Blog: Archive for January, 2002

We're back!

Actually, we've been back for about a week. We're still pretty out of the loop, timewise. We're waking up early, and falling asleep early. It's annoying, although probably better than getting up late and going to bed really late.

M's class starts in a week, so we have lots to do.

More later, with a redesign in the not-too-distant future, I hope, once I get M's site up and running, of course.

For those who're interested in such matters, the typeface used in the Harry Potter books (at least in the U.K. Bloomsbury editions) is almost certainly Font Bureau's FB Californian. (For those of us without several hundred spare dollars waiting to be spent on some fonts, a less sophisticated and complete, but eminently more affordable option is ITC Berkeley Oldstyle, which would only cost you a couple hundred.)

Tim Powers's Declare is set in the same typeface.

I'm now using Mozilla as my main browser, and it's pretty nice. All it took was getting an 867 MHz G4 machine with 1.5 GB of RAM to make it run fast enough to be usable!

I now have IE 5, OmniWeb, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, and Netscape 4.73 available to check my sites. I really like OmniWeb, but its standards support needs a lot of work before I could commit to using it full time again. Meanwhile, Mozilla is growing on me.

The new site for M's class is up, if you're interested in such things. It's full of shiny standards compliance, with an all-CSS design, which means that you really need to be using Mozilla, Konqueror, Netscape 6.2, IE 5 (on the Mac), IE 6 (on Windows, but it's buggy), or Opera. Your old Netscape or IE won't cut it, but it's probably time you upgraded, anyway.

A stupid article in the NYT about Marmite. Apparently it's the foulest substance known on Earth, tastes terrible, smells worse, and makes anyone who smells it on another's breath vomit. And “no foreigner has ever been known to like it”. Um, yeah, right. D'ya think he's ever tasted it?

Apparently the author is trying to be Bill Bryson, only mean. Where Bryson was perplexed or amused, this guy is apparently horrified and disgusted. Just what we need. Give me Bryson any day, and give me a break from ignorant Americans capitalizing on bogus myths about Britain. Yeesh.

While looking to see if I could find out whether the U.S. editions of Philip Pullman's “His Dark Materials” books have been edited for American audiences, I came across HP Galleries, covering the “Harry Potter Phenomenon”. Among other interesting resources, they have a list of all the phrases changed in the U.S. editions. I am so glad that I have the unaltered UK editions.

I still can't understand why the US publishers feel that American kids must be protected from learning that not everyone in the world speaks American English. God forbid a kid starts calling people “barking” instead of “asshole”, or has to figure out from context that a car's “bonnet” is the same as its “hood”.

[Also, some jokes were lost. For example, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Ron is forced to repair his wand with “Spellotape”. “Sellotape” is a brand of tape in the UK. (And, if they hadn't changed “Sellotape” to “Scotch tape” in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (the US version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone), people might have gotten the joke without having ever laid eyes on a genuine roll of Sellotape.)]

And, while I'm talking about Harry Potter, we caught an episode of A&E's Biography on Joanne Rowling, which was fascinating. She's much younger than I had imagined, and I was also really impressed by the amount of work she's put into the Harry Potter books (she spent something like 10 years putting together background material before the first book was complete, and has the entire story plotted out to fit into seven books). Granted, by the time I'd finished reading the last of the four extant books, I was already pretty impressed by her writing (prior to actually reading the books, I was under the impression they were fairly derivative, an opinion that wasn't changed by seeing the film—I can now see where she's borrowed various things, but also put her own distinctive stamp on those things, twisting them to fit into Harry's world). Catch it if you have a chance.

M can't talk!

She's had a sore throat for a couple of days that has been getting a bit worse every day. Today, after teaching two classes, seeing innumerable students, and attending a department meeting, she was barely able to speak.

I had what seems to be the same thing last week, but without the laryngitis, probably because I wasn't doing much talking.

Meanwhile, M's acquired a couple more computers. One is a Micron ClientPro VXE that's slightly more modern than our DEC Celebris XL (among other things, it can use the discarded RAM from our new Macs). The other is more interesting: a SPARCserver 1000 with four processors.

We spent several hours trying to reinstall Solaris on the SPARCserver. There's something up with the CD-ROM drive (apparently), and it's going to take a bit longer than we'd hoped. Still, it should be useful for M's research once we get the thing running again.

Kept M home today, in hopes that she'll be better by Monday (or Tuesday, at the latest, when she next has to teach).

M installed Red Hat on the “new” PC. I may install Debian on it at some point, as well.

Ordered a slew of books (“His Dark Materials” HCs; The Phantom Tollbooth (all-time fave); England's Dreaming (revised edition!)), DVDs (Buckaroo Banzai (finally!); Buffy, season 1), and CDs (Come With Us, the new Chem. Bros.) from the evil Amazon. I admit to being lured by the free shipping on $99 or more of stuff, but between Buckaroo Banzai, Come With Us, and the three “His Dark Materials” books, we were practically there, anyway.

Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! continues to be my favorite NPR program since returning to the States. I used to love Fresh Air, but our local station cleverly puts it on at 10:30 PM (to make room for their awful local talk shows), so I never hear it. Without a (Mac OS X) native version of RealPlayer, I can't listen to it across the 'Net, either.

In the meantime, Wait, Wait is great. It's the only show that dared to suggest that Bush wasn't the best choice post-9/11, and was a welcome break from NPR's nauseating nonstop “rally 'round the flag” programming during the months after the attack. Happily, the Enron debacle seems to be starting to take the wind out of those particular sails, and, with the exception of the local talk shows, NPR is approaching listenability again.

I've just finished reading Anne Fadiman's collection of essays about books from Civilization magazine, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. It was wonderful—funny, heartwarming, and insprirational. If you love books, I strongly suspect that you'd love this book. (Thanks, Jackie!)

I'm now reading Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf, continuing the book theme. Petroski's book examines the history and development of the bookshelf—from pigeonholes for papyrus scrolls, through armaria and book presses, chained books, standard bookcases, and library shelving, including compact shelving. Bookshelves, of course, evolved alongside and in response to the changes in books, and Petroski covers those, as well. Good stuff.

We finally had to give in and turn the heat on, as it was down around 65 degrees in the living room. That doesn't sound that cold, but it has a vaulted ceiling. And a sliding glass door, which, as far as I can tell, isn't actually insulated. (After all, it's southern California, how cold could it get?)

Apparently Connectix finally fixed their VirtualPC product so that you can install (Red Hat) Linux again. M picked up the Mac OS X version today. It's kind of neat being able to run Windows or Linux or whatever PC OS you're interested in full-screen on a shiny new Mac. On the other hand, it's also pretty sick.

Ha! I finally figured out how to make Mac OS X handle our printer correctly. By default, the printer would use 600 dpi, no duplex. To get it to print things at 1200 dpi and duplex, you had to go through the options and set them manually. You could set a “custom” setting (so long as you only wanted one, mind you—who could ever want more than one custom setting?), but that gets old fast. In any case, I don't want to have to switch to a custom setting everytime—I want the damn thing to do what I want it to do everytime, without having to jump through any hoops.

After some poking around with fs_usage, in hopes of finding some nice file somewhere, I realized that the only way to do it was to copy the PPD file, modify that PPD file with my choices for default settings, and then recreate the printer using the new PPD.

Some poking around revealed the PPD files living in /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/. I copied the HP LaserJet 4000 Series file to Sensible HP LaserJet 4000 Series, then edited it with Emacs. I used isearch to find all the occurences of the string Default, and changed their values to what I wanted (the possible values appear below each setting, as the PPD file is really a PostScript program that gets run to set various parameters appropriately). Then I saved, zapped the old printer, created a new one, chose Sensible HP LaserJet 4000 Series as the type of printer, and voila!, the defaults now reflect my choices.

Too bad it wasn't easier.

Our furnace blew up this morning.

Well, no, not really quite as spectacular as that. What really happened was that we got up, and while I was washing my hands at the bathroom sink, I heard this really loud crash that sounded like it was either very far away or just on the other side of the wall (I think that's because some of the sound was carried through the ducts).

The only possible source for a noise like that was the furnace (especially given that it is on the other side of the aforementioned wall. Checking it out showed that a big metal panel on the front had fallen off and crashed against the inside of the door.

It wouldn't go back on, of course. It has metal tabs at the top and bottom. You slide in the top tab, then push the bottom into the furnace and slide it down until the bottom tabs lock behind another piece of metal. But they were all bent. So I used a hammer and a pair of needle-nose Vise-Grips to bend everything back straight.

What a fun start to the day!

Speaking of those Vise-Grips, they're the single best thing my father ever gave me. He's a builder, and one day he took me to a tool store where only builders were allowed to shop. They had everything, amazing tools—huge ones, tiny ones, tools that could do several things, and tools that were incredibly specialized. He offered to buy me something.

My first choice was a Yankee Screwdriver, as seen in The Blues Brothers, but he talked me out of that. (It turned out he had one he never used that he gave me later.) So I looked again, and settled on the relatively tiny pair of needle-nose Vise-Grips. I've had them for nearly twenty years now, and they're still the most useful thing I think I own. I use them to bend things, hold things together, screw things back together again. They never make it back to our tool drawer because they're always needed, instead sitting on the counter between the kitchen and the living room. They're great for opening cans of frozen orange juice or milk jugs after the plastic tabs designed for “easy opening” tear off in your fingers. And they do a great job on furnace covers, too.

Thanks, Dad!