Caveat Lector

Hey, nobody has to justify their possession of a mobile phone to me. None of my business. Next time I’ll keep my surprise to myself.

I don’t know, though, that the Japanese really have much on the West in terms of two-bodies-one-mind thought. I would have to do some serious skimming to bolster my point, but my instinct is that there’s plenty of gushing stuff about the communion of minds and souls in Western lit.

I still don’t buy it. Sorry, Jonathon; I enjoyed the information you presented, but I just don’t think your ideal is, well, ideal.

If I were in a grunchy mood, I would be tempted to ask just who is expected to read whose mind. Not to mention why. Is said mind-reading thought to be fully reciprocal? I rather think there’s meat to those questions. I’m not, however, in a grunchy mood at the moment (and a sigh of relief envelops my corner of the blogsphere…), so I’ll leave that investigation to others for the nonce. Reserving the right to come back to it later.

I simply find value in the act of sharing. It’s good that it takes effort to share, that human communication is explicit rather than implicit. It’s good that there is a line between what is shared and what is not; it makes shared things more valuable, that they are the result of a deliberate decision to share.

Nor am I entirely enamored of the suggested near-identity of two souls able to communicate without words. (Check me on this, but that’s what the lovers-and-spouses-only restriction communicates to me.) Who really wants to marry the reflection in their mirror? More to the point, who wants to marry someone who wants to marry the reflection in their mirror? Yick.

Okay, that’s overstating the case a bit. Still. There is value in difference, too—and even more value in learning to live with and appreciate difference. The friction between minds, the empty spaces, the honest efforts to understand… these are not to be despised.

Maybe it’d be easier sometimes if David and I really could read each other’s minds. Maybe. Be a lot less enriching for both of us, though, because we wouldn’t really be two minds anymore—would we?

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote what I think are good bits about introverted marriages. We picked a Rilke bit to read at our wedding, in fact. (Oops, here come the Copyright Police. Oh, well.) Like me, Rilke discounted the possibility of the “marriage of true minds.” He’s the first I ever read, though, to see value in the alternatives. As I do.

New service from Data Conversion Labs: Books2Bytes.com, which takes paper and turns it into ASCII or Word. My ex-employer had better watch out; they are in this biz too, or used to be.

I would trust DCL with work, no question. I know a couple of those folks, and I read a lot of their stuff on a regular basis. They know what they’re doing. I’ve yet to catch them out. (Necessary disclaimer: I did a weekend’s worth of contract work for DCL once. That and the OEBF are the extent of my contact with DCL. They sure aren’t paying me to say nice things about them, never have, and probably never will.)

More to the point, they’ve been very careful about the parameters of this service. You do not get a typeset book out the back end, nor do you get any kind of markup. If you want Word styles, it’s extra. This is good. The focus means they can develop lean, mean workflows. It also means they won’t promise the moon to everyone (as another ex-employer was in the habit of doing).

I do wonder about their ASCII service, though. Surely they’ll do Unicode, in order to keep smart quotes and similar niceties? If not, I would absolutely demand Word. No excuse for losing typographic characters. None. I suspect, however, that they’re saying ASCII when what they mean is Unicode-or-ASCII; not everybody understands what Unicode is.

I admit I clicked on the link because I had the sinking feeling they were muscling in on what I hope will be Text Artisan Guild’s turf: reclamation of electronic typesetting data, in current and obsolete formats, into SGML or XML. (Especially obsolete formats. I’m salivating at all the Penta work there must be, now that Penta is dead.)

But they’re not, at least not with this. TAG isn’t going to do paper. Nuh-uh. That takes serious infrastructure, that does.

(Oh, and in case anyone from DCL is reading: No, TAG isn’t going to mooch on your turf either. TAG wants the customers and jobs too small or fiddly to be profitable for you. TAG doesn’t want—couldn’t even do—the large-volume and ongoing jobs that are your bread and butter.)

I’m happy. I’m meditating a “TAG recommends…” page, and this is one more good service to put on it.

I was completely wogboggled to find out that Jonathon has a mobile phone. I guess it’s a living-in-Japan thing. I won’t go near the wretched things myself. Cannot imagine anything more intrusive, or more likely to make me enemies: I had to teach myself to bite back my instinctive annoyance at interruptions, when I entered the work world.

By and large, I’m in sympathy with Jonathon’s post. But this parenthetical bit I absolutely had to push back at: “the ideal relationship (between introverts who can intuitively share their thoughts and feelings).”

Jonathon. Dude. Wrong. Wrong ever so. Introverts are introverts, not mind readers. Trust me on this one.

Yeah, sure, I can finish David’s sentences with some regularity and rather better than random correctness. That is not a function of “intuition” or anything related to introversion. It’s simply a function of twelve years of interaction and shared context. A pair of twelve-years-involved extroverts doubtless finishes each other’s sentences as well as David and I do.

But if I tried to “intuit” his thoughts and feelings on a grand scale, or he mine, we’d be divorced. It just doesn’t work that way. Not even for introverts.

This is the danger of courting an extreme introvert, in fact, it seems to me. We’re so comfortable in our own minds we forget that others don’t have immediate access to our thoughts the way we do. Not only do we not give out our thoughts while we’re forming them—we forget to do it once they’re formed.

Eventually, a couple just becomes a couple of people in a couple of different worlds, people who barely notice each other. Dreadfully, dreadfully easy trap to fall into. Been close to it myself once or twice. Intuition hasn’t pulled me out of it, ever. Neither has familiarity or shared context. And David’s and my off-the-scale introversion deserves considerable blame for the problem in the first place.

What solves the problem is breaking the introverted shell. Acting and reacting openly, not just in the privacy of my own mind. Uncomfortable? Yeah, sometimes. Necessary? Absolutely.

Now and then, a blog leaves my blogroll because I know full well that reading it is going to raise my blood pressure. (By no means the only reason, but it is one.) Most of the time, CavLec is an inoffensive sort of place that doesn’t stir that kind of reaction in people, and I like it that way.

Recently, however, I think CavLec stirred up more systoles than it should have. Since my own readings came back to normal, I’ve been trying to figure out how to apologize for that. I currently figure that I can’t wait any longer, even though I still don’t know.

So I’m sorry, Liz, Alex, AKMA, Naomi, Turbulent Velvet, and others. You were right; I did indeed fly off the handle, pin you unfairly into uncomfortable corners. I will try not to repeat my mistakes.

Which isn’t to say I will never again say a negative word about academia-the-system or (specific) academics. But you knew that.

I still haven’t linked the comeuppance that T.V. gave me. Glad for the chance to rectify the omission. I also discovered Timothy Burke and Gary Sauer-Thompson through this unpleasantness, and I value both discoveries.

I got a nice email today from somebody who found my old college honors project useful. Wondered where those hits were coming from; now I know. (Come to think of it, I ought to put a Creative Commons license on that. It’s all but got one anyway.)

Best thing to happen to me all day. I have a hellacious headache, and would very much like to invoke the evil eye on every single programmer who has ever worked on Microsoft Access.

Still. Nice to be useful. Since most of the time I’m not.

Makes me think, though. If my ex-department had let me do a project I once asked to do, there’d be a translation of La vida de Santa Maria Egipcïaca up here too, you bet. I wonder if anyone’s translated that by now? Nobody had (to my knowledge) when I asked to do the project.

Couldn’t do it now if I wanted to. Forgotten too much.

After a whole week not messing with Access at all… it sucks to be back, let me tell you.

I want a bumper sticker for my office that says “I’d rather be debugging Python.”

Okay, so I’m skimming the Cheetah docs for enough savvy to get myself started, when I run across this codesnippet as a template example:

#if $country in ('Argentina', 'Uruguay', 'Peru', 'Colombia',
'Costa Rica', 'Venezuela', 'Mexico')
<H1>Hola, senorita!</H1>
#else
<H1>Hey, baby!</H1>
#end if

Hey, Cheetah guys? Forgot your tilde there, fellas. Or on second thought—a little too much tilde, know what I mean?

(Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re all guys. I’ve yet to meet a woman who would let the above get past her.)

Try “¡Hola, amigos!” and “Howdy, folks!” next time. Just as cute, much less likely to make hysterical Spanish-speaking feminists like me write snide blogposts about your docco.

The weather has been unsettled all day. I went out to lunch downtown with a friend of mine who works from home, and came home in a sleet-squall. Naturally I had forgotten my umbrella; that’s just the kind of idiot I can be sometimes.

But some fifteen minutes ago I looked out the window at the brightening sky and saw against the wall of clouds in the east a tentative rainbow.

Honestly I don’t feel I deserved to. But yes, it was lovely.

If you were going to put a second hard drive in the 60–120 GB range into your Mac G4/350, to run OS X on one partition and use other partitions for backup and miscellanea, what hard drive would you choose and why? Any stinkers to stay away from?

(I don’t want to disturb my husband’s OS 9 installation—hardly worthwhile partitioning the original 10GB drive anyway, and I don’t like what I hear about the flakiness of Classic—thus the second drive.)

Thanks to some timely aid from Joe Gregorio, who is a mensch, I got Cheetah up and running finally. (Problem, as might have been expected, between chair and keyboard.)

Now. Time to decompose textartisan.com into templates. We’ll see how long that ends up taking. And then I actually have to write marketing drivelcopy, eek.