Tuesday, January 15, 2002

I spend much of my day working in text editors and outliners. Many of those tools can only show plain unstyled text. Some of them let the text show up bold andor italic andor colored. For many purposes, being able to have those simple stylings of text -- bold, italic, and color -- is enough. Radio Userland lets you specify bold and italic in an outline node's text via the standard b and i HTML markup tags. You can between the styled text and the HTML markup by pressing Ctrl-` on a Windows system, Apple+ on a Mac. I'm working to add this capability to the JOE outliner. I'll also add the ability to specify color using the standard font color="something" HTML markup. 4:57:44 PM

Sufficiency One of the things I like is sufficiency. When something does just what is needed. With the implication that no more is done. Sufficiency can pop up in all sorts of human endeavors. 4:33:54 PM

Things Sometimes Taught in Schools Don't share your information with your friends. Don't engage in excited, interesting conversations. Don't take time to chew things over. Quickly provide the obvious answer. You don't know what you need to learn. If you don't remember an answer, you cannot look it up in a book. Spend your time with a small slice of the demographic pie. Especially don't spend time with people of many different ages. Stay seated. Obtain permission before going to the bathroom. 4:03:11 PM

Homework Here-and-Now I work at home. One could call it homework. But it's the best flavor of homework. I like it a lot. I'm surrounded by animals and books and information/entertainment devices and all the coziness of my base camp here on a coupla hundred acres in the Siskiyou Mountains. At a BigCo where I worked, everyone fought for an office with a window Not being much of a fighter, and living low on the dashtype scale,I generally got placed in a closeted hole of an office. Here at home, though, I get to work indoors anywhere I like, or, even better, outdoors, which of course provides complete sphere of utterly-transparent-windowation. Hahah ! Home work rules ! 2:57:51 PM

A Brief History of the Dash People At a BigCo where I sometimes worked, if you enjoyed the freedom of being a contractor rather than a regular employee, your email name (and, later on, security badge coloration) marked you as such via the prepending of a dash code. There were several flavors of dash people. v- (pronounced "vee dash") marked vendors, c- ("cee dash") marked contractors, a- ("ay dash") marked employees of a temp service ("agency"), etc. Although in the early days of BigCo, dash people were pretty much full citizens, as time wore on they became less and less so. Dash people could no longer attend certain meetings or refreshment events, and they were no longer included on certain classes of BigCo-wide email. Many dash people grokked the trend, and converted to regularity. Others quietly left a world that had so changed. 2:40:57 PM

Sunday Afternoons and Evenings: Procrastination Having a certain procrastinatory streak - well, okay, yeah, it's a few miles wide actually - I often found myself on Sunday afternoons and evenings immersed in homework. Which kinda sucked, although it did keep saturdays free and clear. I think that's important. In my current 24/7 life, I still like Saturdays best of all. 2:25:21 PM

Time Spent on Homework I didn't get serious homework until 7th grade, back in 1963-4. We were given 3 to 4 hours-worth each night. The theory that was presented: "We're preparing you for high-school and college." Interestingly, I had 2 to 3 hrs/night homework in high-school. Roughly an hour less than I had in 7th grade. And, in college: since there were only 3 or 4 hrs of classes a day, the 3 to 4 hrs of academic work outside class just rounded out to a reasonable 6 to 8 hr thought-work day, and so it seemed like there were effectively 0 hrs of homework. I did not report back on this to my 7th grade teachers. 2:21:32 PM

POTS and BNBs They killed the network my original satellite modem was connected to. So now I've got to install the "upgrade" satellite modem, which is to the original as a WinModem is to a real modem. (For those who don't know WinModems: they have a lot less hardware in them, and instead rely on your main computer running some extra driver software. Problem is, that software is often/usually buggy, much more so than a more-hardware REAL modem usually is. Same it seems with this new model 360 satellite modem: fewer parts, buggy driver software.) In the meantime, I'm using a USB-port POTS (Plain Ol' Telephone System) modem. It's the Hawking PN580U, fine little device, I travel with one in my pc repair kit, drivers just WORK (as opposed to first USB POTS modem, the D-Link DSB-560, which is the same hardware but has some fussy flakey i'm-here-i'm-not-here drivers that are designed by .... SATAN !!!). But the download speed's 21.6 kbps here in RuralVille, versus the satellite's 300 to 1000 kbps (fastest for the first megabyte, slowing to 300 on multi-meg downloads). I'd forgotten how slow things can go. If the satellite downgrade modem install weren't such a bad-news-bear [BNB], I'd do it right away, but it IS such a beast, from all cyberniated reports, so I need a clear 4 to 6 hour block of time, which won't come until tomorrow it looks like. 2:12:24 PM

Great Kids I'm lucky to know and work with lots of great kids A group of them is putting on an evening of skits/songs/poems this weekend and next. The items in the show mix humor and seriousness-sometimes-moving-into-angst. Teens can get into that angst thing, esp the artistic/sensitive ones. We older survivors go for the humor stuff. I've been all-nighting the past week getting a poster together for them. There's a jpg of it out here: http://StanKrute.com/VoicesUnchained/2002/Poster.jpg (Last year's poster is at http://StanKrute.com/VoicesUnchained/2001/PosterOrange.jpg) Today I get to work on the programs. We do 'em CD-booklet size, so as to eventually be able to accompany CDs/DVDs of the performances. Off to Photoshop and InDesign ! 10:35:21 AM