It’s so odd to tune into a radio broadcast set up by someone you know and hear a relatively obscure band you’ve been listening to for years, but in utterly different contexts.
wish list
Here’s what I’d like: an engine where I can search for a place name, and find all the various ways people have referred to a given place. For example, Venice is also Venezia, and in Boccaccio’s Decameron it’s Vinegia. Or, Roland (in Orlando Furioso) goes to an island named Ebuda. And I forget: is this a made-up island? Or does it actually exist? And if it does exist, is it called Ebuda or something else?
I could google it of course, but that’s imperfect more often than not, and often produces a ton of irrelevant results to sift through. Oh, semantic Web, how I dream of you.
conversation
(at computer, working, frustrated) “Rr, I wish…”
“….?”
[silence]
(still facing the computer) “I wish you would use consistent indentation.”
“Me?”
“!! No. Your indentation is delicious.”
simple, as all genius.
All I wanted was to have all of the tags I’ve used so far in a project (in multiple files) at my disposal in drop-down lists in oXygen.
Problem is, while oXygen is great at learning all of the elements and their attributes you’ve used so far in a single document, this knowledge cannot be easily shared between documents.
Creating a DTD turns out to be impractical, because then I cannot easily add new elements to it.
The solution was, as usual, simple: with each new file I create, I include all of the previous files into it as entities. This way, oXygen sees all of the elements I’ve used thus far, and has no trouble learning new ones. When I’m done editing the newest file, the entities referring to other files are wiped.
This makes editing so much easier!
Roooooob!
Rob Wittig, one of my favorite contemporary writers and artists, appears in a New York Times article today: “Call me Email: The Novel Unfolds Digitally.” (Subscription required, sorry. Look to NikkiNewsNet for a login cheat, if you will; and NNN is wonderful reading in its own right as well.)
And after you read the article, run do not walk to Wittigwords.
aaaaaa curse you bluetooth!
Dear Self,
Next time your keyboard commands get all out of whack, and it seems like there’s a stuck command key but none of the keys on your keyboard are stuck,
maybe it’s a depressed key.
of the Bluetooth keyboard sitting on the desk to your left,
still turned on,
under some papers. d’oh.
images people post
This little toy aggregates and displays the latest images that LiveJournal users have been posting. “They may be subject to copyright and may not be work safe,” reads the warning. LJ users seem to post images rather frequently – every time I reload the page, all of the new loads are completely different. Of course, LJ has what, over a million users? So the volume is not that surprising. Amusing, though.
While we’re at it, Ethan pointed me at Random Personal Picture Finder ™, which makes up a random string likely to be commonly used by digital cameras, and searches Google Images for it.
quicksilver!
No, not the recent Stephenson novel, but this free gadget for Mac OS X users. Allows you to use the keyboard to launch applications and do much more – Dan Dickinson’s tutorial is excellent for discovering most of its features. I like this app much better than LaunchBar, which isn’t bad but got to be kind of a nuisance. Quicksilver is just… slick. And with a gorgeous interface to boot.
Hooray!
I am glad that Anders is blogging again. I met him when he was here a couple of years ago doing some work as a visiting scholar. He has some interesting things to say on the rhetoric of/in new media.
I am sold.
This past weekend, I bought a PowerBook. It was about time: my Win98-running PC laptop is five years old; and Brown has a crazy .edu deal; and I’m tired of asking my friends to test Web site stuff with Macs… Not to mention that this new machine is half the weight of the old one, more compact, robust and has much better battery management. There were many reasons to get a new machine.
Not wanting to entangle myself unnecessarily with Bill Gates again, I checked out OpenOffice.org.
I’m completely sold. Not only on OOo, but also on OS X, the whole deal. When I was having problems with keeping the ‘net connection going and had to reinstall the OS, my heart sank: this is a big annoying deal in Windows. It wasn’t here, everything got archived cleanly, even most of the preferences. OOo checked for twenty million components that it needs in order to run (or that’s how many it felt like, anyway), and installed without a hitch. I finally have a Unix environment to play in.
It hasn’t all been entirely smooth, of course, as I’ve gotten to know this system. But here’s a huge difference between this and Windows PC: none of the problems I’ve encountered have corrected themselves as if by magic. Everything seems to be happening for a reason. If something seems to be going wrong, my gut feeling is that eventually I’ll find a solution that makes sense.
Current mood: geekhappy. (Though not blindly so: if you think of any issues I should look out for and want to let me know, I’ll cook you borsch and be generally thankful.)
