The Computer that Did Everything Twice

“I see everything twice!” the soldier who saw everything twice shouted in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. He was in the throes of delirium and died soon afterward.

I’m not seeing everything twice. But thanks to my computer, I’m having to do a lot of things twice and that has, at times, given me feelings ranging from “going mildly crazy” to “presentiment of doom.”

I’m happy to report that the shenanigans Google Mail got up to about a year ago, which I wrote about here, are no longer troubling me. So, I don’t have to type my gmail password twice to login once; I don’t have to watch the progress bar ooze across the screen twice before arriving at my inbox. That’s one mercy.

However, I’ve picked up on a number of other issues demanding repetition of tasks that I would just as soon not have to repeat. They may be unique to my own personal computer (I mean to say, the PC I use at work). Or they may be signs that Microsoft, Adobe and their ilk are having a bad day this year. I’d give them a pat on the head for reassurance, but that would require me to reach up their … never mind.

First, there’s the background image settings on my Windows desktop. Earlier this year, I shot a nice, scenic photo and asked the computer nicely to make it my background image, set to fill the screen. Every time my computer restarts, however, it shows me a tantalizing glimpse of my desired background photo, then switches as if by default to a detail image from the same photo, set on tile. Every. Time. Would it be unreasonable to expect Windows to save my preference and not make me do this every time I restart the machine? I’d like to say no. But this is Microsoft we’re talking about.

When I stick my camera’s memory card in the card reader slot on the computer, I have to be careful what I do in what order. Say I’m dragging photos off the card into a folder on the harddrive. I have to have that folder ready before I insert the card, open the relevant folder on it and attempt to click and drag, or else the computer will likely freeze and I’ll have to restart and go through the whole process again.

When it comes time to remove the card, I try to be scrupulous about opening a context menu and asking the computer to eject it, so I can safely remove it from the slot. But I find that every time – again, every time – I get an error message saying something went wrong, and I have to click “Try Again” at least once before it will eject properly. Occasionally, if I’ve already Photoshopped a copy of some of the pictures that I pulled over to my computer, the cycle of “Something’s wrong, want to try again?” will continue until I close Photoshop. It’s as if there’s a file still open on the card, even though there isn’t.

While I’m mentioning Photoshop, let me also kvetch about the process of printing a JPEG. You go to the print dialog box and find, naturally, that the image is bigger than the printable area of the page. That’s no surprise. What’s weird is that it’s trying to squeeze the landscape-oriented image onto a portrait-oriented page, even though the portrait/landscape selector is, by default, set on landscape. So, I have to click portrait, wait a moment for the program to process the action (which has no effect whatsoever), then click landscape to get what it should have been showing me in the first place – and then check the “scale to fit media” box, etc. Not only is this frankly stupid to start with, but the next time I try to print a JPEG (sometimes I’m doing several in a row), I have to go through all these steps again.

Lately, I’ve become hip to a site called Scribd that allows me to upload a document – say, a PDF of a multi-page legal decision or a press release – then copy the embed code so that I can paste it into an embed on my newspaper’s web platform and include the original copy in the online version of my story. Ideally, the embed should display across the full width of the body text in the online story. But what actually happens is, on the first go around, what displays is a shrunken-down version that only goes across about a third of the column. Strangely, my computer seems to be the only one this happens to, and when I go back to Scribd, look up the existing upload and recopy the embed code, then paste the updated embed into the story, it works fine. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t work on the first try. Ever. But it works correctly when you go back into the upload and do it over. Always.

Weird, huh? Maybe this could be an early sign that my computer is fixing to go the way of the soldier who saw everything twice. I hope not. But who knows? I say, who knows?

Login Lunacy

I can't decide which of my free web-based email accounts is trying harder to get me to quit.

The news is not so much that they're trying, but that Google is actually pulling even with Yahoo! these days. My habit of checking my two main personal email accounts at least once a day had slowed, in the case of Yahoo!, to once or twice a week; I was pretty much just keeping it around as a fallback position in case Google went on the fritz, or as a second email address so when I want to back up a document, I can attach it to an email to myself. But the rewards of preferring Gmail for my everyday business are dwindling. If I didn't have years of history with both accounts, I would quit both of them like, a month ago.

Logging in and out of these accounts doesn't really need to be a big production. You go to your "mail dot" web address. You type or select the user account you want to log in. You type the password. You're in. But Yahoo! is like this: You tell it which account you want to log in, then you get a screen where you have to confirm that you want to log into that account. The only thing worthwhile about that screen is unchecking the box next to "stay logged in," because you're security conscious about that kind of thing; but even if you uncheck the box, Yahoo! will keep you logged in on that computer until you tell it to log out. Anyway, the next screen is where you finally get to type your password, and then you're in.

Logging out of Yahoo! also requires more steps than should be necessary. You select "sign out" from a pull-down menu, and then it shows you a screen similar to the one you started with, showing you a choice of Yahoo! accounts available on your computer (I happen to have two, but one is an old account that I rarely check because it forwards to the other). After several instances in which I thought I had signed out and came back later to find I was still logged in, I noticed that this screen that Yahoo! shows you after you tell it to sign out of your account actually requires you to confirm that you want to "sign out of all accounts." So, it won't just do what you tell it to do, either signing in or signing out; you have to tell it to do what you've already told it to do. This is why Yahoo! sucks.

Gmail was all right, by comparison, until a month or two ago when it practically forced everyone to start using the "new Gmail" format. Basically, it wouldn't stop nagging you about it with pop-up reminders and such. Sort of like how Youtube encouraged its users to select the option of activating its Dark Theme by making the site impossible to use until they did so. Only now, what happens when you sign out of one Gmail account (say, your work address) and into another (say, your personal account) is like this: (1) You select "sign out" from the pull-down menu. (2) Google shows you a screen warning you that "Syncing is paused. Your bookmarks, history, passwords and more are no longer being synced to your account, but will remain on this device. Sign in to start syncing again" - and you then have to choose either "Continue" or "Sign in again," neither of which, at first blush, sounds like "sign out of my damn account already," which is the button you want to click. (3) After clicking "Continue," you get to the screen where you choose which account you want to sign in, click it, and (4) enter your password. Then (5) Google shows you an animation of an envelope opening, signifying that it is loading the way over-produced version of your inbox that came with the new Gmail. (6) Your inbox appears for a tantalizing instant. (7) Google sends you back to the password screen, where you have to type that monster a second time. [EDIT: Actually, it sends you back to the "Choose an account" screen. Whatever.] (8) You see an encore of that cute envelope animation. (9) Finally, you get into your inbox.

Step 2 only seems to occur going from my work email to my personal account. Steps 7-8 used to happen only going in that same direction, but now I consistently see it every time I switch accounts in either direction. I've also noticed that the Step 5 envelope animation tends to last longer, or plays part-way and then skips back to the start before playing straight through, while the Step 8 encore is just once through the whole animation.

I don't know why Google needs me to enter my password twice every time I go from one account to the other, or why it now requires me to confirm that I want to "continue" signing out when I've just told it to sign out. The more use I make of Google (and in my job, I use its features extensively), the more mysterious it becomes. As far as I can tell, the only way the new Gmail format benefits me is by taking longer to log in and out, eating more data and requiring more memory to accomplish pretty much what the previous version did. And how wonderful it is -- isn't it, isn't it, answer me now! ISN'T IT? -- to have all this purveyed to you by a business whose approach to its customers is to ask them to switch from a product they've learned to make do with to whatever comes next, to ask them every five minutes until they submit, knowing there can be no going back. ISN'T IT JUST GRAND?

ScoreFish

This idea's time has so thoroughly come that I am probably too late to claim credit for it, but hey - if even a small part of it hasn't been tried out, remember whom to tip when you sell the idea for a zillion bucks.

When a band or orchestra prepares and performs a concert - and this goes for solo artists too - in many cases, they have to read the notes they're playing off sheet music. Where does this sheet music come from? Maybe a file drawer in a music library somewhere deep in the bowels of the building, from which a score librarian has to dig it up and into which it must be filed again when the musicians are done with it. Maybe it had to be purchased at an exorbitant price. Maybe it had to be rented and must be returned after the performance. If the concert goes on the road, keeping track of the scores can become part of the general logistical nightmare. If scores are lost or damaged, it may cost the organization dearly. And along with the scores comes a bulky bunch of supporting paraphernalia, such as telescoping music stands, reading lights to clip to the stands, fancy folders, etc.

What if all this was replaced by large, touch-screen Android tablets or iPads dedicated to a scoring app that displays each performer's part? Let's call this app, for the sake of example, ScoreFish (*blush*). Here are some of my ideas about how ScoreFish could work.

First, each musician (including chorus members and soloists) would be able to log into any tablet on, say, the orchestra's network. Once logged in, he (or she) could open a full orchestral score of all the pieces being prepared and performed for the time being, or just the ones a given performer is involved in, at the discretion of the music librarian. This can be drilled down to a view of the performer's part only, or his section of the orchestra, or (for singers) a vocal score with piano reduction and the individual user's part picked out in bold type, etc.

Annotations could be added and deleted by hand using a touch-screen stylus, either by the musician or by a conductor preparing scores for his musicians. Maybe with handwriting-recognition software the annotations could be added to the score as though part of the printed music (not sure whether this is a great idea, though). Each musician's, singer's or conductor's annotations could be saved as a customized version of the score in case they are ever called for again, a few seasons down the road; the original score is unalterable and can always be reverted to if necessary.

Page turns during performance or rehearsal could be triggered either by tapping a spot on the screen or, with a webcam, making a certain gesture like a jerk of the head or a flick of the wrist - even, heaven knows, a page-turning gesture of the hand. Or there might even be some way to program the pages to turn themselves in sync with the performance, either using a microphone and sound recognition software or (during a performance) some type of remote controller that keeps all the tablets on the same page of music, like how someone in the sound booth keeps the supertitles on the screen above the stage in sync with the singers. Who knows if it couldn't be programmed to follow the conductor's gesture!

Chorus scores could include IPA symbols for the lyrics, a translation of the text on every page, and a choice of languages to sing the work in, any of which can be completely or partly shown or hidden at the user's discretion, and annotated as well. "Road-mapping" marks, such as when a few singers in the Tenor 1 section are asked to dart up to the Alto 2 line for a few notes, or when some but not all members of a section are asked to sing a particular passage, or when different chords are divided up in different ways, could be reflected in each individual chorus member's part.

A playback function could be included for rehearsal purposes, complete with an optional metronome tick that can be raised or lowered in volume or muted altogether, adjustable speed (for rehearsing slowly, then working up toward a target tempo), and the ability to select whether to play the full orchestra, a custom-selected group of instruments or voice parts, or a piano reduction. Also up to choice is whether to mute one's own part, play it at the appropriate dynamic level, or shine an audio spotlight on it by playing it louder or doubling it with another instrument.

Playback could, of course, take place over on-board speakers, external speakers or headphones. The tuning could be adjusted to the frequency chosen by the orchestra (which can vary depending on which century's practice it is based on). A conductor-sensitive playback, perhaps using a special device that scans the conductor's movements and syncs with other devices on the stage, could even be used, if necessary, to replace absent members of an orchestra with a virtual performer. I can even imagine it being used to replace an entire pit orchestra for, say, a small school musical.

The tablets would have to be mounted in such a way that they would stay put. Traditional music stands may or may not do the trick. Also, power supply would be an issue - it would have to get every member of the orchestra through a performance potentially three or four hours long, if not longer. There might not be a battery in the world that could do this. But maybe a custom stand could be included with a built-in charging port or an immediate source of power to run the device, provided this could be plugged into a power outlet somewhere under the stage. To be able to move these stands around while the stage is being reset during an intermission could be a difficulty, requiring a new concept of stage design. Or maybe someone will finally surprise us all by announcing the discovery of broadcast power, sending energy via a wireless link.

If a tablet is stolen or lost, it can simply be deleted from the library's account and remotely deactivated. As the concert season progresses, pieces whose performance dates have passed can be removed as new pieces to be rehearsed are added, again at the music librarian's discretion or as requested by a user. If they can take their devices home with them to woodshed their part, it stands to reason they may also add any score they desire to their account, provided a licensing fee has been paid either by the user (who has a unique sign-in ID for the app to access files on the cloud) or by the score library. And so even copyright law is covered.

Also, someone could keep track of statistics of how much time each member of the ensemble spends woodshedding his or her part. Maybe there could be a bonus for the most effort.

How does that sound, music nerds?

Crap. Now that I Google it, I see a lot of it has already been done. (The image above is an app called Scorch.) Cool, though.

Dialing Idea

I woke up from a dream this morning with an idea that, at least lying awake in bed in a haze of drowsiness, I thought was pretty clever. Though I don't remember what the dream was about, the idea goes like this.

You know how I've often complained about that loud beep the phone company plays in your ear when you incorrectly guess whether or not you should dial a 1 at the beginning of a phone number? Oh, how that annoys me. It might just be the pet peeve of my life. I've lived in at least two metropolitan areas where there are local numbers in three, four, or even five different area codes - and there are numbers starting with the same area codes that would be a long distance call from the same local dialing area. The trouble is, you only find out whether a particular number is long-distance (and so to be prefixed by a 1) or local (no 1 prefix) until the phone company screams a deafening tone in your ear and instructs you to dial again, with or without the 1. I ask you, as I have asked many times before, why a computer that can instantly detect whether a phone number should or shouldn't be prefixed by 1 can't interpret your intentions without complaint and simply connect the call. If it knows which way is correct, it knows where the number you are dialing is located and doesn't need to correct you, hurt your ears, damage your hearing or force you to spend more time dialing the same damn number. Sigh.

So here's part one of my suggestion: Just program the phone company's computers so that all regular phone numbers start with a 1. Period.

Basically, this would turn all 10-digit phone numbers into 11-digit numbers beginning with 1.

Now, carrying that thought further, suppose you used different prefixes to accomplish different things. "1" could designate a regular phone call. "2" could prompt the phone company to send you directly to the voice mail account associated with the number. Having an account set up to go with each number is another problem. Maybe at first it'll be on you to know whether there is one or not, at risk of having a tone blared in your ear followed by an error message. But if there is a voice mail account on the number, even the phone's user could dial directly into it and then punch in a PIN during the outgoing message to log into their account.

"3" could be to use voice recognition software to convert your voice message into a text or an email associated with the phone number, with the same caveat as to whether such a texting or email account exists. This prefix could also be used for TTY calls, text telephones for the hearing impaired.

I don't know what all the one-digit prefixes could be used for at this point. I imagine you might want to keep 0 for the operator, 4 for information, 9 for emergencies and 8 for toll-free calls. Maybe 7 could be pay-by-the-minute calls, like tech support hotlines, psychic advisers and telepimping. That still leaves 5 and 6 for unforeseen applications, or to catch the overflow of cell numbers. But with a whole prefix set aside for, say, information, you could bring a lot more research applications within the fingertips of a telephone user than just looking up listed land-line numbers. Each cell provider could provide listings of its users. Government agencies could have their own prefix, or maybe one for agency phone numbers and one for research hotlines available for their use only. There could be a prefix for reverse-directory lookups of a given phone number.

Maybe all these ideas are past their time. With smart phones and devices, people may soon learn to get by without dialing phone numbers at all. Everything will be a hot link, designed by their smart device's visual interface to look like a button labeled with the name of a person or organization; you poke that spot on the touch-screen and it dials for you without troubling you to note the seven, ten, or eleven digit number it just dialed. Phone numbers could be going the way of IP addresses - those strings of numbers that designate each device connected to the web. Unless one has a very technical web-related job, one rarely has to look up that number and would probably have to look it up if asked for it. The IP number is embedded in code most of us never look at, represented by graphic buttons and whatnot.

One day, maybe soon, your phone number could be like that. You'll share phone numbers the way people today send each other an email just so they have their address. But when all devices, including phones, become roughly equivalent, will there be enough numbers to go around? That's where planning to add prefixes to make sense of the chaos might make sense.

Pointing Macros

Here are a few more Word macros that you liturgical scholars may like to snap up, provided (1) you use Windows XP and MS Word 2003; (2) you own a copy of the Melody Fonts (Melody A, Melody B, Melody C), which (alas) are no longer serviced by the tech-savvy monks of St. Meinrad's Abbey in Indiana; (3) you have set up a paragraph style (titled, say, "Music") in which the font is Melody A, based on no style, with Normal as the style of the following paragraph, while the font in your Normal style is Times New Roman; and (4) you follow the initial steps in my previous post on Word macros, so that you have the appropriately named, blank, keyboard-activated macros ready to fill in with code. Then it's just a matter of typing the codes shown in the image below into the visual basic editor above the "End Sub" line of each respective macro.The upper row of macros is especially handy if you want to use breves (those whole notes squished between short line segments) to designate the "reciting note" of a particular phrase. I have included the low D and E ones even though I have no particular application for them, just in case they are of use to you: See how nice I am?

The "versicle" and "response" macros simply save you having to remember, and constantly repeat, the key strokes for two very special characters that liturgical typesetters use to distinguish between the minister's and the congregation's lines. The second line of code in each of these two macros is important because it restores the font to Times New Roman, whatever font it may pull these special characters from. If you're not a TNR fan, feel free to substitute your favorite "Normal" font instead.

Now go and have a good time pointing chant tones! That's what I have planned for my Friday night, anyway...

Some Helpful Word Macros

Step 1. Be a user of Windows XP and Microsoft Word 2003. This is not open for debate.

Step 2. From the menus at the top of the MS Word window, pull down "Tools," then select "Macro," then "Record New Macro." Type a distinctive name for a macro; then, under "Assign Macro To," press the "Keyboard" button. Type an unassigned keyboard shortcut (examples will be given later), then click "Assign" and "Close." Then immediately press the "Stop" button on the floating Macro Recorder control. Repeat, substituting different macro names and keyboard shortcuts, until you have created a blank "placeholder" macro for each of the macros below.

Step 3. Pull down the "Tools" menu, then select "Macro," then "Macros," then click the "Edit" button to open up the Microsoft Visual Basic editor, in which you can edit the code for all the macros in your Normal template. Copy the following paragraphs of code and paste each section of code under the appropriate macro name, after the lines "Sub [MACRO NAME]," "[MACRO NAME] Macro," and "Macro recorded [DATE] by [USER]," but before the line that says "End Sub."

And now some macros that I think you may find useful. I give first the name I suggest assigning to each macro, then a nice eligible keyboard shortcut, and finally the code to paste into Virtual Basic.

HEADER: To put the filename, path, and page number in a hairline box at the top of each page of a Word document:
Macro Name: Header
Hot Key: ctrl+. (Hold "ctrl" key and type a period.)

If ActiveWindow.View.SplitSpecial <> wdPaneNone Then
ActiveWindow.Panes(2).Close
End If
If ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.Type = wdNormalView Or ActiveWindow. _
ActivePane.View.Type = wdOutlineView Then
ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.Type = wdPrintView
End If
ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.SeekView = wdSeekCurrentPageHeader
Selection.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphRight
Application.DisplayAutoCompleteTips = True
NormalTemplate.AutoTextEntries("Filename and path").Insert Where:= _
Selection.Range, RichText:=True
Selection.TypeParagraph
Selection.TypeText Text:="Page "
Selection.Fields.Add Range:=Selection.Range, Type:=wdFieldPage
Selection.TypeParagraph
Selection.WholeStory
With Selection.Borders(wdBorderTop)
.LineStyle = Options.DefaultBorderLineStyle
.LineWidth = Options.DefaultBorderLineWidth
.Color = Options.DefaultBorderColor
End With
With Selection.Borders(wdBorderLeft)
.LineStyle = Options.DefaultBorderLineStyle
.LineWidth = Options.DefaultBorderLineWidth
.Color = Options.DefaultBorderColor
End With
With Selection.Borders(wdBorderBottom)
.LineStyle = Options.DefaultBorderLineStyle
.LineWidth = Options.DefaultBorderLineWidth
.Color = Options.DefaultBorderColor
End With
With Selection.Borders(wdBorderRight)
.LineStyle = Options.DefaultBorderLineStyle
.LineWidth = Options.DefaultBorderLineWidth
.Color = Options.DefaultBorderColor
End With
ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.SeekView = wdSeekMainDocument

ROUGH: To add the effect of a rubber stamp saying "ROUGH #1" to the top of the page (which can be edited after being inserted to show whatever Rough Number you want):
Macro Name: Rough
Hot Key: ctrl+;

ActiveDocument.Shapes.AddTextEffect(msoTextEffect2, "ROUGH #1" & Chr(13) & "" & Chr(10) & "__ Approved by KS", _
"Arial Black", 24#, msoFalse, msoFalse, 232.1, 107.25).Select
Selection.ShapeRange.TextEffect.PresetShape = msoTextEffectShapeSlantDown
Selection.ShapeRange.WrapFormat.Type = wdWrapTight
Selection.ShapeRange.ScaleWidth 0.62, msoFalse, msoScaleFromBottomRight
Selection.ShapeRange.ScaleHeight 0.75, msoFalse, msoScaleFromTopLeft

PASTE NO FORMAT: To paste from the clipboard without keeping the format of the document it was copied from (i.e., without changing the format of the insertion point):
Macro Name: PasteNoFormat
Hot Key: alt+v

Selection.PasteSpecial Link:=False, DataType:=wdPasteText, Placement:=wdInLine, DisplayAsIcon:=False

FLIP QUOTE MARKS: When, after pasting a section of text copied from another document, you need to change all the double-quotes into single and all the single-quotes into double:
Macro Name: ReverseQuotes
Hot Key: alt+' (apostrophe)

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "'"
.Replacement.Text = "@@"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindAsk
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchByte = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
With Selection.Find
.Text = """"
.Replacement.Text = "'"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindAsk
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchByte = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
With Selection.Find
.Text = "@@"
.Replacement.Text = """"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindAsk
.Format = False
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchByte = False
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

NOTE: You may have some trouble with apostrophes on this one.

BLOCK QUOTE MARGINS: To indent both right and left margins of the selected paragraph by 0.5 inches:
Macro Name: BlockQuoteMargins
Hot Key: alt+b

With Selection.ParagraphFormat
.LeftIndent = InchesToPoints(0.5)
.RightIndent = InchesToPoints(0.5)
.SpaceBefore = 0
.SpaceBeforeAuto = False
.SpaceAfter = 0
.SpaceAfterAuto = False
.LineSpacingRule = wdLineSpaceSingle
.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphLeft
.WidowControl = True
.KeepWithNext = False
.KeepTogether = False
.PageBreakBefore = False
.NoLineNumber = False
.Hyphenation = True
.FirstLineIndent = InchesToPoints(0)
.OutlineLevel = wdOutlineLevelBodyText
.CharacterUnitLeftIndent = 0
.CharacterUnitRightIndent = 0
.CharacterUnitFirstLineIndent = 0
.LineUnitBefore = 0
.LineUnitAfter = 0
End With

FOOTNOTE: To insert a footnote, placing the reference number at the insertion point:
Macro Name: Footnote
Hot Key: alt+i

With ActiveDocument.Range(Start:=ActiveDocument.Content.Start, End:= _
ActiveDocument.Content.End)
With .FootnoteOptions
.Location = wdBottomOfPage
.NumberingRule = wdRestartContinuous
.StartingNumber = 1
.NumberStyle = wdNoteNumberStyleArabic
End With
.Footnotes.Add Range:=Selection.Range, Reference:=""
End With

COLUMN BREAK: When typing on a page formatted in two or more columns, to insert a hard column break at the insertion point:
Macro Name: ColumnBreak
Hot Key: alt-/

Selection.InsertBreak Type:=wdColumnBreak

EXTREME EMPHASIS: To convert selected text into all caps, bold type, and word-only underline:
Macro Name: BoldCapUnderline
Hot Key: alt+;

Selection.Font.Bold = wdToggle
If Selection.Font.Underline = wdUnderlineWords Then
Selection.Font.Underline = wdUnderlineNone
Else
Selection.Font.Underline = wdUnderlineWords
End If
Selection.Font.AllCaps = wdToggle

LIGHT YELLOW SHADING: To create a "yellow highlighting" effect over the selected text, one that leaves the text looking very readable when printed on a color laserjet:
Macro Name: YellowShading
Hot Key: alt+1

Selection.Shading.Texture = wdTextureNone
Selection.Shading.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
Selection.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = wdColorLightYellow

LIGHT GREEN SHADING: Ditto, only with a green highlighting effect:
MacroName: GreenShading
Hot Key: alt+2

Selection.Shading.Texture = wdTextureNone
Selection.Shading.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
Selection.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = wdColorLightGreen

LIGHT BLUE SHADING: Ditto, only with a blue highlighting effect (which, I find, is easier to see on paper than on the monitor):
MacroName: BlueShading
Hot Key: alt+3

Selection.Shading.Texture = wdTextureNone
Selection.Shading.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
Selection.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = wdColorLightTurquoise

ORANGE SHADING: Ditto, only rather like an orange highlighter:
MacroName: OrangeShading
Hot Key: alt+4

Selection.Shading.Texture = wdTextureNone
Selection.Shading.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
Selection.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = wdColorTan

PINK SHADING: Ditto, only with pink highlighting:
Macro Name: PinkShading
Hot Key: alt+5

Selection.Shading.Texture = wdTextureNone
Selection.Shading.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
Selection.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = 16764159

PURPLE SHADING: Ditto, only with purple highlighting:
Macro Name: PurpleShading
Hot Key: alt+6

Selection.Shading.Texture = wdTextureNone
Selection.Shading.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
Selection.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = 16764108

NOTE: I'm sure these "shading" macros can be tweaked to suit the color calibration of your monitor and/or printer. I recorded them so that I could "flag" paragraphs of research material for up to 6 different topics of interest.

RED BOLD: To change a selection from regular type to bold, red type:
Macro Name: RedBold
Hot Key: alt+7

Selection.Font.Bold = wdToggle
With Selection.Font
.Name = "Times"
.Size = 12
.Bold = True
.Italic = False
.Underline = wdUnderlineNone
.UnderlineColor = wdColorAutomatic
.StrikeThrough = False
.DoubleStrikeThrough = False
.Outline = False
.Emboss = False
.Shadow = False
.Hidden = False
.SmallCaps = False
.AllCaps = False
.Color = wdColorRed
.Engrave = False
.Superscript = False
.Subscript = False
.Spacing = 0
.Scaling = 100
.Position = 0
.Kerning = 0
.Animation = wdAnimationNone
End With

GREEN BOLD: To achieve the same effect, only with green type:
Macro Name: GreenBold
Hot Key: alt+8
Code: The same except, where RedBold says "wdColorRed," change it to "wdColorGreen."

BLUE BOLD: Ditto, only with blue type:
Macro Name: BlueBold
Hot Key: alt+9
Code: The same as RedBold, only replace "wdColorRed" with "wdColorBlue."

PINK BOLD: Ditto, only with pink type:
Macro Name: PinkBold
Hot Key: alt+0
Code: The same as RedBold, only replace "wdColorRed" with "wdColorPink"

NOTE: These colored types can be handy, for example, when you have to edit copy & you want to draw attention to text you recommend deleting, to your suggested rewrite, to new material you would like to see added, or to wordings proposed by different editors, translators, etc.

Two more shortcuts have proven very handy to me. I work in a variety of applications, some of which have one sort of keyboard shortcuts for an em-dash or an en-dash, and some another. As I move between these programs, I find it most difficult to keep in mind which shortcut I have to use; in some cases, guessing incorrectly leads to disaster. So, I've created my own customization. I recommend that you do too.

EM and EN DASH: From the "Insert" menu, choose "Symbol," scroll through the character map of your default font until you find the em dash (and likewise for the en dash). Once that character is selected, click "Shortcut Key," then assign alt+m for the em dash, and alt+n for the en dash, then click "Close" and "Cancel." Then it's just a matter of remembering how to use them. Use the em dash instead of two hyphens to indicate a break in a sentence; use the en dash instead of a hyphen to indicate a range of dates, page numbers, etc.

NUMBERING: From the "Tools" menu, choose "Customize," then "Keyboards," then under Categories select "Format," and under Commands select "FormatNumberDefault." Under Press New Shortcut Key, press alt+l (lowercase L), then click "Close" twice. This will insert a numbered list without requiring you to hunt through the menus for it.

These are only some of the macros that have saved me tons of keystrokes and mouse-clicks in the last five or six years. May they come in handy for you!

P.S.: Upon request, I can also give you some handy tips on how to transfer macros, autotext, etc. from your normal template to another user's ditto. This can come in especially handy in a shared-folder type of workspace, where different workers are doing similar things and need access to the same shortcuts.

Bed Warmer

As my city is buried deeper and deeper under ice, sleet, and snow, I find my thoughts turning towards one question: How to stay warm?

This is a particular problem in my present apartment, where the newish vinyl windows are so badly insulated that the vertical blinds rattle when the wind gusts. There have been times when I could feel a cold draft through the tight-shut windows, even while standing several feet away. The doors aren't tightly sealed, either, but it's the windows that really kill me.

I miss my old apartment, with its elderly metal-framed windows and the over-abundant heat that rose up from the basement. I remember having to crack a window open sometimes to let out excess heat, even on a cold winter day. Now for warmth I depend on my own apartment's central heating, which at full blast doesn't quite take the chill off the air on windy days like this. Back around Christmas, I suffered through a few nights when, even curled up with a pile of quilts tucked in all around me, my body heat couldn't keep up with the icy draft that somehow stabbed its way into my blanket cocoon.

So I told my father today while we were on the phone, comparing notes about the grandmother storm now blanketing our area. I was waxing nostalgic about hot water bottles, electric blankets, and those pans of hot stones people used to transfer from the fireplace to the bottom of their bedclothes. That's when my father told me about a simple type of bedwarmer one of his ex-parishioners had made for him, something anybody with a little needle-and-thread know-how could make at home, and which could very quickly, simply, and safely warm up your bed on a cold winter's night.

Start with a cloth pouch. You can make one yourself out of your choice of fabric, or you can use a pillowcase or slip-cover of some kind. Fill the bag with 2 to 4 pounds of dried beans, or (if you live near a farm supply store) feed corn, making sure to discard any plastic wrappings. Sew the bag shut.

When you want to warm up your bed, pop this bag of beans or corn into the microwave and heat it for a couple of minutes. (You may have to put up with a certain smell when you do this.) Carefully wrap the bag in a towel and/or a second pillowcase to avoid burning yourself, and stick the bundle under the covers of your bed. A few minutes later, you should be able to get into a nice, toasty-warm bed. Push the bed-warming bundle toward the foot of your bed and it will heat your feet for a while, too.

Here's a crafty website that gives a fully illustrated explanation of how to make one of these bed-warmers from scratch. I think they would make a great gift. Really. I could use one right now!

Time Wasted Central

When my Dad joined Facebook, it was only so that he could connect with some resource or other that wasn't available any other way. After looking around for a while, he asked me (via an off-the-wall message): "What exactly is the point of Facebook?" I had to candidly reply that it's an engine for burning time.

That, however, was before I started playing any of the Facebook games, popularly known as apps. Soon after I started doing this, another longtime friend joined Facebook and my first post to his wall was: "Welcome to Time Wasted Central!" And by then I was only starting to really know how true that is.

In the past couple of months, I have wasted so much time playing Facebook apps that I am sincerely ashamed of myself. I have lost sleep over them. I have spent money on them(!). I have even stayed late after work to get in a couple of good moves before rushing home to play some more of them. Some days I recover from a whole work-day of sitting at a desk, looking at a computer screen, by spending the whole evening sitting at a desk, looking at a computer screen.

Facebook has begun to interfere with writing my blog, even though I deeply despise the "tweet" format of communication and consider a thick, chewy blog post more my speed. Facebook has taken time away from reading other blogs. It has taken time away from reading and reviewing books. It has taken time away from watching DVDs of Star Trek (I know, you can hardly tell). It has taken me away from playing my piano, composing my music, writing my fiction... Basically, if it didn't have a deadline attached to it, set by someone besides myself, it didn't happen. Everything fell down before the onslaught of Facebook apps.

And let me be honest: They kind of suck. I mean, they're designed to waste more of your time than absolutely necessary, and to pressure you into spending money on them. At least I have that last bit under control... well, mostly. Some of the games are just plain lame. And some of them only seem cute until another player comes along and takes a dump on your fun.

One app that I played for a couple of weeks was "Backyard Monsters." For a long time, I seemed to be alone in a little virtual world, at leisure to build up my farm of cute monsters. Now and then some wild monsters would attack, but they were always easily repelled. Then one day while I was at work, another player decided to attack my farm, in which I had invested an inordinate amount of time building it up to such-and-such an extent. They didn't just rob and pillage a little. They destroyed every thing I had built, razed it right down to the ground. I would have had to start over from Zero. You know what? I decided that was enough of Backyard Monsters for me. Forever. It was cute while it lasted, but not cute enough to go again through everything I had gone through up to that point, and certainly not cute enough to put up with a jerk of a player whose idea of fun is to annihilate everybody else who is trying to enjoy the game.

I also played Mafia Wars for a while, but even though I made good progress, I could never quite forget that I was role-playing somebody who killed people for personal gain. Plus, there was so little I could do in any one sitting without running out of energy points, or stamina points, or money, or whatever. When I decided to quit that app, I discovered a useful tip: If you go into "application settings" in your Facebook account, you can block an app from sending you messages or using your personal info. So I don't even have to deal with incoming "gifts" from other Mafia Wars players. It's a mercy!

Lately, the games I play are mainly of the board-game variety. One of my left-coast friends and I have five games going at any given time, divided between three variants of Scrabble (including the official Scrabble ap, plus Lexulous and Wordscraper). I have Scrabble games going, turn and turn about, with four other folks at this time. Now and again I poke my head into Family Feud, or Mah Jongg, or Text Twist. And then of course, there's the one role-play type game I have stuck with since the beginning: Kingdoms of Camelot.

Right now I'm a Level 51 "Grail Night" and I have 3 cities. They're doing fairly well, but probably only because I keep them under a "fog of protection," at considerable expense mind you, because I'm really a hopeless player. I still don't know what the heck I'm doing. Can't get my armies up to a respectable size, and just when I start getting there I make a foolish gamble while trying to conquer a wilderness and end up with an Army of Zero again. Meanwhile, the wilds I do own are getting picked off by more aggressive players.

Seriously though, some of the people I'm playing with seem to have no end of time to blow. I couldn't make a living if I spent as much time as they do perfecting every fiddly little gimmick in all of these apps. I feel like I'm letting down my friends who let me play with them. But I have to remind myself that life is precious. I don't see myself wasting much more of it playing these apps!

Well... except maybe the Scrabbly ones....

Up Old, Down New

Over the past week, I have experimented with using Blogger's "new" editor. What a boondoggle! As of today, I have gone back to the "old" editor. What a relief!

Blogger's "new" editor has a lot of cute tools the "old" editor lacks. I reckon I can get by without most of them. I have done so thus far.

Blogger's "new" editor has an "improved" graphic interface, when you're writing on the "Compose" tab, which could potentially simplify one's work in laying out a gorgeous blog. In practice, however, I found that it made my work much harder.

I generally like to compose in the "Edit Html" tab. In the "old" editor this was mostly a matter of taste and comfort. I tend to be irritated by the code that Blogger adds when you use the "bold" and "italic" tools, for instance. A simple "i" between less-than and greater-than signs, paired with the same symbol with a slash added before the "i," doesn't take long to type and works just as well as a long string of gobbledgook beginning with "span" and closed by a "/span" tag; and when I use my blogs to write reviews and editorials for MuggleNet, the simpler, keyed-in code allows me to copy and paste my posts straight into the HTML template that I use to publish those columns.

I also found--perhaps in an older version of the "old" editor, before some patch or other--that it was better to add pictures in the "Edit Html" tab than in "Compose." Having the "Compose" tab open when pictures were uploading resulted in extra paragraph breaks and unnecessary divisions, which cost extra work to get rid of. Sure, pictures uploaded into "Edit Html" tended to insert at the top of the post, regardless of where you had left the cursor (a.k.a. "insertion point"). But the code to embed each picture uploaded as a separate paragraph, which you could select with an easy triple-click, then cut and paste into whatever part of the post you wanted to decorate with it.

Meanwhile, dragging the pictures up and down the post in the "Compose" tab, with its more graphics-oriented interface, was a time-consuming pain in the ahem--especially in Firefox, where the "Compose" pane doesn't scroll downward when you try to drag a picture past the bottom of the pane. This meant dragging a picture to the bottom of the frame, manually scrolling down until it was at the top of the frame, and repeat until you reached the paragraph where the picture belonged--OK in a short post, maybe, but not in a review of a whole season of Star Trek where there was a different picture for each episode. For these reasons, I generally use "Compose" only to nudge pictures up or down a few lines until satisfied with the appearance of my layout.

Most importantly, the "Add Image" tool is available in both the "Edit Html" and the "Compose" tab in Blogger's "old" editor. This makes it possible to bypass dealing with all the unhelpful features of "Compose" while trying to place pictures amid your text. Regardless of which tab you're typing in, when you click the "Add Image" tool you get an applet that allows you to upload up to five pictures at a time. Within the same applet are radio buttons determining whether the images will appear in large, medium, or small format, and in left, center, right, or no alignment. There is even a checkbox which, if checked, saves your selections so that they come up automatically the next time you upload pictures... which can be very handy in an image-intensive blog like mine.

That's all "old" editor stuff. How does it work in Blogger's "new" editor? Not half so well. The "Add Image" tool no longer lives on the "Edit Html" tab. To upload pictures, you have to do it in Compose mode. On the plus side, they actually do insert at your "insert point," which can be helpful if you've actually bothered to place the cursor where you want the picture to go. On the minus side, the applet only allows you to insert one picture at a time to your blog. You can upload several pictures to the applet, but it only allows you to select one of them before clicking "OK" to add it to your blog. If you immediately click "Add Image" again, all your uploaded images will still be on the applet, but this only underscores how much more helpful it would be if you could insert all of them at the same time.

Then there's the matter of formatting them. The choices of sizing and alignment are no longer in the applet. You have to click each picture individually and choose how big you want it to appear, and how it should be aligned. There doesn't seem to be a way to make these selections globally, or to save particular selections (such as "small" and "align right") as preferences. That means a lot more clicks of the mouse.

And finally, you reach the point where the picture looks just right... but it's not where you want it to be. How well does Blogger's "Compose" mode cooperate with your efforts to arrange your visuals just so? It doesn't. You can drag the pictures up and down, but they jump by default to the beginning of each paragraph. The "old" editor was much more sensitive to your specific wishes. So, ironically, it is to the "Edit Html" tab that you must turn when you realize that the best place to anchor a given picture is in the middle of a paragraph. But this presents another problem.

For Blogger's "new" editor has gone back to the bad, old ways of the "old" editor, insofar as it obsessively & compulsively adds unnecessary code. Once in "Edit Html" mode, you discover that "new" Blogger has polluted your pristine code with division tags (which you hate with a holy hatred). Worse yet, it has lumped all of the embed codes for your pictures into one run-on paragraph, so that when you triple-click on the anchor code for one picture, the whole lot of them light up (indeed, everything between the "div" and "/div" tags). Now you must undertake the fussy, eye-watering, mentally exhausting task of finding the end of each "/a" tag and putting a paragraph break after it--and deleting the "div" tags as well. These are a bit like bubbles under wallpaper. When you think you've killed the last of them, another division break pops up in the least expected place.

Even after you have separated "new" Blogger's image anchors into discreet paragraphs, they don't copy and paste as cleanly as they used to in "old" Blogger. Paragraph breaks that you want tend to vanish, ones that you don't want appear without permission--meaning more work undoing what you didn't do. In a similar way, over in "Compose" mode, pictures that you just finished sizing & aligning to taste suddenly snap back to their default "large, centered" format when you attempt to drag them somewhere... but only sometimes. These glitches only seem to crop up when you're not braced for them. My analytical mind balks at finding rhyme or reason for them.

Sure, I would love to have a new and improved editor in Blogger. But what they currently promote as the "new" editor isn't it. The best thing about Blogger is that one has a choice whether to upgrade; and that, having chosen to do so, one can reverse that choice and go back to the "old" version. That small mercy may have saved my blog!

Helpful Shortcuts

A lot of people have gone negative on Microsoft Word. I would like to put in a good word for it. Unfortunately....

OK, seriously, though, I do work with Microsoft Word every day. I have done so for years, and I have learned a lot of tricks that make it quite handy. These tricks aren't so helpful once you get past the 2003 version of the program, however. Sometimes it doesn't pay to keep up with the upgrades.

Among the things that have made my job bearable are the keyboard shortcuts that can be customized to each user's "Normal Template." Here are some of mine.

PASTE WITHOUT FORMATTING. I couldn't begin to estimate the keystrokes and/or mouse-clicks this shortcut has saved me. You're importing text from an email, a webpage, or a file from some other application, and you want it to blend seamlessly into your document's current paragraph and character format. And you do this dozens of times a day. Do you want to go through a series of menus each time? No. Create a macro and assign it to the keyboard as, say, alt-V. It's just like regular "paste" (ctrl-V), except using the alt-key instead of ctrl. Easy peasy!

EM-DASH. You're trying to create documents that have a professional look. Are you going to leave the punctuation mark your boss likes to use for dramatic effect--the "em" dash--to chance? No! Are you going to type two hyphens like I did just now because Blogger is for the birds? No! Are you going to go through another bunch of menus to insert the em-dash as a special character? No, no, no! You're going to assign ctrl-M (regardless of the fact that Word has already assigned an important task to that key) because you're going to be typing it a LOT and you don't want to have to remember whether it's shift-ctrl-hyphen, shift-alt-hyphen, or alt-ctrl-hyphen, or maybe it's not a hyphen at all but the minus sign on the numeric keypad... These so-called "shortcuts" are so unhelpful because they're different in every program (including other applications you have to use daily), and getting them wrong can lead to disasters such as your mouse pointer turning into a dingus that permanently deletes items from your menus. So yes, definitely, tell ctrl-M to say goodbye to its native function and hello to the em-dash!

EN-DASH. Not quite as important as the em-dash, you nevertheless find out that you're going to have trouble if you can't readily remember and quickly type the key combo for this handy character. Why? Because the stylebook Nazi in your office swears he's going to grab you by the shoulders and shake you the next time you type a hyphen between two numbers representing a range of pages, Bible verses, etc. The character you need is longer than a hyphen but shorter than an em-dash. Use ctrl-N, dummy! Don't worry about the fact that Word already has it assigned to "create new document." You don't need it to create a new document. You have a cute little icon on the toolbar for that. But without a custom keyboard shortcut, each en-dash will cost you another fishing expedition through menus and dialog boxes. And ctrl-N is easy to remember!

NUMBERED LISTS. Do you frequently find yourself having to type a numbered list? Forget the menus, guy! Set alt-L (as in "list") to get started.

BLOCK QUOTES. How about those block-quote paragraphs that have to be indented .5" from both the left and right margin? Do you really want to have to play around with the paragraph margins every single time? No! Set alt-B (as in "block quote") to do this for you.

OTHER BELLS AND WHISTLES. My boss loves emphasis. He asks for "caps, bold and red" so often that I have set up a keyboard shortcut to do this. I have shortcuts to change the text color to red, blue, yellow, green, or pink, and also to highlight a selected region of text in various colors (sometimes changing the text color as well, for contrast). And though I didn't create the keyboard shortcuts for all-caps and word-only-underline, I am daily glad to know the ones native to Word. I also have a shortcut to tweak the margins of a paragraph to fit inside the printable area of a 3"x5" card, to insert a numbered footnote, to add headers and footers to various types of documents so that they can be annotated and/or located in a shared directory. I have autotexts to assist in repetitive tasks dealing with tables, embedded pictures, and texts in a foreign alphabet that always require extra massaging to integrate into a document.

When you work a lot with Word, and have to do a wide variety of things in it, you quickly discover who your best friends are. Their names are Autotexts, Stylesheets, Templates, and Macros. You learn how to create, import, export, and update all of them, and how to sync a document to them; how to force one style to automatically follow another; and above all, how many sins can be forgiven by ctrl-Z ("undo"). Without all the gimmicks only a "power user" knows about Microsoft Word, I doubt that I could do my job without going insane. And I appreciate these gimmicks more and more as I find myself forced by circumstances to work on someone else's version of Word, or (O help!) WordPerfect. Absence makes the heart grow fonder!

Software Woes

In the course of my work, I have become fairly proficient in many, many, many computer programs. For example, on any given day I will most certainly use Microsoft Word and Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and InDesign, Mozilla Firefox, Libronix, BibleWorks, AskSam, Dymo Label Maker, a client program for a color-proof RIP server, and the native interface of a top-level scanner. At least a few times a month I may also have Nero Burning ROM, Parsons Screenshot, Neato MediaFace, Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, MyOffice, and Adobe Bridge open on my desktop. In recent weeks I have used Irfanview, Opera, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and a font management program whose name I forget. And that's besides the apps I use at home.

As a result, I often have many different things open on my desktop at once. And some of those things conflict with each other. For instance, certain keyboard shortcuts don't work properly in InDesign while a BibleWorks session is floating nearby. Fonts that I can't live without for a quarter of an hour, any time of day, due to my constant work in Outlook and AskSam, conflict with fonts I need to use in (sigh--again) InDesign. I don't want to think about how much time I spend each week setting up my custom toolbar in Acrobat, only to have it revert to default for reasons as yet undiscovered.

Twice today, Word refused to allow me to save changes to my template, forcing me to do a lot of extra steps. And font troubles have been plaguing me all week, so that I have to deal with "pinked out" text in InDesign, gibberish when I print emails from Outlook, pagination glitches when I convert Firefox webpages into Adobe PDFs, bizarre and arbitrary format changes in AskSam, and a display font that I have to blow up to 400% magnification to read accurately in Word.

But it's hard to complain when you're using many of these programs way beyond the level at which most people experience them. One of our IT guys shocked me, a few years ago, with this answer to a question about Microsoft Word: "You tell me. You're doing stuff with this program that no one else does, that I know of. In fact, I'm thinking about referring some of my other clients to you when they have questions about Word." It's true that I push Word to the limits of its word-processing powers - which are actually far more extensive than most people realize.

I have formatted printer-ready books in Word (though the final step was converting to an Adobe PDF). I have printed in booklet format, with multiple columns of text, sometimes overlapping watermark images and at other times wrappng around pictures. I have used a wide range of special characters, generated a numerous "customized keyboard" commands and a vast number of Autotext entries, and moved macros and autotexts (which is to say, document templates) from one computer to another. I have used Word to create music, outlines, footnotes, indices, tables of contents, tables, hyperlinks (some of them leading to offline documents in Word and other applications), 3"x5" cards, labels, filing tabs, and fully addressed envelopes. I make constant use of headers, footers, autotexts, style & format macros, multiple print drivers, and various methods of sending a document as an email. So I expect a lot from Word, and I ought to.

Which is why the last couple of months has been so frustrating. Good old MS Word is just not what it used to be. It's not that we upgraded. My office declined to switch to Vista and Word 2007 because the (then) new version of Word wasn't able to do some things that we constantly used it to do. But now even the previous generation isn't cutting the mustard. When did Word start applying all (or rather, most - with random exceptions) local format changes to a document globally? Because it does this, nearly every time I try to put something in Italics, bold, underlining, a numbered or bulleted list, an indented paragraph, a different font style or size, etc., I then immediately have to hit "ctrl-z" to undo Word's global interpretation of what I intended as a local edit. Due to the nature of my work, this has made some tasks hellishly frustrating and way more time- and labor-intensive than they should be.

A related problem comes up whenever I use that "ctrl-z" command to back out of a global edit, when (as is nearly always the case) my document has a header. The moment I hit UNDO, Word donates another paragraph return at the end of the header, thus pushing the text a little farther down the page. After a few of these back-and-forth edits, I have to open the header and delete a bunch of blank paragraphs in order to pull the body text back up to the top half of each page. Why would Word do this? How can I persuade it to stop?

Having to halfway undo every style/format change is like pounding my head against a digital wall. It's an unpleasant passtime, but you can work it into your routine. But then, imagine that each time you pound your head, your cyber-pants slip down an inch or so. After twelve or eighteen pounds, your clean white drawers are showing and you have to stop headbanging to pull your jeans up again.

I could complain about other things Word has just recently decided to do. It's as if Microsoft sent out a patch that "fixed" a working application so that it doesn't work as well. If this is their sales pitch for upgrading to a later version of Word, I'm not tempted.

Changing Jobs

What am I doing up at this hour? Well, I'm changing jobs, you see. I ended my new job at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday. I am starting my old job at 6:30 a.m. on Monday. I've had the intervening 47.5 hours to adjust my sleep schedule from working all night and sleeping all day, to going to bed early in the evning, getting up very early in the morning, and working into the early afternoon. It's not an easy adjustment to make over a weekend. I expect to reach equilibrium sometime around Thursday.

No, that isn't a mistake of a tired mind. I said I was quitting my new job and starting my old one. That is correct. I solicit your prayers and God's blessing as I bend my efforts once more toward duties from which I was relieved almost exactly a year ago.

I'll be spending a lot more time on the road. The old job that I'm starting has a much longer commute than the new job I just quit. I've made an investment to help me with that. With my last use of the employee discount card, moments before my exit interview, I purchased a portable CD player that I can plug in to the cigarette lighter, and that has an adapter that I can plug into the tape deck in my car radio.

Now I won't be at the mercy of the radio any more - even beloved KFUO-FM, where I used to hear the same commercials twice going each way, day after day, until I thought they would drive me insane. For all the wonderful classical music they play, they seem to spend just as much time broadcasting advertisements. This is their bread and butter and I don't hold it against them. It's just a me thing.

I can't stand having pieces of my life torn off and burned on the altar of commercialism. I can't stand the mindless drone of the same ad playing day after day, three or four times a day. This is why I can't watch TV any more. I prefer to be in control of the time I spend watching video, listening to music, and reading. I prefer to fill that time with quality content, and to keep words from our sponsor to a minimum. So I watch the boxed sets of TV shows, season by season; more often I read and play the piano, etc., when an ordinary person would be watching the tube; and now I'll be listening to my own classical-music picks on CD as I commute.

I've given some thought to combining two of my interests. I may start investing in audio books. Until now I've been deterred by the fact that most of them are available on CD, while my car radio only has a cassette player. Clearly, the car is where I would need a book to be read aloud. When I'm not at the wheel, I can read by myself very well, thank you. So I'm going to be taking stock of what's available, and affordable, among the books I've been planning to read. Maybe I'll be able to redeem the two hours a day I spend at the wheel, by having that many more book reviews to write at the end of the week.

Stuff That Doesn't Work

More and more of the stuff in my life is starting to give up the ghost. And in the current economy, I can't afford to replace it.

Case #1: My computer monitor. It's a nice, flat-screen monitor that I have hooked up to two different computers at the same time. I can't do that with the tube monitor I'm using as I write this. I've been forced to go back to my old screen because the new one currently refuses to do anything except make an ominous ticking noise, unless I unplug it. It costs a week's pay out of my current income to replace it. And I won't have a week's pay to spare any time in the foreseeable future.

Case #2: The blower on my car's interior heating & cooling system. For some time, it would occasionally kick in if I drove over a bump or a pothole. Now it rarely comes on at all. I have to drive everywhere with my window rolled down. This may get a bit tricky come winter. It's already starting to make it hard to get around when there's a lot of fog and dew in the air. When I can't get air to blow on the windshield, the only way to defog it is to wipe it with a napkin or a cloth. This can result in some hairy moments; for example, when the air suddenly gets foggy while I'm cruising down the highway. I've already invested as much money as I can currently afford in having this problem fixed - to no result.

Case #3: My right knee. For most of a week now, it's been giving me trouble. I've never had much knee trouble before. I hate to think that this might be the beginning of a battle with joint pain that could go on for the rest of my life. Perhaps I've pulled something that will heal by itself... but in the meantime, a lot of my ordinary routines have taken on a new aspect. I'll count my blessings. You can't take your everyday activities for granted when they hurt.

Book Review Workflow

You may think reviewing books is little better than an idle hobby. Actually, it's more like a craft. And now that I'm approaching the 1,000-review milestone, keeping the quality high is no easier than it ought to be. There are a lot of steps involved in shaping, polishing, and presenting each review.

First, and not to be sneezed at, is the step of choosing a book to read. Some of the choices may seem like a no-brainer; I'm following a series, so I read the next book in it. But really, I'm following so many series at the same time that it must take some skill to keep my mental thumb on the place where each of them left off. I am constantly on the lookout for the next paperback in a ludicrous number of series. I sometimes have to visit out-of-the-way places, on- and offline, to get hold of copies in good condition and at a decent price. As for selecting which books to read in what order? I really can't explain how I do this. I pretty much go where my mood takes me. I certainly have a lot of options on my to-do shelf, any time I need to change books.

Second, I read the book. There have been a few books I have started reading, paused to pick up something else, and had trouble getting back. Remarkably few, I hope. The rest of them absorb my attention during the hour or two each side of bedtime (depending on how naughty I allow myself to be). And during breaks at work. And in waiting rooms. On buses, airplanes. At airport terminals. During downtime at church and the symphony. Etc., etc., etc. I am not an especially fast reader as such. My productivity is boosted by my total lack of interest in TV and my deep, paralyzing horror of having nothing to do. I hardly go anywhere without a book.

There's a special spot on the corner of my desk where I let books stack up when I have finished reading them. When the stack is yea high - say, four to six books - I devote a free morning or evening to writing a review of each of them. Then I put the book on my "done" bookshelf, from which I periodically cull a boxful to sell at Dunaway Books, conveniently right up the street.

The writing itself is a lot of work. It would take me ages if I hadn't been practicing writing daily since childhood. Which is not to say that it's necessarily easy. It may look that way to an observer, but I make a special effort to say just so much about what happens in the book and no more; to offer up a personal evaluation of the work; to make it unique and readable and entertaining; and to give it an intelligent shape as a miniature essay. Some reviews come relatively easy. In other cases, it can be very hard to hit the right tone; I can end up scrapping most of my work and starting over. Generally speaking, writing a four- to six-paragraph review (give or take a few) on each of four to six books takes me two or three hours.

I typically write the initial review for this blog. Then, often, I browse the internet for links to add to my review. I most frequently include links for wiki articles, authors' webpages, and other reviews of mine. I have also been known to drop in links to fan websites, online bookstores, news items (most recently an author's obituary), information about film adaptations, and points of interest related to the topic of a book. Finally, I search for enough pictures to make sure that, as the reader scrolls down through my blog, there is always a picture on the screen. I sometimes search arthouse websites, but I find most of my images through Google.

After I publish the post, I then read through it once or twice. Partly this step is down to sheer vanity. But it has a practical use. I often find mistakes that I want to correct. For a literate, literary person, it's sometimes astonishing how many typos, misspellings, grammatical errors, and half-complete rewrites I leave hanging out the first time I publish a post. Especially when I'm tired. After a couple rereads, I am generally satisfied with my writing. I may also move the pictures around so that they are as evenly spaced as possible, without interfering with the flow of the text more than absolutely necessary.

And that's just the first of three times I publish each review. The second time will be on Shelfari, where I have a shelf of "books I have read" that more or less mirrors my reviews. I search for books I have read so that their images are displayed on my shelf. I rate them on a five-star system. I copy and paste the text of my review (losing the pictures, links, and most formatting in the process). Eventually, after irregular intervals, I will add subject tags to the books.

Last of all, I put each review on MuggleNet. This may seem a bit backwards, since most of my reviews started out on MuggleNet and only moved to my blog later. But I only recently acquired posting privileges at MuggleNet, and I've been in the habit of doing the actual writing on Blogger for over a year. It works nicely. Plus, there are a lot of steps involved in posting to MuggleNet. I have to copy new reviews into a text editor, add html tags. I then open an html file for one of my existing reviews, downloaded from MuggleNet, and do a "save as" to create a new filename. I use "cut" and "paste" to very quickly replace the text of the review, so that I only have to type a few words (title, author, age recommendation) in each html file. I update the index pages for the Book Trolley as well. With the systematic use of cut and paste, I can keep the amount of code that I actually have to type to a minimum. All this coding, for 4-6 reviews and the relevant indices, can be done in only a handful of minutes!

Then comes the FTP part. This is where I upload the new and revised pages to MuggleNet. Perhaps surprisingly, this takes longer than any other step since writing the reviews themselves. First I have to connect to the server. Then I have to wait several minutes for my FTP client to generate a directory of the main folder. Then it does the same thing for each subfolder until I reach the one I need to work in. The actual file transfer takes mere seconds. But before I can disconnect, I have to let it create one more directory. These long stretches where the computer says, "Working," in Majel Barrett's voice, can be very tedious unless I have other things to get done, such as cooking dinner, or shaving, showering, and getting dressed for work. Finally, there's a separate production admin site I have to visit so that I can leave a news bulletin about the new update where MuggleNet's casual visitors can spot it.

By the time all this is done, I've just about put in a full day's work. And do you know what I get paid for it? Diddly. I do it because I love to read, because I love to write, and because I love to share the books I love. I do it because, as in any craft, achieving excellence is the craftsman's reward. And I do it because I hope you enjoy the results. Please don't keep your enjoyment to yourself. Let me know what you think, even if only to argue with me. Leave a comment! Become a blog follower! Tell others about it! Maybe, with your encouragement, I'll collect enough courage to follow through on my plans to write and publish my own books.By the way, what do you think of this art work my Dad did for a potential self-supporting Book Trolley website? Whoa. If we go there, I'll have even MORE work to do...

Another Invention Whose Time Has Come

I'm sure that I have mentioned before, somewhere in this thread, that our telephone system is stupid. Say you live in a small metropolitan area that has four area codes in it. You dial a 10-digit phone number in one of those area codes, not knowing whether or not it's a local call. If it is local, you're not supposed to dial 1 first; if it isn't, you are. So either way, you have a 50:50 chance of having your eardrums blasted by a series of surgically pure musical tones, followed by a recorded voice telling you to hang up and dial again, with or without the 1 prefix as the case may be. Given a series of unfamiliar phone numbers to call during a single morning, you run the risk of suffering significant hearing loss.

It's a stupid system, because it's so gosh-darned smart... but only up to a certain point. It's smart enough to know whether the number requires a 1 prefix from where you're dialing. But it's not smart enough to understand what you mean and simply connect you, whether you're calling long-distance or not. The programming and circuitry can tell the difference between a local number and a trunk call, even within the same area code; but it still needs you to start over and press 1 (or not) to understand your intentions.

I can't believe nobody has written software, or designed circuitry, to do this after all this time. I think the time has come. There is no excuse for this stupidity. I don't care if your local phone service provider is different from your long-distance provider. If the long distance folks can tell the call belongs in the local system, or vice versa, they should simply route it where it belongs & not require us to know in advance which numbers are & aren't covered by the metro plan. It's common sense. Maybe, if this ever happens, I could get paid for the idea!

Well, all that is just to say what I've said before. I've come up with another one like it. Rechargeable batteries are another piece of modern technology that are so brilliant they're stupid. I have a rechargeable cell phone and a rechargeable shaver. Both of them have the type of battery that should only be plugged in when it really needs to be recharged. In both cases, if you don't unplug them promptly when the battery is full, you risk shortening the life of the battery.

The problem: Who has time to sit and watch a small appliance recharge? Realistically, you plug it in and leave the room to do something else. You go to bed. You go to work. You stretch out in a comfortable chair to read or watch TV. You forget to hop up every five minutes to look at the display on the phone, or the colored lights on the shaver, to see whether "battery full" is indicated. It might even be plugged in for hours longer than necessary. And that's bad for business. But so is the idea of having to hover over the recharger for 30 to 90 minutes.

What can be done to solve this? It's so blindingly obvious that only a fat stupid jerk can spot it. And so I'll expect royalties when someone starts selling it. I mean, if your gizmo has the programming or circuitry to tell you to unplug it or else, you shouldn't have to unplug it at all. How hard would it be to add a few lines of programming, or a couple of microscopic switches, so the poor thing will stop recharging by itself?

I see a potential "second problem" here. Suppose you program your shaver to stop recharging as soon as the battery is full, whether it remains plugged in or not. Now the danger is that you'll leave it on the charger all the time. After each use, which only drains the battery a tiny bit, it will start charging again - to the detriment of the battery's lifespan. Or your phone, always plugged in and turned on, will intermittently start charging again - even if you never use it - simply because the energy it expends staying on drains the battery (to say nothing of its LCD clock display). Even if you only leave it plugged in a few hours past the "battery full" mark, it might have to start charging again.

So, here's the second part of my brilliant solution: Fix the program so that it stops charging at "battery full," and does not start recharging again unless you unplug it and plug it back in. How do you like that! I may not be any thinner (or any less of a jerk), but I must be getting smarter!