Caveat Lector

Two tidbits of interest at KnowBetter today. An interesting contrast.

Simon and Schuster is publishing Hemingway’s entire oeuvre in ebook form. They aren’t saying which ebook form, but I suspect (*growl*) PDF.

Wiley is publishing Graph Theory and Geography, in partnership with GlobalMentor, which is run by the brilliant Garret Wilson. (Bias alert: Garret’s a friend of mine. He once let me drag him through the Denver Art Museum on an off-afternoon before an OEBF function. Believe me, it takes real friendship to stick with me through several rooms of pre-Columbian artifacts.) I have seen what I think were bits and pieces of this project, and I can honestly say I thought it was wizard cool.

So on the one hand, we have a mere transfer of words from one medium to another. Simon and Schuster hasn’t tried to do anything interesting with the Hemingway republication, or you can bet your bottom dollar they’d be talking about it. On the other hand, we have an attempt to push the limits of the new medium, in full awareness that it is a new medium and new and useful things can be done with it.

I know which hand I’m more impressed with. How ’bout you?

I don’t know where Damon finds this stuff, but boy, it’s good.

Check out the latest plans for Mac OS and Windows (not). Didn’t you always sort of suspect?

An interview with Bruce Perens contains the following Q&A segment:

So you do speak for yourself?

As far as I can, I speak for myself while being an employee of HP.

The rest of that sentence clearly is “but I can’t say everything I’d like to.” Perens does go on to talk about a few things he’s said that top brass doesn’t agree with, trying to prove he’s not muzzled.

Argh. Argh, I say. I used to think that doing the Poster Child thing was a good gig for those that could get it. I had a lot of fun being Poster Child for Impressions, for a while. That fun ended when departmental management changed and the new manager got angry at me when someone I knew at a large publishing house arranged to call me on the phone. New-manager told me in no uncertain terms that he intended to control what his department said about Things Markuppish.

My immediate past employer (one can say “immediate past president” so why not “immediate past employer”?) got nearly to the point of firing me over an article that committed two heinous sins: criticizing practices in use at his company (among many other places, I say in the company’s defense), and praising a competitor.

That challenge I faced down with uncharacteristic courage. I had told him from the beginning that I didn’t want my article series for eBookWeb to come under company aegis, because I meant to keep my voice independent. I won, after a fashion. I did not enjoy my victory. It spurred me to get another job, in fact.

I can be argued with. I even enjoy it, as long as the merits of the argument rest on matters of fact or intelligent speculation and leave personalities more or less alone. I can be convinced I’m wrong; happens often. I don’t have to get my way every time; I know how to lose the good fight now and then, and I can be depended upon not to hold grudges later. I work hard not to be nasty on a personal level (though when I don’t meet my own professional standards, it is liable to be here). I understand the separation of the personal from the professional—being introverted by nature, I have less inclination to bring my personal life to work than most, I think. I really, truly try not to be a more difficult person than my peculiar mental wiring and imperfect socialization already make me.

I resent argument from authority, however, especially when the source of the authority brought to bear upon me is social rather than intellectual. I do understand that someone with umpty-ump years in a field knows more about it than I do; I have been known to accept that kind of authority, though not always and not unconditionally. I have trouble accepting authority by fiat, is all.

And I will not be silenced. I will not. I will happily explain that my professional opinions are my own only. I gladly take responsibility for them. I won’t pretend I don’t have them, however, nor will I adjust them to fit a company line. For good or ill, I don’t possess the capacity for doublethink that would permit this.

This probably makes me a poor choice for an employee, a lot of places. I guess I accept that. My immediate past employer, however, seemed to want it both ways: he hired me at least in part for my ebook notoriety, but wanted to check the free expression and personal probity that went into establishing that notoriety. I fear I’m a package deal. I’m good, but I’m loud.

Poster Child is a good gig, and Perens is doing well at it. Part of me is a little envious. Most of me doesn’t want to be where he is, however.

Poor AKMA complains that he had trouble coming out as himself on a What Blogger Archetype Are You? quiz.

AKMA? You might want to sit down, sir, if you aren’t already seated; I fear it gets worse. I turned out to be—you.

The really scary thing is, though, if I change my answer to question 5—to something just as plausible, frankly—I come out as Andrew Sullivan. Yee-ikes.

I hate copyright arguments. I truly do. Not just because they’re invariably far more acrimonious than necessary. Because the same things get said, over and over and over again.

We’ve been arguing copyright a long time, as this reprint on kuro5hin of an 1841 speech on the topic demonstrates. (Lifted from AKMA.)

So why am I reposting this link? ’Cuz I like a good speech, I do. And this one’s a peach.

I am trying not to type much, weekends, so as to favor my gimpy left hand. (Spent the afternoon trying out a heating pad and simultaneously discovering that Dream has found some charm in lap-cat-dom. I have spent worse afternoons.) I do, however, feel compelled to toss out a few blogbacks.

First, one for Mark: Think you can scare me with markup, sugar? Me? Nah. I turned an entire English dictionary, corrupt data from an obsolete typesetting system, into valid XML singlehanded. (Yes, I wrote the DTD too. The customer made me dumb it down, unfortunately.) I did. Markup hath no terrors.

Okay, okay, RDF and topic maps and sometimes XSLT scare the living daylights out of me. But that’s different.

Seriously, you gave me exactly the answers I was looking for, and I appreciate it. If the gimp (not the GIMP, which is something altogether different) allows, I’ll start on an accessibility makeover of Textartisan tomorrow. Won’t take too much effort; at least I’m starting from fairly clean markup. I can see I need some language indicators, though, and you caught me redhanded on <caption>.

A reader (sorry, I forgot to ask permission to mention him by name when I emailed back) suggested “blogilante” as the Spanish for “blogger” (on the analogy of “vigilante,” of course). Not bad for our more, er, aggressive bloggers. My husband suggested “bloguero,” and I’m kicking myself that it didn’t occur to me first.

And one for AKMA: “… hardly any of us wants forgiveness”? My heart, man, that’s bleak.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a Jewish household and rarely missed the all-day Yom Kippur services that I try very hard not to let fear keep me from the kind of encounters with truth that you rightly indicate earning forgiveness requires. The Yom Kippur liturgy is stunningly clear: first you figure out whom you’ve hurt and make appropriate amends, then you ask forgiveness from your victims, and only then do you dare seek forgiveness from God.

I am no longer a Jew, if indeed I ever was one (and you could ask six rabbis about this and get seven answers). I do not attend services, nor do I pray privately. I do remember much of the Yom Kippur liturgy—I can sing the Avinu Malkeinu from memory without more than one or two prompts—and I very clearly remember how uncomfortable I felt every single year because of things I had done that I did not know how to ask absolution for.

I learned when I grew up (which took me longer than it should have) that not screwing up in the first place is generally easier than earning forgiveness. Easier said than done, I know, having already made several mistakes just on this two-month-old blog. Speaking professionally, however, I can at least say that I have been offered one or two chances to sell out, and thus far I’ve turned ’em down because I couldn’t live with a sold-out self. It isn’t much, I grant; my small but earnest hope is that doing right in relatively low-importance situations will create a reflex that helps me do right when real devilry presents itself.

As for what happens when I do screw up, sure, I’ll take amnesty when it’s offered me. (I get it from my husband far more than I deserve.) Failing that, however, I’ll go for forgiveness every time. The alternative, given my peculiar twists of mental wiring, is endless self-hating rumination on my error. The kind of hell that leads to—again, given my peculiar twists of mental wiring—it is better not to talk about, okay?

I don’t know where that puts me in your catalogue of humanity. Hell’s bells, I don’t even know if you (or anyone else, for that matter) can muster belief in what I just said of myself. I do know, though, that I have met people whose basic decency, resistance to all sorts of selling-out, and eagerness (not just willingness) to confront their own failings make me quite ashamed. If your catalogue has no room for me, it must at least account for them.

My hand is threatening to gimp up again; better stop now. I have been looking at programmable foot pedals, but the only ones I can find are hideously expensive. A keyboard innovation would help, if anyone had only thought of it: put shift, control, and alt keys underneath the space bar so that they can be thumbed instead of little-fingered. It’s the frequent hit-and-hold motion from my weakest finger that has caused me most damage, all told.

My good friend Damon passed along a link to the iToilet. So as not to tick off the Apple fans among us, let me also point to a bright idea (not) from Microsoft.

I find that I’m typing with nine fingers these days, because if I give my left littlest finger much of a workout it starts to spaz.

Best I’ve ever been able to figure is a case of cubital tunnel syndrome, with entrapment at the wrist rather than the elbow. I have been careful about sleeping with bent arms lately. Not sure what else to try that I’m not already trying.

Mark just blogged a crystal-clear, fully-detailed description of W3C accessibility requirements for documents and document-authoring tools. Thanks, Mark. Much appreciated.

Now for my question. Do any weblogging tools actually meet all these requirements? Movable Type seems pretty close, but I don’t think all the auto-generated stuff is editable. (Can you edit the calendar markup?)

Jenny asks whether any library-systems vendors allow library users to reserve books that they can later go in and pick up. (If I read the entry right. Jenny may have been asking something quite different.)

The Madison Public Library and its Southern Wisconsin affiliates let me put any book in any member library on hold. If it’s not from Sequoya Public Library (down the street from me), they ship it there. And they send me email when a book I reserved is in.

Despite the ugly UI—I have to type my fourteen-digit library-card number for every book I put on hold—I get most of my books this way. Love it to death. Somebody blogs an interesting-looking book, I telnet in and put it on hold, a bit later (depending on the length of the waitlist) I bring it home and read it. I dig that.

Jenny has also been wondering why anyone would do the Google Answers thing when there are librarians around for free. I suspect that Madison is not unique in hiring anybody they can find who’ll work for less than nine dollars an hour (and zero benefits) for front-line library positions. Trained librarians are in management when they’re hired at all; their interaction with patrons is kept to a minimum.

Which is not to say that Madison front-liners can’t or won’t help; just that they aren’t typically the highly-trained information professionals that Jenny herself is and talks about. Nor is the situation likely to improve in Madison; the Wisconsin legislature is trying to cut library funding, damn them to the ninth circle of hell. (Yeah, ninth circle, and third section, too, the place where you’re buried head to foot in ice for unconscionable treachery.)

(Addendum: The fourth section, of course. Dang it. Not everything in Dante comes in threes. Just most things.)