Caveat Lector

Right, got the food made (though not set out yet), and am all glammed up in a dress Li will remember very well… making me the exception to the rule that One Never Wears Bridesmaid Dresses Twice. Plus entirely too much makeup in clashing colors—this is, after all, the Oscars.

Did hair in dramatic asymmetrical fall-over-one-shoulder… and discovered that in a few years I shall have a skunk stripe, if the one gleaming gray hair just off the forehead is any indication whatever.

Anyone who shows up with a camera tonight faces summary execution.

May I say once again that Internet Explorer 5 is the stupidest, crankiest, brokenest, most thoroughly Cro-Magnon browser known to humankind?

Thank you.

(Somebody is working on a redesign idea for somebody’s Info Architecture class. Somebody gets right cranky when stuff that ought to work doesn’t.)

Please, people. Firefox is what you want. It just is. Trust me.

Could someone tell me what’s so great about anti-aliased fonts?

I mean, they’re fine for working on a print production. They do give a better sense of what the final product will look like.

But for reading significant amounts of text onscreen? Hate ’em. Hate ’em hate ’em hate ’em. Anti-aliased fonts make my eyes think they’re not focusing properly, and too much of that leads to serious headaches.

Don’t tell my ebook friends at Microsoft, but I never really liked the ClearType deal either. Same reason. My eyes like to read things with crisp boundaries. Dinking around with subpixels is not a route to crisp boundaries.

I grant you this limits my onscreen font choices. You know what? I am cool with that.

I debated this post in my head for quite some time. Hereby I post it; the worst that can happen is I get sued.

Quite some time ago, I wrote this:

Once upon a time in eBookspace, there was a conversion house. “Ah! Open eBook Publication Structure!” said the people of this conversion house. “This is merely HTML in disguise.”

And they said, “Let us hire a great many robots at the lowest wages we can manage, build highly sophisticated production tools that even they cannot misuse (since robots, as we all know, are stupid creatures, prone to make mistakes), and turn them loose. We will not train our robots, since training is expensive and they need not understand what they are doing; they need only use the highly sophisticated tools in predictable fashion.

“We will not create high-quality OEB markup, moreover, since we will give our clients only the finished eBooks, not the markup that went into them—and in any case our clients are clueless about quality markup and we will do our best to see that they remain so. And yea, we will make a great deal of money and our days will be long on the earth.”

And they did as they had planned. And they failed miserably, and ended their days in great penury crying woefully unto the heavens about the injustice of their failure.

I got in heaping helpings of trouble (as in “a millimeter from being fired”) with my employer over this, because my employer thought—not without reason—that the company was being targeted. (And it was; I’d run out of internal places to try to push some kind of reform. But not uniquely targeted, not at all.)

I found out a bit ago that said employer ain’t in the conversion business no more. Now, while I’m not going to claim that the problems I pointed to are the only reason for their troubles in this arena, and I’m furthermore not going to claim that the company itself is imperiled (I don’t actually think it is)… I will claim that I was right about their mindset vis-à-vis conversion, and how much that mindset cost them in the long run.

My crystal ball is spotty, but every once in a while it turns up a winner.

A lot of the personality tests I’ve taken fall down around the question of organization. They assume that spatial organization and temporal organization are part and parcel of the same trait, whatever you want to call that trait.

Well, I’m here to say, it ain’t so. Spatially, I am horrendously disorganized. Piles, piles everywhere—the cats navigate our home office with extreme care, because they never know when a pile is going to shift under them and land them abruptly on the floor. I have never had a desk in my life that didn’t turn into a disaster area eventually.

(No, I take that back. My TA desk was shared, so I kept it neat. Exception that proves the rule.)

Temporally, though—I like a schedule, I do. I like it not to change. I do not like disruptions to it. Schedule disruptions make my head hurt.

This, I think, is why I’ve had such a hard time this month. It isn’t the sheer amount of work; I’ve actually kept that under control. It’s that I simply haven’t established a routine, what with group meetings and extracurriculars and eye exams and I don’t know what else. I like routines. They comfort me.

Nor I don’t like what they call “spontaneity,” either; I can get downright curmudgeonly about that. My frame of mind tends to follow along with my schedule. It’s no use suggesting something off-the-cuff; I won’t be in the right mental space for it.

Perhaps it’s the extra mental energy I have to devote to making sure I’m in the right places at the right times doing the right things. I think I’m much happier when all that is on autopilot.

But right now, this is a strongly atypical Thursday (not that I’ve had any typical ones, the last few weeks!) and I have a headache. Grr.

I don’t know why I haven’t run into Katz and Hartnett, Scholars in the Making (Ballinger 1976) before. It’s a good book, even if it’s a little timider than I would like. (Y’all know me, I’m a firebreathing revolutionary when it comes to graduate education. Nothing short of the scholarly equivalent of an ICBM would make me happy, if my detractors are to be believed.)

Seems to have been roundly ignored for the past almost-thirty years. Shame. It’s definitely on the right path. I just sent a quote out to my Use and Users group, a quote that sums up why I railroaded the group (I admit it, I did) into the project we’re doing:

In spite of gains made in the past few years, prospective graduate students have far less information about graduate departments than those departments have about the students. Many students who express dissatisfaction with their graduate experience indicate that the source of difficulty is that the department is not what they had expected or been led to believe, and that more information might have prevented them from making what, in hindsight, seems to have been a poor decision. We favor greater equalization of the flow of information between prospective graduate students and graduate departments.

The word for this is “disillusionment” (though the Portuguese desilusão just sounds righter, for some reason), and yes, it’s a large part of why I’m such an infuriating harpy on this subject. I damn well expected better of the Department from Hell, and I still don’t see why I didn’t get it.

Got to this entry on a brand-new weblog via Sean McGrath.

Now, the blogger in question is talking about something totally different from PDF, so I just find it enthrallingly cool how the entry encapsulates so very much that annoys me about the “PDF is too a standard!” business. A sample:

The problem with these “proprietary standards” is that they are closed to input. And even for the chosen few allowed to provide input, the authoring companies completely reserve the right to use or ignore their comments and criticisms of the specs. Let’s face it — this is because the companies publishing the specs are busy implementing them, and they essentially refuse to take comments that would require any painful refactoring or rewriting of their implementations.

Go ye and read.

Hop on over to Open Access News and read the pushback from Elsevier. No, really, go on. If only to see Peter Suber’s patience growing thin, a rare sight indeed.

What I want to know is, who does Elsevier think they’re kidding? Honestly, who? Do they think librarians are going to buy their line of hooey? Librarians have the budget numbers and the cancellation lists staring back at them! Faculty senates have finally started to take the cancellation lists seriously, too, and faculty are generally smart enough to figure out that Elsevier has strong and compelling reasons to defend the status quo, reasons that have nothing whatever to do with the strength and reach of scholarly and scientific discourse.

So I can only surmise that Elsevier is trying to snow the financial analysts, who have been downgrading Elsevier stock lately. (Takes a lot for an analyst to do that. Analysts are sunny-side-up people, generally.)

I really can’t say how successful this effort of Elsevier’s will be; I don’t understand how financial analysts think. I can say, though, that I don’t believe it’s going to stop or even slow open-access journals appreciably. Frankly, Elsevier is looking pretty silly, slamming that barn door with so much noise and fanfare. Horse done gone, y’all.

I do confess I don’t understand this person’s reasoning (scroll to end of article). The idea that libraries can use open-access as a stick to beat Elsevier with rests on the assumption that one journal is just as good as another, that one journal can be replaced by another with no loss felt. That’s ludicrous; if it were true, Elsevier would have been abandoned in droves long ago.

Part of the whole Elseviley Verlag problem is that these guys own some quality journals, amongst the droves of crap ones they bundle. Moves by Donald Knuth and various faculty senates attack this issue; they’re intended to reduce the quality, prestige and value of Elseviley Verlag journals. I hope it works, but unless and until it does, libraries are still between a rock and a hard place.

Absent the silly meaningless threat of replacing Elseviley Verlag journals with open-access ones, how are libraries supposed to use open access as a stick? “Lower your prices, Elseviley Verlag, or we’ll—we’ll—we’ll start an open-access journal, that’s what we’ll do!”

Yes, well, I wouldn’t mind seeing such threats, myself. But Elseviley Verlag would laugh, and libraries would feel silly, and anyway, this is a hideous bad reason to run an open-access journal. Do it because you’re committed to it, not just to spite Elseviley Verlag.

(And if you’re going to do it, think about hiring me to run production, will you? Sorry, sorry, self-promoting—but it’s never too early to job-hunt, you know?)

Anyway—might as well get some amusement out of Elsevierian antics. In the grand scheme of things, their PR doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. For once, I’m confident in my crystal ball—open access in one form or another is here to stay.

To whoever is searching for “felinicide” on this blog: you are a sick puppy and you need to go away. No killing kitties here.

To whoever is searching for “Roger Wright” on this blog: Ugh. I read Roger Wright, back when I still thought I had a hope in hell of passing Ph.D prelims. I still consider doing so to have been an extraordinary waste of time. Who the hell cares when Latin became Spanish?

That is all. Carry on.

Taxes done, copied, and packaged up to mail. I think there may be an error in the instructions for the state form, but if there is, they’ll figure it out on their end.

Hint for students: If you’re thinking of taking the deduction for tuition and fees, check to be sure the Lifetime Learning Credit won’t net you more. Did for us.

TAG did okay last year. And for once, most of its income was from me. Don’t see that happening this year—I’m too busy—but it still felt nice.

Paid bills, too, and fed David’s IRA. (Still have to call those nice folks in Texas to feed mine. Dunno what’s got into me lately; not getting these minor chores done.) Took a look at the mortgage, David looking over my shoulder. “We could, um, pay this off now,” he offered.

Well, yes, we could, but we’d have to strip ourselves bare of cash to do it. With me starting a job hunt in a year, that’s a really bad idea, and so I told David. He accepted that—but I think he’s disappointed. Man after my own frugalista heart.