Annotations

Some Days in the Life - April 26, 1999

 April 26, 1999

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Good morning to you,

Good morning to you,

We're all in our places

With bright shining faces

And this is the way

We start each new day.

My mother tells me that's how her schoolclasses (I assume young ones) would start the morning -- it's a little song. The times she had to wake me up instead of my father, she would sing that song to me. It's a very fond memory.

My father had a ritual which I loved. For a long time, that ritual was followed even when I visited at home. Then I actually moved home for a while, with my alarm clock, and it went away. But what Dad would do is about a half hour before I had to get up, he'd stick his head in and say "time to get up, Eric."

I'd say "okay." Sometimes I'd say "five more minutes?" Either way led to the same result.

"Would you like a cup of tea," he'd ask, regardless of what I said. I would say yes.

He'd then come back twenty minutes later (much longer than it would take to make good tea) and give it to me, and chat about -- oh, something for two or three minutes. And then I was awake and could face the day. A bloody civilized way to wake up.

The most recent "alarm clock" my parents worked out, for those times I actually spend the night, is our dog Buddy, who is quite young. He is, however, smart enough to know that "go get Eric up" means "run downstairs, jump onto Eric's bed, lick his face, jump off the bed, and steal one of Eric's socks."

Dogs are smarter than we give them credit for.

It is a grey but warm day. Naturally, it isn't raining. It looks like a horror movie out there -- or perhaps like that scene in Excalibur when the Grail Knights are riding, but the land is barren. No snow, but also no Spring, no life. Just brown fields and barren trees. Astounding cinematography in that movie. I should watch it again.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. I went for a hearty walk at one point, downtown and back. It's a great town for walking -- really, everything is right close. It's easy just to use the car when you need things, but that's such a waste. At least during the Spring. There are days in the winter when getting to work requires a car, and that's five minutes on foot. Otherwise, I worked on an In Nomine article for a new web magazine I'm involved in -- I'll be doing a column in it too, apparently by the strength of my journal.

I never thought of my journal as a resume item before, but perhaps it is. Hm -- on the other hand, there's probably a heck of a lot more in here than I'd want a prospective employer to know about me after just one interview. In any case, I'll take it.

The column's title? Annotations, of course. I'm nothing if not consistent. Besides, it makes it easy to put the sabre@annotations.com or angelic equivalent at the bottom of the page for people to send commentary to. And besides, it might attract people to read the journal and offer me more columns. You can never have enough columns.

A somewhat annoying morning, with at least one boneheaded accusation of plagiarism on someone's part to me. I love people who don't understand copyright law, I really do. They remind me of football experts who sit around Monday Morning Quarterbacking and explaining how if they'd been the coach, they'd have done things right.

Except of course they're not a professional Football coach, mostly because they wouldn't know the first thing about doing the job.

So I spanked him in an e-mail. We'll see what it turns into or what it doesn't. There are people in this world in desperate need of hobbies, though.

Microsoft Word is used for exactly one thing on my system. Namely, the creation of these journal entries. I have the most current patch, the most current system software, and a freshly rebuilt desktop and zapped PRAM.

Microsoft Word causes the Launcher to crash with a memory error whenever it's started up, and sometimes brings down the Finder. I got fed up with it and am trying to force WordPerfect 3.5 to do what I want. I don't want to use Pagemill for the page creation -- it simply isn't good at text-typing. It's good at finishing. I don't want to use a text editor where I have to throw manual paragraph breaks at the end of each line. My desire to hand code HTML for a daily journal is nonexistent.

In the end, I just want a nice, simple program that will let me type paragraphed text with occasional lines and italics, and save as HTML. The sort of thing where nothing not found in HTML 2.0 can be used. I'll insert it into the funkier stuff in Pagemill, doing what Pagemill does do well.

Is there simply a law against simplicity in these things, or is it me?

BBEdit Lite doesn't seem to do "previewed" HTML. The demo of BBEdit 5.0 doesn't either (well, it lets you open Netscape or Explorer to look at it, but that's what I mean). Maybe I need to chill.

On the topic of mundane annoyances, I just installed MacLinkPlus Deluxe 10.0. That in itself isn't annoying -- MacLinkPlus is an amazing program with an unfortunate name.

However, we ordered the software from a mail order vendor.

It came in a thin cardboard box, about 9"x12"x1.5". The box had an extra "layer" of cardboard that formed a flap on the front that you could open and read all about the exciting world of translating files.

Inside the box, there is a thick, brown, corrugated cardboard box. The fit is snug -- removing the cardboard box from the thin outer box takes a bit of work.

Inside that cardboard box is a thin cardboard CD holder that opens up, about jewel box sized.

Inside that there is the CD, three postcards, some stickers and a "Let's Get Started" booklet. All of which would easily have fit inside of a CD Jewel Box, without any of the other redundant layers of packaging.

Of the two pounds or so the full box weighed, I've thrown away about 1.8 pounds or so.

Am I the only one who finds this... wasteful?

WordPerfect's a wash. So, back to Microsoft Word or else find something capable of doing what I want to do without it taking a slash and burn approach to my system. I am open to recommendations.