Category: NaNoWriMo 2005

Fifty-One-Seven / Camper Van Beethoven / New Roman Times – EP
Dumb Waiters / The Psychedelic Furs / Talk Talk Talk
This Is How It Goes / Aimee Mann / Lost in Space
Strange / R.E.M. / Document
Dissolve / Elvis Costello / When I Was Cruel
Sunset Road / Béla Fleck & The Flecktones / Live Art (Disc 2)
You and whose army? / Radiohead / Amnesiac
Susan’s Strange / The Psychedelic Furs / The Psychedelic Furs
Lazy Days / The Byrds / Sweetheart Of The Rodeo

Looking for alternatives to Word, prompted by this bit I read this morning.

More Apple Love:

The only really problem that I have had is with Office documents that folks send to my personal email.

I could, of course, just install MacOffice (which is a really great product), but I wanted to see what it would be like to be one of those “M$ haters” (which I clearly am not — since I work there and love it).

It turns out that iWork and OpenOffice aren’t too bad.

I couldn’t use it at work — I doubt anyone could actually — but it has gotten me past a few personal hurdles.

In short, it is very clear to me that this is a “Office World” and I am a “Office Boy” — and I think everyone else is too.

Not all of us want to be, though. I want to use something for writing that is simple (like TextEdit or TextWrangler) but not so complex as Word. I want basic text styling and fonts (one of the problems of having your first daily computer experience be the Macintosh, even if it was circa 1987). But I don’t need table tools, drawing tools, or all the scientific apparatus.

I used Mellel for my NaNoWriMo effort and liked it OK. It has lots of features I’ll never use but it is a writer’s tool.

I also took a look at Pages, part of iWork (well, not just part of it: half of it, with Keynote).
It’s OK, and close to what I want, but it doesn’t offer much more than TextEdit.

I think Mellel makes the most sense at US$49. iWork/Pages is $79 for something less fully-featured.

Any other options I have missed?

Political Musings:

If the media incline to the left, why has all the coverage of the transit strike in New York (all that I’ve heard, in other words “mostly NPR and online news sources”) stressed the hardship this strike imposes on commuters, tourists, hoteliers, and merchants, and the unusually-comprehensive pension and health care package that the laborers are striking to maintain? A lefty press would, I’d imagine, lionize the brave workers who have drawn the line at corporate exploitation (billions of dollars of profits, comfy benefits at the top, but a desperate need to cut benefits for the laborers who actually make the transit system run).

A left-inclined press might be baying at the heels of congressmen and White House officials who have fallen afoul a special prosecutor for violations of political procedure rather than for lying about a stupid, tawdry sexual affair. A left-inclined press might try to suppress or rebut, rather than perpetuate and amplify, reports that the press inclines toward the left. Or so I’d think.

I have been traveling and out of touch more than usual so I have not followed the strike too closely, but I think AKMA makes clear what many already know: that Fox’s “foul and biased” news is where you’ll find news filtered through a political agenda and the rest of the media outlets are content (or desperate) to chase rating success rather than follow their charter as public ombudsman.

I need to hang this up and see how many of them I can do . . . is every day too often?

Clark Lane: This Season…:

I so wish I could take credit for writing this, but I can’t. I’ve had it for years, and I think it may have been from an ad, as no author is cited. It resides in a Christmas ornament box, dog-eared and yellowed, and I mist up every year when I read it.

• Mend a quarrel.
• Seek out a forgotten friend.
• Dismiss suspicion, and replace it with trust.
• Write a love letter.
• Share some treasure.
• Give a soft answer.
• Encourage youth.
• Manifest your loyalty in word and deed.
• Keep a promise.
• Find the time.
• Forego a grudge.
• Forgive an enemy.
• Listen.
• Apologize if you were wrong.
• Try to understand.
• Flout envy.
• Examine your demands on others.
• Think first of someone else.
• Appreciate.
• Be kind.
• Be gentle.
• Laugh a little.
• Laugh a little more.
• Deserve confidence.
• Take up arms against malice.
• Decry complacency.
• Express your gratitude.
• Welcome a stranger.
• Gladden the heart of a child.
• Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth.

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » John Gibson goes berserk — on air and off:

The question:”why are wingnuts so angry” is backwards, the question should be phrased “what attracts angry people to reactionary political positions”? Throughout history angry frustrated men (and usually predominantly men) gravitate to reactionary paranoid politics. It doesn’t have to be “right-wing” per se, in the ex-Soviet Union it was precisely these sort of people who were the strongest supporters of the Communist Party – because they could trust it to “beat” their enemies and anyone who threatened them by being different. Angry people need to find external enemies because no-one wants to blame themselves for their own unhappiness.

I hate it when other people get to the conclusion I have been groping for before me . . . nah, I’m not that clever, though I think this comment hits it on the head.

This reads like a list of utopian towns or even worlds from a bad space opera . . . . maybe they would actually be dystopias?

Movin’ On Up (Harpers.org):

The following is a list of residential high-rises constructed in the last few years in Beijing. As of March 2004 there were more than 3,500 registered developers in Beijing, and the government is promoting a building campaign under the slogan “Development is the only principle.” Translated from the Chinese by Mike Meyer. Originally from Harper’s Magazine, March 2004.

• American Rock
• Bank Landscape
• Bobo House
• Boning Park
• By Yourself
• CEO
• Easy Port
• European Culture Park
• Glamour International
• Glory Vogue
• Ideal Life
• Latte Town
• Luxuriant City
• Manhattan Garden
• Margarita Island
• Merlin Champagne Town
• Minority Live
• Moderate Shangri-La
• MoMA
• New Fortune Garden
• Palm Springs
• Paris Station
• Park Avenue
• Pink Box ER
• Shining Book
• SoHo
• Sun City
• Top Aristocrat
• Upper East Side
• Vitality Building
• Warm Homeland
• Wonderful Digital Jungle
• Younghot
• Youth Town
• Yuppie International Garden

Local celeb Michael Hanscom was writing about the remake of a 70s era disaster movie when he stumbled in the realm of imagination made real.

Poseidon:

Whoa. Such [rogue] waves are real? Apparently so!

Rogue waves are freakishly large waves, much bigger than the surrounding swell. They seem to rear up out of nowhere, sometimes out of a fairly calm sea, and disappear just as quickly. Mariners have recounted tales of such waves for centuries, but until recently oceanographers discounted them, along with sightings of sea monsters and mermaids. Naval architects, however, have analyzed the wrecks of ships sunk in recent decades, and have found that a large proportion of them have damage consistent with an encounter with a rogue wave, which can reach heights of a hundred feet. Even supertankers have been sunk by these monster waves. Now the evidence is too great to ignore, and physicists are trying to understand how rogue waves are generated. The issue is important not only for our understanding of the ocean, but also because rogue waves seem to be responsible for the loss of many lives at sea.

Piqued my interest, especially the bit about supertankers being sunk by these monsters.

Turns out 2 ships — by ships, I mean 600+ foot long container ships and the like — are lost every week. That’s 100 a year. You’d think that would be more widely known.

Scotsman.com News – Latest News – Giant Waves ‘More Common Than Thought’:

“The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels. Two large ships sink every week on average, but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to ‘bad weather’.”

Continue reading “a stranger world than we know”

My DSL circuit has been flapping again. Frustrating for me as well . . . .

I still suspect the underlying telco wiring, even though phone service works just fine.

Now playing: Violin Concerto, Movt. II by Hilary Hahn/St Paul Chamber Orchestra/Hugo Wolff from the album “Barber & Meyer Violin Concertos”
Continue reading “apologies if you stopped by and no one was here”