Caveat Lector

I am actually ashamed to say how good a year this has been for me. It’s been wretched for a lot of people I care for, for the country I live in, for the world. Counting my blessings skates the edge of gloating. Woo-hoo, I got mine, screw you. Which isn’t at all what I feel.

Well, but. Worse is taking our luck for granted. Worse is failure to appreciate. So.

I made some enemies this year. I made more friends, though, and that’s quite something. By and large, too, the enemies I have were (and are) powerless to cause me harm—whereas my friends did me a great many favors. For that, believe me, I am grateful.

I haven’t loused up my health. My hands are in pretty good shape, considering. I came out of a long-delayed physical with flying colors. I didn’t go on any diets, which in this benighted culture is a victory on a par with the Pelennor Fields.

I didn’t lose courage, facing the same institution that reduced me to ash five years ago. Not only am I back in grad school, I’m tearin’ up the place. I’m doing well.

I can hold my professional head up, too. A book chapter, a tech review, a lucrative conversion job for an excellent client, an ongoing relationship. It’s a small start, but I approve of small starts, and I see more following on next year.

No complaints about money—none.

And the bedrock of my life turned five years old (or thirteen, depending on how one counts these things), and is weathering better than I could ever have hoped. If that isn’t a blessing, I dunno what is.

Okay, Sindarin fans: if you’re wanting to get to David’s talk on Monday, you need to call the Lisle Library now at 630-971-1675. Capacity is something like 100, last known number of people registered is 78—and that number is known to be outdated. Attendance is by registration only, so call if you’re coming.

Should be fun. See y’all there!

I asked my boss if I could use her as a reference, as I’m looking at a couple of summer jobs. The Survey Center has vague and nebulous plans to keep me over the summer, but I don’t trust vague and nebulous plans, and I have six credits of summer school to pay for. (Not that I don’t already have the money for them—I do, and I’m glad I do—but the closer I come to paying my way as I go along, the happier I am.)

She said yes, as I knew she would, because she’s that kind of boss. And she mentioned that my last coworker to leave is happy in her new job, except that she doesn’t much care for her supervisor.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said offhandedly. “You’re a hard act to follow.”

She was pleased, and I’m glad of it. From some people that would have been glass-shallow flattery, but I’ve made a point of mentioning as often as I can that my boss is a good boss, such that nobody’s questioning my sincerity. (Oh, shut up, you. I am sincere. If you don’t believe me, skim the Work category starting in April 2001 for mentions of her. The blog don’t lie, baby.) After the neurotic ex-boss and the dragon-lady ex-not-quite-boss, two years of a really good boss has been indescribably nice.

I worry for my former coworker, though. Working for jerks is, I have found, a speedy way to expunge a lot of joy from life.

Part of an email I just got:

My name is [deleted] and I am a recruiter in the content and document management space. I am working on a Sr. sales opportunity with an offshore SGML, HTML, XML data conversion/entry, OCR, imaging and scanning company.

Not interested in me, mind you, which is wise of him because I am constitutionally incapable of the salesdroid thing. He wants me to recommend him somebody I know.

So… let me get this straight. I’m supposed to help find a salesdroid for an offshore company. For TAG’s competition, yet.

I’m torn about offshore outsourcing, personally. I’m not so much worried about my own job, nor do I have any especial objection to sharing Western wealth. And I know those folks are competent; I’ve worked places that sent keying and conversion offshore. It’s bloody complicated. I don’t have all the answers to it.

But I think my nose for ethics just slammed right into a wall of “I don’t approve of this.” Therefore I will not be answering that email…

… though a tiny, irredeemably evil part of my soul wants to send the guy the name of my neurotic ex-boss.

Some news media have recently seized onto an upcoming book by Barry Schwartz called The Paradox of Choice. It’ll hit my hold stack at the library as soon as the library orders it (I don’t doubt they will) and puts it in the OPAC.

In roughly the same soundbite terms I heard this in: Schwartz postulates two strategies for making (mostly consumer) choices, satisficing and maximizing. Your maximizer isn’t happy unless s/he is convinced s/he has made the best possible decision of the decisions available. Your satisficer, on the other hand, goes for “good enough” and doesn’t sweat it later.

I am an unquestioned satisficer. Sure, I talk a good game about text artisanry, but the truth is I read whole novels onscreen off Gopher back in 1990, and that was plenty good enough for me. I research major purchases, sure, but once I’ve bought something, I don’t revisit the decision. And I’ve never needed or even wanted the latest, the hottest, or the newest.

And, you know, for the most part this works fine for me. But right now, my feet hurt.

No. Not a non sequitur. Really.

I have big feet. Always have. My parents joke about how they took one look at my feet after I was born and exclaimed in horror that I’d be wearing shoeboxes by the time I was ten. And they weren’t so far wrong, at that. We don’t have footbinding in this country, for which I am profoundly grateful, but judging from our shoe selection we do seem to believe rather strongly that women shouldn’t have big feet.

So shoe shopping has been pure hell on wheels since I was a kid. I hated it then; I hate it now; I will always hate it. Ergo, I tend strongly to pursue a satisficing strategy, grabbing the first pair of shoes that even vaguely fits, when I ought to be maximizing.

Ergo my feet hurt. Frequently. And a lot. It’s just one of those things I’ve gotten used to.

I whacked my toes this morning on a table leg, and it hurt about five times as much as it would have if my toes weren’t nearly as damaged as a pointe dancer’s at the moment owing to new shoes. Which, I admit, is making me rethink how I buy the damnable torture instruments in the first place.

(This is a “Dorothea is an idiot” post. Just so you know.)

I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me, but it appears I haven’t parsed any non-XML SGML since the last time I reinstalled Windows.

Because nsgmls (part of James Clark’s lovely sp package) is giving me fits.

All I am trying to do, I swear, is parse some cruddy HTML files. Yes it validates or no it doesn’t, that’s really all I need to know. I can’t always use online validators because some of these files claim to be HTML 2.

First I have all kinds of problems with my catalog files, because OVERRIDE YES doesn’t appear to be functioning and the damn thing is retrieving DTDs over the ’net when I don’t want it to… but I did finally get that fixed.

And now I get forty gazillion warnings about comments in entity definitions in the DTDs. Yeah, they’re there all right… but, you know, I really don’t need to hear about them. All I really need to do is validate my damn files. Really. That’s all.

I didn’t think comments in entity definitions were a problem anyway. Shows what I know.

I will get this sorted out, because I have to. But urgh, what a fuss!

My parents sent me to week-long Girl Scout camp one summer. I didn’t hate it, but it certainly didn’t rank as a top childhood experience. Mostly I remember a lot of lockstep rituals, from flag-up and flag-down to mealtimes and even bedtime.

The afternoon my detail had dinner duty, I (being an obliging child) volunteered to chop onions. I dutifully chopped until my eyes watered so that it was even odds whether I’d chop onions or my own fingers. I left the knife and walked away for a bit to let my sinuses drain.

A kindly camp counselor wandered by and asked with much concern why I was crying. “Oh, no, I’m fine,” I said, with one of those silly grins that are all you can muster when your tear ducts are working overtime. She didn’t believe me, so I explained, pointing to the pile of chopped onion, and we both laughed about it.

There is, somewhere, an opposite of onions, something that makes people laugh the way onions make them cry—not entirely willingly. And if you’re the camp counselor, what do you do?

I have as much respect as anyone can for folks who can look at a decidedly mixed blessing and only mention the blessing part. I wonder about them, though. I do. It’s not as if the blessing will go away if the accompanying curse is acknowledged. I tend to think that unacknowledged curses have the potential to taint blessings, myself.

Eh, but I’m a crusty old bag, and not particularly quiet about it. Perhaps the rose-colored have it better after all. Let me pass by, then, and not stop to ask. Not draw attention to the opposite of onions.

I braved the mall today, because my winter party dress got torn a while ago and if I’m to do a round of conferences starting next fall, I’ll need something to wear to the interminable cocktail hours and whathaveyou. And in my experience, the best prices on winter not-quite-formalwear are now.

I do understand why I shop via catalogue and online. Department-store clothes are, like, well, um… I didn’t think it was possible to be both boring and entirely undignified, but those selections somehow managed it. I’m no fashion plate, but I know what I like to wear, and that stuff so wasn’t it.

Then I walked into Coldwater Creek and said “aha!” Clothes with a little dignity to them, some sweep and some color—but not all over beads and sequins and general gaudy uglitude. Found a nice purple jacketed number in my size, half off; snagged it immediately before someone else did.

And then I noticed I was the youngest woman in the place. Which struck me as odd. When I think about it, I’m much less concerned for my general dignity now than I was half my life ago. My wardrobe for the most part backs that up, as those who have seen the Unmissable Green Dress can attest. I didn’t quite realize dignity skewed to certain age groups, I suppose.

When I grow old… ah, hell. I’ll wear purple now.

Dream found out tonight why hanging out on the dining table is a bad idea. He singed a few hairs off the end of his tail on the Chanukah candles.

No harm done to actual cat flesh. Burnt cat hair, however, smells something horrid. Dream didn’t even realize anything had happened until just now, when he sat down to wash and discovered that the end of his tail just didn’t smell right. We have trimmed the offending fur, and Dream has stalked off in a snit at the loss of it.

May all your holiday mishaps be as trivial.

The question becomes, then, whether the OEBF is a suitable venue for continuing development of electronic-book specifications.

Frankly? No.

Shortly after I started work at OverDrive, I heard Steve speak at an OEBF plenary. His attitude toward the OEBPS was that the OEBF had already done the standards thing, wrung what there was to wring from it—and it was time to Move On to more fun and exciting things. Public relations, mostly. And trade-org stuff, whatever it is that trade orgs do (I’ve never been sure).

Hardly coincidence that PubStruct withered inside the next year. And from respect for the principals involved (some of them, at least), that’s all I’m going to say about that.

I’m dead sure the OEBF can’t get back the people it lost over that year. That isn’t entirely because of bad memories, either; part of it is that major contributors to the first effort have had their employers back off on the whole ebook concept, and thus can’t get leeway to participate any longer. (I am thinking particularly of Microsoft and Xerox PAL here; the demise of Gemstar matters quite a bit also.) The original technical talent pool has been quite thoroughly muddied.

Nor do I think the OEBF can put together another one. Ebooks are a hard sell to technical talent these days. About the only other thing that would attract more technical talent is existing technical talent, which they just don’t have any longer. So even if they realize their mistake, I seriously doubt they can correct it at this late date.

Myself, I think the OEBF is moribund, not worth the energy that Mr. Rothman is expending on it. It’s easy to be angry at them for some of the chances they threw away. I used to be pretty ticked off myself. Better, however, we should focus on the future—which is brighter than one might think.

I see three bright spots in e-text today. With any luck at all, they’ll converge to finish the job that PubStruct started. On the technical side, there’s James Clark and Murata Makoto, who are tackling the nasty namespace-combination issues that PubStruct was trying (rather fruitlessly) to find a metadata solution to. There is also Relax NG, which solves the grotesque problems PubStruct was having with DTDs. (Well, most of them. There’s still the warty old HTML entity set. Sigh.)

On the book side, there’s the accessibility people, and the nice state legislators who are starting to require that textbook publishers use e-text and electronic production methods to make their wares accessible for the visually-impaired. I don’t have the whole story here—but it sure does bear watching. If we can get textbooks, which are some of the hardest book-production jobs known to man, made into markup, we can bloody well do anything.

And on the social side—the demand side—there’s open-access scholarship. I remember my dad the professor’s article file—I helped fill it when I was a youngster. Three big unwieldy file cabinets, organized by author last name and date—and since most papers had multiple authors, Dad couldn’t ever find an article he wanted anyway. Give academia a wireless gadget with a good display that finds this stuff, downloads it, and organizes it for fast retrieval and perusal, and they’ll stampede a path to the ebook door. I mean, really, it just isn’t that hard to beat the current state of e-reserves (which are flourishing mightily).

I’m actually of the opinion that former ebookers who can’t climb on one of the above-mentioned bandwagons (and if they can, they should, by all means) should sit back and wait. Wait. Wait and see. Interesting times coming.