian etchings wallpaper. Note that there are archives for different years and there are varied sizes. My personal favorites are the Fornasetti Girl (2002), the Snowy Trees (2002), the Cowboy Band (2001), and Hand Kisser (2001),

The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters

Perhaps a case of the web answering a question that no one had asked, still, that's a lot of work and one sits on one's ass, impressed to the gills.

My personal goddess is Promethea.

Skinhead Hamlet

Skinhead Hamlet: Shakespeare's play translated into modern English

Our hope was to achieve something like the effect of the New English Bible -- Eds

What do you know now?

This is a page I ran across years ago when Mistress Krista's site was in an earlier stage of development. At the time, I was into lifting weights and trying to find the "right" way to do it. Krista's advice is pragmatic, funny, and no nonsense; she's a great teacher.

Here's how she describes the page of pithy quotes and hard-won experience:

"Recently, the folks on misc.fitness.weights were asked the following question: What do you know now that you wished you'd known five or ten years ago? Here are their responses and ruminations about training and life in general."

I always hated the term "knowledgebase." Semantically, it meant nothing to me. When you have a "wisdombase," I'd say, then come and talk to me. Until then, pages like this (much like The Commonplace Book of earlier centuries) will be the places that capture our personal wisdom and experience for others both to benefit from and laugh at.

Betty Jo's Valentines

Susie Bright has a lovely blog entry on finding a scrapbook of valentines her mother, Betty Jo, received as a child in the late 1920s-early 1930s. It's a poignant story.

Susie has slaved over a hot scanner to create a gallery of these wonderful paper ephemera that hail from a slower, different time, where even the paper goods had quality and charm and sparkle.

Trackback

Great parody of pharmaceutical advertising

MERD | Panexa (Acidachrome Promanganate)

via

Oooh, that hurts

From NY Times' William Grimes review of the book Beyond Coincidence:

The award for the most painful coincidence in recorded history must go to the poet Simon Armitage, who chanced upon a used copy of a book of his poems in a trash bin outside a thrift store. On the title page was the following inscription, in his own handwriting: "To Mum and Dad."

via

Panhandling

Walking along Ninth Street in Durham, or Queen Street in Toronto, or anywhere, we've been approached by vagrants, panhandlers, the lot. They've even knocked on my door and asked for money to help them pay their rent.

I'm conflicted. I know I'm a soft touch, and my heart goes out to people who, through bad luck or bad choices, ended up in a place they never expected. There but for the grace of God, etc. Yet, I know I've been taken advantage of more than once by people exploiting my generosity and it galls me.

Searching the web yields a few approaches. At Christmastime, Jeanette Winterson puts a few fivers in her pocket and has them at the ready:

I also have the £5 principle in the month of December. If anyone on the street asks me for money - they get one of the endless fivers stuffed about my person. We are told not to give to beggars - stupid advice - we should always give if someone asks us. Street donations don't solve the problem - we need to support homeless charities - but I think it is wrong to walk past a person who has nothing. We could all be that person.

So give what you can, according to your means, however small.

A typically strong Winterson opinion, unequivocal. I like it.

On Ninth Street, the merchants advise not to give money to individuals and instead to make a donation to the Durham Rescue Mission or other similar organization. The Regulator Bookshop, in its online email newsletter, recently offered a write-in contest for "true stories of especially considerate or especially rude behavior that they had encountered, sparked by the publication of Lynne Truss's new book, Talk to the Hand: The Utter, Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door."

The runner-up was this piece, by Bobbie Collins-Perry (and the prompt for this blog posting):

After dark. A man approaches me in a parking lot. He asks me for a dollar for the city bus. Normally, I don't give money to strangers, remembering the counsel I've been given that panhandlers will just spend the money on drugs or alcohol and the cautions about opening myself up to crime. I call out, "I'm not sure I have any change." "You're going to see if you have the change?" He approaches closer. I've got myself in it now, and I'm feeling uncomfortable and pressured. I begin to run through scenarios and questions. Is he homeless? Or is he just having a bad day? Well, he doesn't look like a typical street person, and I'm close enough to the side door of the restaurant to feel more secure. I fish for my wallet and come up with a dollar bill-this will at least get me out of the situation. I hand it to him. He thanks me and says I'm very kind. I hurry my hands to get the wallet back in my purse and turn towards the entrance.

"Wow, pretty too. You married?" An affront has transformed into an intrusion, and I have allowed this rudeness by not being indifferent to him. "Very," I replied and beat a hasty retreat. I berate myself--he was just a freeloader. And he thinks I'm willing to give him much more than money. I know better, and vow to never let a vagrant take advantage of me again. Yet, I'm still conflicted-feeling disrespected, but still wondering how I can help.

Okay, give to a homeless shelter. I've done this before, but it's in the past; it doesn't help alleviate the feelings of immediacy each time I'm approached on the street. Ruminating while I drive, knowing full well I have a dollar to spare and a vehicle to transport me home, I come up with a solution: "I'll start a jar-each time I am panhandled, I'll politely say "no," and put money in it." I'll feel good about not supporting substance abuse, not being violated, and being able to respond right away. I should be able to make a healthy contribution and help people who want to be helped on my terms in the light of day.

Another good, sensible tack.

What are the economics of begging? Robert Klein has a funny routine on one of his albums about a panhandler whose heart-rending screams of PLEEEEASE!!! in downtown Manhattan bring in contributions. Klein follows the beggar at the end of the day to a side street, where the beggar puts his stuff into the trunk of a shiny Cadillac. Klein said he yelled to the guy, "Hey, PLEASE!" And there's a Sherlock Holmes story, "The Man with the Twisted Lip," about a middle-class man who finds begging more lucrative than being a reporter (I can verify that fact).

Marginal Revolution, a libertarian economics blog that more than occasionally drives me up the wall and across the ceiling, usually provides intellectual cud for me to chew on or spit out. In this post, Tyler Cowen directly confronts the economic situation of all the beggars he sees in Calcutta. Using his typically cool-blooded economic reasoning, he concludes that giving to beggars who ask for money encourages more beggars to enter the market, thus increasing the number of beggars and more aggressive behavior from the beggars because their actions are rewarded with money. Better, he says, to give money to the poor person who is not begging and so is expecting it least.

In the comments to Cowen's posting was this reference to a Tom Stoppard quote from his play "Indian Ink." Stoppard blends economics with self-satisfaction:

Dilip: You have to understand that begging is a profession. Like dentistry. Like shining shoes. It’s a service. Every so often, you need to get a tooth filled, or your shoes shined, or to give alms. So when a beggar presents himself to you, you have to ask yourself-- do I need a beggar today? If you do, give him alms. If you don’t, don’t."

So, where does this leave me? I already make regular donations to the Durham Rescue Mission. If, on a particular day, I'm feeling generous, I'll make sure I have some singles folded up in my pocket. How much harm can a person do with $1? But I won't give anything to the beggar who gets in my face.

Get Fuzzy books: A Reading Guide

This Amazon reading guide is essential for the Get Fuzzy fan. It helpfully notes that

Get Fuzzy books are divided into "collections" and "treasuries". There are two collections in each treasury.

Nice to refer to when building one's Christmas list.

Yet a further reason to join the ACLU

This has convinced me it's time to join the ACLU. The security paranoia has to stop.

via

Update 2005-01-06

Some good news, according to the papersplease.org site:
Not only will Deborah Davis not be prosecuted on charges related to her refusal to show ID on a public bus, but she is now able to travel on the route 100 RTD bus without showing her 'papers.'

Deb's lawyer, ACLU volunteer attorney Gail Johnson, was informed shortly before noon on December 7th by the office of the US attorney in Denver of their decision not to prosecute.

Score one for the good guys and against the security state.

Back in the Nanowrimo game

Well, sort of. I wrote earlier about retiring from the field when I found the story I was working on uncongenial. But I couldn't get some of the images out of my mind, and I had certain key moments in the long life of the main character appear in front of me as I went about my other chores.

I had also promised myself the New Yorker DVD set if I successfully completed nanowrimo. While I always intended to buy the set anyway, I can't forget that carrot I dangled in front of myself. I felt I needed to put in at least a good-faith effort in order to justify buying the DVDs.

So I went back to my file and basically started the story over again for at least the third time. It's interesting to me how the story started as a sprawling, dozens-of-characters murder mystery, to a more constrained, cozier setting, starting with two characters but in the last few writing sessions, settling on the main character, a 96-year-old woman on her deathbed remembering key events of her life.

I don't believe I'll make the 50K word count by Nov. 30, though. I'm at about 23,700 right now and can't do much more than 2000 words in a sitting. The week I took off left me way behind, and I went to bed early last night. So I'd need to push out about 3000+ words a day to make the goal. Hm. Well, maybe if I intersperse writing sessions with leaf-raking on my days off Friday and Saturday, maybe I'll get up to the mid-30s by the 28th.

My Nanowrimo profile page: http://www.nanowrimo.org/userinfo.php?uid=62444

I hate when that happens

Just got a call from a job recruiter for a position that has my name all over it, at the last place I worked as a contractor. It's only an 18-month contract, but it would be more money, fewer hours, and closer to home than the full-time job I have now. God, but it's knotted my gut.

New PC: First Steps

First, clean off the old PC and prep it for its new owner. I'm giving it to my friend Scott, which makes me de facto tech support. Therefore, I want to include some tools and tricks that may make recovery and troubleshooting easier.

Also, there are a few interesting little bits of software and other techniques that I've been wanting to try. No better time like now, when I won't damage anything--I'm reformatting the hard drive and re-installing the OS. So there's nothing to lose. I probably take more time than I should getting things ready, but it's a good learning investment.

LESSON LEARNED: In retrospect, I should have also used a special data-wiping program to overwrite any old data on the disk before going through with the formatting or even after the formatting.

Buy and install UPS replacement battery
I finally bought the replacement backup battery for the APC BackUPS 280 unit and installed it. The battery type I want to search on in Froogle is RBC10, and replacement batteries average about $28. The install instructions are in the "APC" folder in the filing cabinet.

I'd noticed the replace-battery light buzzing red for weeks but shrugged it off. Then we had a brownout. The computer and router--everything--cut out immediately. No time to save any files for a graceful shutdown. After the power came back on, we noticed the network acting flakey--file and printer sharing, which had worked flawlessly before, didn't work at all now. I kicked myself for not replacing the battery sooner.

LESSON LEARNED: For the lack of a battery, a network was lost...

Buy an external USB hard disk and USB hub
I finally bought an external USB hard disk, a 160GB Seagate. I installed and then uninstalled the backup software, BounceBack; it was too insistent on its own settings and intrusive in other ways. Instead, I just copied all the files from C: to E: and listened to it chatter away. I'd been debating with myself to buy an external disk because I knew I'd also need to buy a USB hub, and I've been putting off spending money for most of the last year. Well, it was time to spend. Let's do this right.

Circuit City had a neat USB hub that offered two easy-access ports on the top of the device, making it convenient to plug in a flash drive or my Digisette on the fly. (The Digisette required Windows to register a new driver, though the driver already existed on the hard drive.) Plus, the hub is stackable in case you need to add more. Into the hub I plugged the printer, my Clie stand, and the Seagate. Plus, the new PC will have USB 2.0, whereas the old PC had USB 1.1, so I'm looking forward to faster transfers.

For backing up files, I use Karen's Replicator, a very nice free tool that lets you set up and schedule individual file-replication jobs. I just set Replicator to update any changed file on the disk to the external drive. Simplicity itself and it never ran for long. Every couple of days, I ran the job to make sure all my latest files were up there. I don't really bother with incremental backups or any of that. Just copy them all. I don't have synchronization turned on, so files I delete on C: will remain in place on the external drive. That's fine.

LESSON LEARNED: No lesson, just putting the pieces in place that will support good habits.

Sure you've backed up all the files you'll need later?
Big lesson learned: scan the help files of the programs you use regularly; heck, just go down each program in the Program Files folder. Is it one you use often? How often? Often enough that you'll want to use the data later? Is it as easy as copying the files over to the new PC?

In most cases, yes, it is. AI Roboform, for example, lets you import its data files with no problem. Firefox lets you import all of your bookmarks from another location. The Audible.com Manager program doesn't export categories you create. It's easy enough to copy the files over from the external drive later, but I'll have to spend an hour or so re-categorizing every bloody file.

Quicken 2003 was also a bugger. I should have read the help and exported the data files to a QIF that I could import into a new install later. I didn't, and there seems to be no way to get all those years of data into the new install. Yeesh. I'll talk about this in a later post. It may be a blessing in disguise.

Create a fresh XP install disk
The HP Pavilion came with a set of Windows ME recovery discs. Great. However, at the HP web site I read that once you upgrade the PC to XP, the recovery discs don't work no more. Great.

At this point, I remember Fred Langa and others talking about creating your own XP recovery disks by taking the original XP disc, slipstreaming the Service Pack 2 release into it, and then burning a new XP install CD that has all the up-to-date security patches. Fred's article focused on a snazzy new flavor, called Bart's PE disk.

I thought it would be good for Scott to have this just in case, and it would be a good exercise for me.
Here's the Langa article, but you can also find lots of links via Google or del.icio.us.

Of course, nothing works that easy. All told, I burned away most of a Saturday trying to create Bart's PE disk. What helped was using Autostreamer and reading up on the Bart's PE disk forums; the final disk I wound up creating was by Autostreamer, which worked like a dream. Bart's PE is a good idea but I'll have to revisit it later; I see its value, but its value to me is low right now.

I notated all this fruitless activity, what helped and what didn't, in the big-ass text file I maintain in Notetab Pro.

On Sunday, I reformatted the disk and installed XP with SP2 on the disk. Since I'm on DSL (Scott's still on dial-up), I also downloaded and installed the post-SP2 security patches. I also installed AVF anti-virus software.

Partitioning and imaging
I've been infected by Fred Langa's repeated writings of his backup method. First, partition your disk by the type of files that need to be backed up; there's usually only a small set of files that really need to be backed up regularly. Other types of files only need to be backed up occasionally.

So, he recommends a small partition for the Windows system files that also holds My Documents; these files are the ones you want to replace in a hurry. Then divvy up the drive as you see fit.

Regularly image the C:\ drive, but back up the partitions as often as you think necessary. Now, if you have a system crash, you can use the imaging software to restore the last good working configuration of your system and your files. It shouldn't take long to recover from something disastrous.

Fred recommended BootItNG (BING) as an all-in-one partitioning and imaging. I downloaded it, wrestled with the cold and rather geeky interface over several evenings, setting small goals to be achieved each night. But in the end, it worked great the first time. I partitioned the disk on the fly so that C: was about 8GB, and the rest of the drive remained open. I thought it was best to keep it simple.

If only BING had worked so smoothly for me on the new PC. But that will come in a later post.

Buy those neat power-strip liberator plugs
For myself, I also bought these neat plug extensions that let me use every outlet on my UPS.

Don't throw out those old CDs
I want to find a way to recycle all my old CDs I burned or CDs of old programs I don't want to keep around anymore. There's Greendisk, but I discovered our local hazardous waste recycling facility, in addition to handling batteries (like old dead UPS batteries), monitors, and old PCs, also advertises itself as taking CDs. So I put all the old CDs I didn't need anymore on a spindle and will take them the next time we do a recycling run.

Blog diet

Up till the middle of last week, I had about 80 blogs on my Bloglines list. Many of them were divided up into Monday, Tuesday, etc. categories, as they didn't update often but I didn't want to miss them. So I'd be able to check them at least once a week.

But I found myself obsessing over checking them like I obsess over checking my email. I feel it was severely impairing my workday, my time at home, and, really, who needs that much information every day? Every week? So I pruned them down to the core, about 8 blogs that I really don't want to miss, and they're all pretty reasonable with updates: maybe once a day, some 2-3 times/day, but quickly read and digested. When I now obsessively click onto Bloglines, I see a mostly empty page. I feel a slight disappointment, then see it as a reminder that it's time to move on to better things, and close down the window wth a self-satisfied air.

This rather strict rationing came about from my periodic reading of this Jeanette Winterson column, where she rails about people consuming more than they process, and what that excess leads to: fat, restlessness, malaise. (Note that the quote is sandwiched between the positive benefits of sex, so it may not be a work-friendly link.) Blogs certainly deliver excess. It's fun, I enjoy it, but I wind up being a consumer, not a creator.

The other was reading an article about an entrepreneur who favors physical solutions over mental solutions, as a way to guide the behaviors he wants to encourage in himself. (Like, absolutely no work on the weekends or talk about work after hours, punching the clock, etc.) I exported my blog list to an XML file that I can re-import into Bloglines later, if I want. And then I deleted most every folder there and settled on my core blogs (like Catarina.net, 43 Folders, and The Comics Curmudgeon). A physical solution to the problem. The kid-in-the-candy-store is crying because the misses the candy, but the adult who's watching his weight is rather glad that the shop has closed.

Retiring from the Nanowrimo field

I was looking forward to it this year, but hit the sand early and never recovered. I started out as I had done last year, with an image, a situation, and then started to run with it. But the material didn't form under my fingers as naturally as last year. I finally switched from a male, first-person narrator to a female, third-person narrator, and that helped a bit. I got several days of writing out of that.

I also adopted the Jeanette Winterson/Diana Gabaldon method of composing scenes out of sequence, thinking that if I could get the juicy scenes out first, then that would give my mind time to generate the connective tissue.

Well, it's a good idea, and I should try it sometime. But tonight I sat at the keyboard and the ideas just didn't come. I think the past that one of the main characters, a 96-year-old rural woman, on her deathbed, has lots of sadness and compromise in store for her, and I plain don't want to go there. I don't want to put her through it. There's also the niggling feeling that I've read this kind of story before, that I'm just going through the plotting motions, and the sense of discovery I had last year isn't there.

There have been pleasant surprises along the way, and I've rediscovered the truth that 50% of the material I generate will come out of the writing and I don't need to do much in the way of planning. I did hit on some interesting connections in some of my daily writing, and some haunting (I think) images that I will want to come back to.

But as for making the 50,000-word count by Nov. 30 -- nope. I'm bowing out. Nanowrimo should be fun, for me, and I don't need the extra pressure of generating plot and words for a story that I am resisting. I reserve the right to continue to play with the story through the rest of the month (and beyond), however, and may break through whatever I'm resisting. But not today.

The Revenge of the Novelist

From the NY Times obit of John Fowles.

As much as it frustrated some of his readers, Mr. Fowles always believed he had done the right thing by leaving the endings of his most celebrated novels open-ended. But he was not above bending his own rules when the occasion called for it.

He once told an interviewer that he had received a sweet letter from a cancer patient in New York who wanted very much to believe that Nicholas, the protagonist of "The Magus," was reunited with his girlfriend at the end of the book - a point Mr. Fowles had deliberately left ambiguous. "Yes, of course they were," Mr. Fowles replied.

By chance, he had received a letter the same day from an irate reader taking issue with the ending of "The Magus." "Why can't you say what you mean, and for God's sake, what happened in the end?" the reader asked. Mr. Fowles said he found the letter "horrid" but had the last laugh, supplying an alternative ending to punish the correspondent: "They never saw each other again."

"Due to..."

From Melvyn Bragg's latest In Our Time newsletter:

Monica Grady's other mission seems to be to stop her students saying "due to" when they ought to say "owing to" or "because of". She pointed out that in the case of libraries, babies and rent you can use "due to", everything else is "owing to" or "because of".

NaNoWriMo: The Adventure Begins

Yes, I'm one of the hairpins doing the NaNoWriMo challenge, though I will only use lowercase letters from here on out because those intercapitalizations drive me nuts.

Last year, I signed up on October 31st, just for a lark. I wasn't working, nothing was going on, and I thought it would help me pass the time. I emailed my friend Sue in California, also a writer, and said this looked like fun, I may try out. Well, she signed up too. I got the No Plot, No Problem book, read through it, and plucked out a situation I'd written down in my notebook years ago but had never done anything with. I didn't know where it might go, but thought I'd give it a try.

It had a magical, fantasy type atmosphere, and I read a couple of Lon Milo DuQuette's books that helped feed my imagination during the process.

I wound up creating enough situations and piling up enough detail that I eventually "won" with about 51,000 words. Sue actually crossed the finish line first and called to tell me. This inspired me to sit down, finish mine, and upload it to the site (which I did before her). We were both abuzz for the rest of the year, comparing notes on the experience, and patting each other (and ourselves) on the book for taking on a crazy project (crazier in her case, as she's a freelancer and mother of two little firls) and actually succeeding at it.

The lessons I learned and things I noticed:

• I'd been rather glum and mopey for most of the year, with good reason. I didn't feel that way during Nanowrimo month. (Sue noticed the same thing.)


• I started out with only a situation--no plot, no characters, no themes. As I wrote, plots, characters, and themes emerged.


• When I had a strong situation, the scene almost wrote itself.


• When I could see the images in my head very strongly, the scene worked out pretty well.


• When I had nothing, it was work to squeeze out the word quota.

This year, I also pulled a situation out of my notebook, what I had long thought of as a murder-mystery idea, even though I have no idea how to write a mystery story. The situation stands on its own as very melodramatic and maybe ludicrous, but it's stayed with me for some reason, so I'm using it as my prompt to get the story started.

As it happens, tonight's writing went OK (but I found myself checking the word count every 5 minutes towards the end--was it this hard last year?). I'm already finding that it's going to contain lots of personal history and thoughts about my family, and the place of the outsider in the family. I didn't actually get to the prompt scene. I started the novel after the funeral service; the narrator will be flashbacking to the prompt scene, and I'll see then how plausible it feels.

But even if it doesn't, who cares. It's Nanowrimo month! I have license to be creative! I can splat things down just to see what happens! I don't have to go back and edit or delete! God Bless Us Every One!!

Online holiday games to play

For those of us who just don't get out enough into the real world...

Note that some of these require Shockwave or other plugins to work, and probably a fast connection as well.

• Carve a pumpkin -- Be sure you wait to see it light up


• Shoot zombies--my personal favorite


• Scarecrows and ravens (not a terribly easy game to understand, but atmospheric)


• Turkey Shoot

Links courtesy of News from ME and Lifehacker (more links to other games included in the comments to the Lifehacker post)

10+ year old files

During the New PC Blues upgrade process, I ran across a 5.25" floppy disk Liz had used to store files related to a musicology paper she wrote back in 1989 -- well before I came on the scene.

Why we hadn't done anything with this diskette before, I don't know. But what to do with it now? Our last two PCs had only 3.5" drives, and the current one has no floppy drives at all. Who needs the things, with USB flash drives?

Unfortunately, Liz didn't have any other copies of this paper and wanted to keep them. What to do?

Few friends or co-workers had a 5.25" drive, even in a closet, let alone installed in a working system. Fortunately, Michelle's boyfriend was visiting his father in Fayetteville who, amazingly enough, had a 5.25" drive on one of his computers. Michelle assured me that 5.25" diskettes were tougher than the 3.5" disks and that the files were probably still readable.

Her boyfriend copied off the files, zipped them, and emailed them to me. Easy as pie.

Next: Let's try opening them in Word, surely there's a converter ... Ah, but no. Most of the text comes in, but the formatting codes interfere with too much of it to make the file easily readable. Then Liz remembered that maybe it was Wordstar for DOS instead of WordPerfect that she'd used for the paper.

I fiddled with downloading Word 2000 converters but instead invoked the Google oracle. Up popped several Wordstar sites, including several utilities to convert old WS files. The one I picked converts Wordstar files to formatted HTML. It runs from a DOS window and uses the command-line to specify the source and destination filenames.

Voila -- it worked. The HTML files come up with the original formatting preserved and all the text in place. The text can now be easily copied into Word files or wherever they will sit for the next 10+ years.

Storing Nuggets of Information

Over at the PigPog site, Michael muses on how to store and retrieve nuggets of information, particularly as it relates to non-fiction writing. I respond in the comments with two tediously long missives that constitute a skimming-off of the shmarty-cream afloat in my brain. (Sorry, been reading too much of the Wikipedia entry on Simpsons neologisms.)

RSS Feeds - one day at a time

This item from Merlin's 43Folders blog knocked me for a loop and I took a few examples from the Probations idea and from others in the comments to adjust how my Bloglines feeds are displayed.

* First, I always have the option checked that only updated feeds be displayed. When I began editing my list, I was shocked at how many feeds I've subscribed to that haven't updated in months. Out they went. Others went into the probation folder.

* I like sorting my blog folders in alphabetical order. It's natural yet arbitrary. Sue me. So, I have "z_Probation" to hold the feeds I'm on the fence about.

* I also had subject-level folder categories, the largest being "Blogs," which usually always had something for me to look at and/or clear out. So that needed trimming down. I picked out a few blogs I love checking on a daily basis--Catarina, Cool Tools, Core Dump, and a few others--but that don't update constantly. These are the "desert-island blogs" that I let myself check anytime I want.

* I also created a Comics folder for the few comics blogs I read and a folder to hold various feeds from Audible.com. I let myself check these daily because they don't update often.

* But I also enjoy the novelty and freshness of something new coming into Bloglines on a regular basis because, you know, my bored brain needs stimulation all the time. And there were plenty of blogs I like but that didn't need to be checked daily.

So, I created a set of day-based folders--_1_Monday, _2_Tuesday, up to _6_Sat/Sun. I then arbitrarily split up my huge Blogs folder amongst this group.

So now, the simple rule is: On Wednesday, for example, I allow myself to read the blogs in _3_Wednesday and in any non-dated folder (Blogs, Comics, Audible). I cannot read Monday's blogs till Monday, Tuesday's blogs till Tuesday, and so on. I can tell at a glance if my Blogs and Wednesday folder are empty, and if they are, this is the signal for me to move on to real work. I know that tomorrow's blogs await and that they will have something new to delight me. It keeps me from overdosing on them all today.

A final refinement: high-update blogs like Mark Evanier's and Quick Online Tips go into the Sat/Sun folder because they generate lots of items daily. While I enjoy them, I simply don't have time to process them. I have a little more time on the weekend, so the high-impact blogs go here.

I'm toying with the idea of letting myself view any blog on the weekends or after work-hours, but for now, I'm sticking with this system.

New PC Blues: The Beginning

The time had come. My last computer had been an HP Pavilion, bought at Circuit City, when Windows Me was the OS of choice. It had 256MB RAM, a 20GB hard drive, and a CD burner, but I'd not upgraded it much beyond adding more RAM. Along the way, we got DSL, a wireless router, file and printer sharing between my desktop and Liz's laptop, an HP all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax, several plug-in USB readers for various media formats, I'd compiled a large list of "essential software" for the PC, and I installed and uninstalled shareware like it was nobody's business.

But little things began piling up -- Windows began running arthritically slow (could it have been all the programs loaded at startup?), the "replace battery" light glowed red on the UPS unit, the network was acting flakey and I did not have the tools or methodology to deal with that particular problem.

And--embarrassing though it may be to say--when I saw the New Yorker was issuing all its back issues on DVD, I knew I didn't want to have to trick out the old PC anymore. [Aside -- I think the DVD set will sit nicely beside my previous magazine collection on CD. Lovely little bookends, what?]

It was time to upgrade--get a new PC, with a bigger hard drive, enough RAM, DVD burner and reader, built-in media readers, and maybe a few other goodies. Also, maybe, just maybe, please God -- the network would again work as flawlessly as it had been working for the previous year or so.

Around this time, I had to sell a mutual fund to pay off some debts and thought I had enough left over to buy a new PC. After looking around, I decided to buy from a local computer store instead of the big-box stores and to bequeath my old computer to a friend who would appreciate it.

So this series of posts will catalog for future generations (or just me) what I did, why I did it that way, and lessons learned as I went along. I also always like seeing those wonderful checklists people make when they reinstall Windows, because it can be an elaborate operation and you always forget what you did from the last time you did it. Until I make such a checklist, I'll let these posts take their place.

Links: Writing tips for academic papers

I compiled the following quickie list of paper-writing tips for a co-worker who is taking online classes and has been away from paper-writing for a while. The whole process seemed difficult for her, so these links cover a broad range of items. Some of the links to academic papers at the end of this list may have good clues, especially with selecting thesis statements. I've not vetted all these, but they're a start. The little comments for each are reproduced from my original email to her that contained these links.

---

A good book I recommend is this:
Amazon.com: Books: Thinking on Paper

--Just read the first half (the second half is all about the Latin names for types of logical arguments). it sets forth a very good simple process for building a piece of writing from the ground up so that it isn't as painful as you think.

Writing tips compiled by Mike Shea
--Here's the PDF version

Poynter Online - The Writing Tools
--Just scan the list and read whatever article is of interest. His focus is on journalism so his approach might conflict with academic writing. but the writing tips are good and solid. You'll be able to devise some simple rules to help you in your actual writing.

43 Folders: Hack your way out of writer's block
--Entertaining list of bullet points and good comments. but lookit the next link too.

Google Groups : 43 Folders
--Advice on paper writing from a grad student

TOC About Writing
--I'm also interested in fiction writing and this page has mainly tips for that side of the house.

50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work
--A great page of tips to bust procrastination.

Study Guides and Strategies
--Scroll down to the writing sections, but good general advice to students.

Google Search: tips academic writing papers
--The search i used to dig up some of the links in this mail.

Timed Essays: Planning and Organizing in a Crunch
--This is for when you're writing for an in-class test, but some good advice.

Thesis Statements: What are They?
-This might be more practical for your needs right now. BE SURE to click on the Related Links in the right sidebar. You might get good ideas there.

Academic Writing Handouts -- Dennis G. Jerz
--The top page from which the previous two links were drawn.

Sally Slacker Writes a Paper (Dennis G. Jerz, Seton Hill University)
--I haven't read all this but I like the title!

Tips for Writing Academic Essays and Term Papers in Philosophy at Erratic Impact
--Good numbered tips after the intro.

Writing Help
--Ton o' links. Don't know how many of them are still good.

Academic Center :: Writing Tips
--More basic tips on academic writing. After you've read about 10 of these kinds of pages, you'll notice they start repeating themselves.

Checklist
--A pretty good checklist to use after you've written a draft.

True Work

I had this on my office wall many many years ago, and can't find the source again. But I think I remember it word-for-word:

True Work is that which occupies the mind and the heart, as well as the hands. It has a beginning and an ending. It is the overcoming of difficulties one thinks important for the sake of results one thinks valuable.

Jacques Barzun

Phrases and misspellings to expunge forever

Mike Shea has a nice list of phrases to be avoided (as well as writing rules from Orwell and Struck & White) here. Among my pet peeves on his list are "on steriods," "think outside the box," and "talk offline." (But I have no idea what "goat rope" refers to.)

Herewith, a few of my additions, culled from everyday readings of stuff on the Web:

• (anything) from hell Even Matt Groening is tired of this one


• may or may not Just say may!


• impact as a verb


• loose for lose Why is this the most common misspelling I see nowadays? Lazy typing?


• alot for a lot But this lamentable misspelling has been around for years


• peak or peek when the writer means pique


• pour when the writer means pore As in "I poured over the pages" -- what did you pour -- milk?


• "ping so-and-so," when the speaker means "contact" or "call"


• "Well,..." at the beginning of a sentence Way overused by journalists and columnists for the last several years

Nice phrases

These are some phrases that have passed my way that have struck me, for whatever reason.

• constructive novelty


• serious fun (a phrase used by one of Liz's professors)


• productively idle/idly productive (haven't decided which I like better)


• effortless effort

I have a mild idea what some of them mean. "Serious fun" is my favorite.

A new Blogger template

I've been using Blogger's Scribe template since I started this thing last year. While I liked the parchmenty feel of the colors, I had two bones to pick with it: ordered lists were always displayed as unordered, and the horizontal rule didn't work, which led me to do stuff like centering three asterisks to set off quotes.

So I've been messing about with other templates. Simple II was too simple--I like having the recent posts and archived months displayed. I'm really liking Mr. Moto, by the esteemed Zeldman. I'm liking it a lot so far--and I see that my numbered lists are now numbered and my horizontal lines appear. Thank you, Zeldman.

Addendum
The Quick Online Tips site (powered by Blogger) has a good post on free Blogger tools. And he's pointed to other Blogger templates here.

Using Total Recorder to record songs from cassette

I've sung the praises of Total Recorder (I'm using it now to record more episodes of In Our Time, and other BBC4 radio shows.)

I noticed this procedure I'd put into my old infoindex.doc (I may blog about that file one day), and thought I'd post it here so I'd have it again if I need it in future.

I did this last Christmas when porting a local group's Christmas cassette to CD. (You can buy a CD yourself here from the source.)

Required tools: Total Recorder, WinWord, ClipMate

Recording the tracks in Total Recorder

1. In the Options>Save tab, set the folder to the working folder where the raw files will go.


2. In the options>Split tab, split the incoming sound into separate files when there's 2 seconds of silence


3. Set a file-name generation rule. I found this dialog box difficult to understand and the help file didn't help much. But I set the files to generate sequential numbers.


4. In the TR interface, click the Use Save As dialog option

Now, when playing the cassette back, TR will save a new file after 2 seconds of silence. This worked like a charm. I'm always delighted when a process works the first time.

The first side that I did, I recorded the whole cassette in a giant file and then used TR to scan and split each file at the breaks. The more automatic way detailed above is the way to go.

Generating the track names

1. In WinWord, open a new document.


2. Type in all the song names, then set up some seq fields so that I had a template of:


01-{seq side1}, that would translate to 01-03, for example, for Side 1, Track 3.
Side two was 02-{seq side2}.

4. Typed in all the song titles, and added .wav to the end.


5. Replaced spaces in the track name with underscores.


6. Copied the track listing seq template to each line.


7. Highlight the lines and press F9 to updated the seq fields. They should be correctly numbered.


8. Copy each line to ClipMate.
   
9. In File Manager, go to the working folder where the raw files are.


10. In ClipMate, set the Paste Down or Up option in Clipmate.


11. Highlight each filename in FIle Mangler, and press F2 to enter rename mode.


12. Start pasting in the names. WIth Paste Up or Paste Down selected, you don't need to keep flipping back to ClipMate. ClipMate will automatically paste in the next line.

Them, I used Roxio CD Creator to burn the files to CD. I didn't have to clean up the sound, as it all sounded OK.

Maybe next time I'll just buy the CD.

Personal Inventories and Piggy Banks

Whilst reading through some collections of old David Allen essays I've culled from his newsletter, I ran across one intriguing nugget that went something like this: Every now and then, take a top-to-bottom inventory of your assets, your processes, your systems. Everything from the shirts in your drawer to the way you pay your bills and so on.

As I moved through my routines, I evaluated what traveled through my hands. I got rid of some old clothes, piled up all the magazines in my closets into one big pile (I remember that big pile when I'm tempted to buy a new magazine).

And of all things, I re-evaluated my need for my battery-powered automatically sorting loose-change bank. I've had banks like this in one form or another for nearly 10 years; it made it awfully fun to save my spare change. I got the coin wrappers from the bank and happily rolled my pennies, dime, nickels, and quarters until I had about $20 or so. Then I'd put them in a little ziploc, take them to bank, and exchange them for folding money.

That's usually when the process got troubled: if I didn't make it to the bank that day, I was left hauling around a little bag of heavy change everywhere. Then, when I joined the credit union, I discovered that they wanted my account number written on every roll before they'd cash them. And sometimes going by the bank (a bank different from my credit union) that would cash them without any quibbles meant disrupting my workday schedule so I could get to the bank before it closed. (And bring them inside please! No coin rolls allowed in the drive-through lanes.)

But what else to do?

Well, after several years of walking past that green Coinstar machine at the Harris Teeter, I decided to try it. It wasn't without its problems: so many people have used it that the buttons don't respond so niftily and so I kept trying different ways of pressing them to get them to take, and Coinstar takes about 8 cents on the dollar or something like that for its trouble.

But you know what? It works. Since I go to HT every Sunday morning to do the weekly grocery shopping, I wasn't travelling out of my way. The receipt that's dispensed can be exchanged for cash at the register or (what I discovered on my last trip) I can put it toward my grocery bill. Talk about convenience--no more wrestling coins into wrappers, driving to the bank, waiting in line. It's worth whatever minimal charge Coinstar takes to make that little nothing routine run much more smoothly.

The coin bank was donated last week along with the clothes. Now I have a nice-sized jelly jar that holds my loose change and I'm enjoying a lot more space on the top of my bureau. Such a tiny thing, but it feels good to get something right.

In case you needed another reason to join the ACLU

The Transportation Security Administration maintains "no-fly lists" of people whose names match those of suspected terrorists. As this article reports, the now officially brain-dead TSA maintains lists that include babies under 2 years old.

As someone with a very common name, I'm sensitive to these issues. Especially since I recently had to fight a stubborn and stupid background check company that got my records mixed up with those of a convicted criminal.

Well-known people like Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and David Nelson, who starred in the sitcom "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," also have been stopped at airports because their names match those on the lists.

The insidious thing about the TSA is that it's a black box: what's the criteria for putting names on the list? It's important to know that your name never comes off that list; more information is added that supposedly lets you board a plane, but to the best of my knowledge, your name is never taken off the list.

I remember reading recently about a critic of this government's also-brain-dead executive branch who found his name on a no-fly list, which effectively grounded him. Retaliation? Who can say? The TSA is not telling how it compiles or maintains its lists.

This safety paranoia has got to go. Gore Vidal has often said that governments need enemies to keep them in power and to keep the military-industrial complex well-funded--what better enemy for this modern age than one you can't see? During the Watergate hearings, Sam Ervin said, with disbelief, about Richard Nixon, "He's afraid of freedom." I would say, this country's administration (and its loyal, unquestioning bureaucratic drones) is also afraid of freedom.

Here's a quote from Stephen Fry's novel Making History, one of the few passages that struck me as admirable in that lamentably bad book.

If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by the way of the insecurities of the Kaiser, the Fuhrer, Eisenhower, and Stalin, right up to the terrors of the citizens of the modern world --
THEY ARE OUT THERE
The enemy. They will break into your car, burgle your house, molest your children, consign you to hellfire, murder you for drug money, force you to face Mecca, infect your blood, outlaw your sexual preferences, erode your pension, pollute your beaches, censor your thoughts, steal your ideas, poison your air, threaten your values, use foul language on your television, destroy your security. Keep them away! Lock them out! Hide them from sight! Bury them!

And no, the irony is not lost on me that I do not fear "them," as much as I fear my government's actions toward innocent people. As the saying goes, who watches the watchmen?

(Link to the article courtesy of Core Dump.)

The Dalai Lama Shower

I saw this originally in Thirty Thousand Days, the newsletter for the ToDo Institute. Given that we're in one of our periodic droughts (down 5.5. inches from normal), it seemed a good time to post this. I don't have the original article (which I think appeared in one of the Dalai Lama's books), but I've adapted it for my ablutions.

1. Turn on the shower and rinse. Turn off water.


2. Soap your body.


3. Turn on water to rinse. Turn off water.


4. Shampoo.


5. Turn on water to rinse. Turn off water.


6. Shave. Quickly rinse the razor as needed under the faucet.


7. Turn on water to rinse. Turn off water.

Water is precious and non-renewable. Use it and lose it. Please conserve.

Links:
ToDo Institute: http://www.todoinstitute.org/
His Holiness the Dalai Lama: http://www.tibet.com/DL/index.html

Knock Knock

From webpagesthatsuck.com:

Knock-knock
Who's there?
Under the Patriot Act I don't have to tell you.

Fasts

Inspired by a friend's admonition to get off the Internet if I want to feel better, I'm attempting to NOT get on the Web or the PC this week when I get home from work. I will do my finances tomorrow night (that's when I've scheduled to do them), but no free-surfing. Only the task at hand.

Along with that, I've decided to try NOT bookmarking stuff this week, either at home or at work, unless it's something I need today, right now. I've accumulated so many "to read" or "to look at later" bookmarks that it's suffocating; like piling magazines in the closet knowing that you'll read them "some day." I just spent the weekend clearing out my magazine closet and don't want to have to do the same to my bookmarks. What with Google and delicious and Bloglines, I see little need to bookmark much of anything nowadays.

My bookmarking problem is irritated by my having so many bookmark tools: PowerMarks (my preferred tool, Windows-only), Furl, delicious, Yahoo's My Web, and Yahoo's Bookmarks tool (a close second to PowerMarks). Time to evaluate what I really need and what I want to spend time maintaining.

Circusmuseum.nl

There's something wonderfully creepy and other about circus and magic show posters. The color, the stiff poses, the sometimes fantastical and downright bizarre tableaus. The circusmuseum site, in the Netherlands, isn't in English but you can still sample an excellent presentation of historic circus and sideshow posters from all over the world.

I like the keen-o spotlight you use to select the genre of poster you want to see. All posters available for purchase but not sure I'd actually want any in a room where I need to relax.

Doomsday Algorithm

I've loved this little trick for years: the Doomsday Algorithm, a creation of Dr. John Conway, he who gave us the game of Life.

The Doomsday algorithm gives you the day of the week for any date, based on the last day of February.

Lots of great links at the bottom of the page, too.

Links
The Game of Life - in Java, with a link to the Wikipedia entry on the Game of Life

Being jealous of myself

I was listening to The Splendid Table show on the drive home from the grocery store yesterday. Lynne Rosetto Kasper was introducing a guest who splits her time between her farm in Provence and writing and teaching in Paris. Lynne closed with, "And yes, we're jealous."

And I thought, "Well, gosh Lynne, people might be jealous of the life you lead."

And I thought, "What makes me envious of my friends who live in other places that seem to me exotic: Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna. Or even those who live in my own town yet who lead such a seductively energetic life?"

And then I thought: "What could I do that would make someone want to live my life?"

And then I hit on the big thought: "What could I do that would make me envious of my life? Were I to take a look at my life from the outside, what would make me go, 'Gosh, I'd love to be able to do that'?" The trick being, though, that I'd be doing it.

This is related somewhat to my working through Mark Forster's book How to Make Your Dreams Come True, in which he suggests an exercise in which your future self, who has attained all that you want to attain, counsels your present self. The dialogues you write between these two personas help you over time to build a bridge betwewn now and the future.

Related to that: Liz and I compared notes last night at supper that, here we are in culturally rich Durham, and we've never been to the documentary film festival, haven't been to the ADF in years, haven't been to the Blues Festival ever, and haven't been to the Eno Festival in years. Thinks: could there be clues to my dilemma here?

So a thought experiment is in order. I'll be interested to see what comes out of it.

Quicken-Killing, or Money Meditations

I expect it was this post on the 43Folders Google Group that got me to thinking about Quicken, money management (surely one of my lifelong meditations), and folding all that into my daily life. The original poster was asking if there was a GTD-like approach to money management that would enable you to get money stuff "off your mind" yet still provide enough cohesion via a simple set of processes or habits.

The answers tended to software or to setting up multiple checking accounts. Some people seem to naturally get money management, but the vast majority of us don't.

As in so many cases, Liz leads the way. Her years in New York made frugality second-nature and in the last 10 years she had jobs that consistently paid very good wages. So she was able to sock a lot of that away.

My jobs have tended to the interesting but low-paying. For whatever reason--laziness, "I wanna," not enough money--I've never been able to save money consistently unless it's taken out of my paycheck automatically. And even then, I find my disposable cash has frittered away through too much eating out, too many books or CDs, and so on.

Liz uses a tape calculator and her checkbook to manage her finances. I was using the late, lamented Managing Your Money (with a great software manual written by Andrew Tobias) back in the late 1990s and when I moved to Windows, eventually clambered onto the Quicken bandwagon (I had a friend who worked at Intuit).

With Quicken, I found I could buy the previous version rather cheaply via Yahoo Shopping or Ebay, so I've consistently stayed several years behind the upgrade curve. Typically, I only upgrade in odd-numbered years (I'm using Quicken 2003 now) and only when forced.

I've bought and skimmed a few copies of Stephen Nelson's Quicken for Dummies series, and one of the most striking bits of advice he offers regarding Quicken's various features is to ask yourself: Do I really need it?

Do I really need to break out my paycheck deductions using Quicken's paycheck feature? After all, your stub breaks it out for you and keeps a running total as well. Why not just enter the net figure into Quicken and be done with it?

Do I really need to track my mutual funds in Quicken (or even subscribe to Quicken's various online services to do this)? After all, I get quarterly statements from them which have all the totals and enough history for me to gauge how they're doing. And besides--attempting to stay on top of how your investments are doing day-by-day, week-by-week, is crazy-making.

Now, Nelson dutifully tells you how to do all that if you want to do it, but I was grateful to him for that bit of wisdom. It simplified my money-tracking in Quicken enormously. (It reminded me, in fact, of David Allen's advice in his booklet on using Outlook to implement GTD. Allen's point there is to "dumb down" the busy Outlook interface so you can get useful work done.)

My use of Quicken became so simplified that I found myself using Quicken only for downloading my transactions from the bank, categorizing them, running the occasional report, and that was about it. I tried using the Savings Goals to approximate the "envelope system" of budgeting (more on that later), but it seemed too clumsy and I eventually deleted them. In fact, whenever I tried to get clever with Quicken, I always found Quicken to be cleverer--so clever that I decided it was best to give up before going any further. I reconciled myself to using maybe 10% of Quicken's firepower, but didn't feel too guilty about that. Still, that's an awful lot of program to be taking up space on my hard drive when I only use it for checkbook stuff.

A few years ago, with my beloved Psion 3mx's Sheet application, I devised my own variant of the envelope system, based on a book I was reading at the time, True Prosperity. Most people are familiar with the envelope system. It's explained very well here, though you may find the Christian wife deferring to "the wisdom of (her) husband" amusing. I certainly laughed; I'm the last person I'd ask for financial advice. (And I'm appalled by the site's name, but that's another topic.)

The envelope system is simple enough that a spreadsheet app is all you need to track and plan your spending. I filled all my envelopes with cash, and was impressed that it seemed to do what it promised. But of course, I had no hesitation to rob from an envelope if I really wanted to spend the money on something. After a while, going to the bank to retrieve the currency in all the specific denominations (mainly ones, fives, and tens) just struck me as too much trouble. There had to be a simpler way. In the meantime--back to Quicken.

So earlier this year I looked into other programs, saved into a bookmarks folder I called "Quicken Killers." I found myself intrigued by Mvelopes, which attempts to meld bookkeeping with the envelope system. I tried it and didn't like it. It's written in Java and ran horribly slow. I also disliked that you had to provide a credit card and sign up for 3 months service in order to simply try it out; and the ongoing monthly charges did not endear me to them.

In searching the Google groups, I also found some heated opinions against the envelope system: here (an especially good thread), here, here, and here. They boil down to the hassle of keeping money in envelopes or Quicken's Savings Goals, tying up your money when it could be used for some purpose, and the pointlessness of diddling with many separate goals instead of considering a single overall plan.

Their arguments are compelling and sensible. For them, the envelope system is a crutch that you really don't need and that is hazardous to people who are short of cash.

And yet...I needed something to help me think through how to manage my cash flow. As intelligent as I am, I'm not always smart enough to see what I have to do.

During my searches, I saw a Google ad for The B Word (the "B" word of course being "budgeting"). Although a lot of his system is described on his, um, rather loud, web pages, his actual implementation is described in a PDF that is included with the software. The software looks and behaves like a two-tabbed spreadsheet and is remarkably simple.

What he advocates pretty much resembles the envelope system. You average out what you pay to various line items over the year, and save enough per pay period to cover the monthly average. Using my Quicken reports, I did this pretty easily. It was disquieting to see that, at my current spending rate, I was going into the hole every month (thanks to our $800/mo. Cobra payments).

Yes, yes, I could have figured this out on my own. But the B Word gave me a simple set of tools and ideas that made it simple and obvious. Yes, all I needed was a spreadsheet that could quickly recalculate numbers and help me run planning models. But this was the sort of thinking I hoped Quicken could support with some simple tools in its arsenal. Unfortunately, it really can't. It's good at what it does (and I still use it to categorize transactions and run reports), but it couldn't help me plan.

While I'm sure I'm tying up extra money in my accounts, I really don't care. My goal is to save money and to have enough to cover both the expenses I'm expecting and the expenses that fly at my head from out of nowhere (like my car's water pump that died on my way in to work). For the first time in my life, I feel I can handle both types of expenses. And it rather painlessly enforces some much-needed discipline on my spending.

I also loved B Word's idea that you reserve your financial work for only 2 days of the month--updating my checking account, paying the bills, planning for the next budgeting period, etc. That simple idea (akin to the GTD Weekly Review, except this is the B Word Bimonthly Review) means I'm actually spending less time per month working on my accounts. My sessions are scheduled and focused.

Before, I was futzing with Quicken every weekend and spending an hour or two looking at reports that couldn't help me see what was happening to my money.

Now, twice a month, I work my plan, update my accounts in Quicken, adjust my B Word totals as needed, write the checks I need to write, and forget about the finances until the next B Word session. Any bills that come in get put in my tickler file for the next session.

I also am maintaining my discipline much better this time around than I did with the envelopes; I'm not shimmying money around from account to account to make up for shortfalls. Although the idea is the same, the implementation is different. And, to be fair, I'm 7 years older and have gone through a year when money was tight. I can look at my B Word sheets and see the implication of spending too much money on books or software or the latest shiny object from the Levenger catalog.

So far, so good. We'll see how it goes. I have hopes that I can now meditate on things other
than money.

Update 18-May-2006

• I'm still using BWord, though I need to re-read the PDF; I find myself spending too much time on the financial stuff and I think it could go quicker.
• I dumped Quicken and am using Moneydance, which is not without its quirks but is, to me, cleaner and more straightforward. It meets my needs very well. And it has a very active user base and mailing list.
  
• Overall, I'm still doing very well managing my money using the BWord principles. I'll be taking on a car loan in the next few months, and BWord makes the shifting of priorities (as represented by my spending plan) easy and effortless.