Caveat Lector

Lest it be thought I do nothing here on CavLec but bash publishers…

Mike Rossner is made of win and awesome. May many of his principled colleagues follow his example.

That is all.

I owe Dr. Peter Sefton an apology for not addressing him as Dr. Sefton here. Mea culpa, and I’m sorry; the error was inadvertent and no disrespect was intended.

I should also make clear that I’m rooting for ICE-RS and Lemon8, and that my still-significant reservations about their prospects have nothing whatever to do with the people building them or the quality of their work (which I have no grounds to evaluate—save past experience with similar tools—as I haven’t tested either package yet).

No, this is a problem that lives at the intersection between people and computers. I don’t believe that authors will always not use styles; I know better. But that, to me, is not the question. The question is “will enough authors use these tools (whether based on styles or not), and will they use them adequately enough, to base an efficient publishing workflow on their work?”

I ain’t seen it happen yet, is all I’m sayin’. My jaundiced soul believes right to the bottom of its toes that markup is an editor’s tool, not an author’s, not to mention that a lot of players have different text-structure needs.

But that doesn’t mean that ICE-RS and Lemon8 are useless. It’s not as though editorial tools are perfect! (Back in the day I made a suggestion or two about how to get these tools right for authoring. I don’t think anybody listened to me then, and I doubt anyone will now. The point is, there are advances to be made, if anyone is willing to think hard enough about them and able to implement them.)

I find myself in an odd rhetorical position here. Under most circumstances, head-shakers with their eternal “Tried that. Didn’t work. Won’t work this time either,” bug the living you-know-what out of me. And here I am being one, and I don’t like it. Sometimes things happen when it’s their time to happen. Maybe now is the time for word-processing–based authoring tools for markup. Who am I to say it’s not?

Except…

The head-shakers are often wrong because something’s changed in their environment that makes the New Thing feasible where it wasn’t before. Roy Tennant made this point the other day in a different context. I guess where I go off the rails on author markup tools is that I don’t see what’s changed in author brains or in the value proposition for these tools such that authors are going to climb onboard en masse.

Maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to be.

Mouser spent last night snuggling up alternately to David and me in bed. It’s utterly astonishing how many BTUs a bitsy scrawny gray kitten can put out. It’s also utterly astonishing that a bitsy scrawny gray kitten who wouldn’t let us anywhere near her last Friday is a total cuddlebug by Tuesday. I told her not to get used to being my necklace, because that’s a limited-time-only endeavor. She can m0wz0r my arm as much as she wants, however.

The vet got back to us this morning with the welcome news that Mouser tested negative for feline leukemia, which could have prevented us keeping her because we wouldn’t want it spread to the Goths. We also gave Mouser a dose of selamectin today, which should do for her earmites as well as anything else parasitic she’s carrying around. If she gets a clean bill of health when she goes back to the vet in late September, we’ll be able to introduce her to the Goths.

We’ve found her a string to play with (supervised, of course; we know that kittens eat things they shouldn’t), a toy ball as big as her head, and a couple other toys, but Mouser thinks that Buffle the MacBook is the greatest toy ever. She loves watching the pointer move around the screen, and the Dock magnification effect was clearly created purely for the amusement of kittens. Oh, well, at least it demonstrates that her visual acuity is just fine.

As a fringe benefit… while I was watching Mouser on the back porch last Saturday, I saw a veritable hummingbird at one of our flower-vines. We unearthed and filled the hummer feeder, and it has already been found. So you see, it is good to rescue small kittens, because they come with bonus hummingbirds!

So the PRISM folks got caught with their pants down. They’re so uptight about copyright that they’ll… violate somebody else’s. Oops.

Look, this wasn’t malicious. (Unlike their campaign, which is.) It wasn’t intentional hypocrisy (again, unlike their campaign). Some poor webmonkey somewhere forgot to swap out some files, and nobody caught it in time. The webmonkey will probably be fired. (Unlike Eric Dezenhall.) Getty didn’t lose any money, because PRISM paid up—I suspect, as I said, that they’d already paid up and there was a plain old ordinary mixup on the webserver.

So I’m not pointing fingers, and for once, I’m not laughing at the perps. I’ve made similar mistakes, and cleaned up after them. (Not, I should say, in the course of my work. I’m quite careful about that.) I feel bad for the poor webmonkey. I can’t say I’m precisely sorry that PRISM now has a big black eye, because I still think they’re slime for reasons having nothing whatever to do with a mixup over paid images. But I’m not laughing.

Peter Suber, as usual, said it best Dave Munger, sorry: “Dealing with copyright and DRM is expensive and inconvenient.” Now perhaps some of the PRISM folks will start to understand how library patrons feel. That can only be a good thing.

And a whole bunch of people who would have let PRISM pass in silence are now spreading the word about the issues. That’s a good thing too. So this has turned into a win for the angels—but for reasons somewhat orthogonal to the actual event.

We are mean and cruel housemonkeys. Poor Mouser hadn’t been in the house a day before we hauled her (she is a her, it turns out) off to the mean and cruel veterinarian!

Mouser was convinced to stay in last night by the simple expedient of closing the back door while she was indoors. She didn’t really object; her only question was about the bathroom arrangements, and now that she’s been plunked into her litterbox once or twice at the crucial moment, she seems to have taken to it. She missed out on this morning’s thunderstorms (which is more than I managed; I had a morning meeting in the computer-science building halfway across campus), and by the look of things she believes she is moving up in the world. I got her to sit on my lap last night, and David says she climbed onto the bed all by herself this morning to come cuddle on his shoulder.

As I suspected, Mouser has earmites. The vet gave her drops for them (much to her dismay, I’m told), and a med to rub on her skin that will take care of them for good and all, as well as any intestinal parasites she may be harboring. She got her distemper shot, and is being tested for (please, no!) feline leukemia and various other nasties. We’re to take her back in at the end of September for a rabies shot, at which juncture she can be introduced to the Goths if she has a clean bill of health otherwise.

Barring serious health issues, it looks as though Mouser (or “m0wz0r,” which is David’s coinage) will become part of the family. Exactly how harmonious a family we turn out to be depends rather on the Goths…

I forgot to mention that yesterday was our locale’s annual neighborhood yard sale, so David and I left Mouser a full bowl of food and walked around to see what was what. We came back with some books, a dinner-dish for Mouser, and a Tripitaka statue (”Tripitaka” or a variant thereof is a common nom de net of David’s).

We also discovered the Washington Hotel Coffee Room, which is an utterly charming little establishment at the back of a local knitting shop, with a lovely view of Monona Bay, even to a bird-spotting scope set up near the windows for the convenience of guests. David strongly recommends the apple juice.

On my way out, I spotted the MACSAC cookbook, which I’d heard good things about, and grabbed it at once. Vegetarian cookbooks I have in plenty, but most of them don’t heed seasonality, which is hard on a CSA subscriber. This one is designed for CSA subscribers, and should make my life easier.

Today Mouser learned the glories of fleece, as well as the art of attacking milk-jug-ring-on-a-string. Miraculously, he has decided we are allowed to pet him—when he’s in the mood. We caught him in the middle of one of our spiny backyard bushes, and he hissed when I reached in toward him. Half an hour later, though, he was stretching his scrawny little neck so I’d scratch his head harder, purring to wake the dead.

I accidentally left the bedroom door open while Mouser was inside. Didi wandered in and came nose-to-nose with Mouser. Miraculously again, neither of them hissed or growled or clawed or bit; they were both rather “wtf?” nonplussed until I shooed Didi back out and shut the door.

When she tells Dream, though, we’re in for trouble…

David IMed me while I was at work yesterday, something he doesn’t ordinarily do, and when he does, it’s usually about trouble.

This time? Stray kitten in the back yard. He emailed me pictures of a sad little grey waif with big scratches on its forehead, a bald spot over one tawny-orange eye and immense elf-ears. It’s been raining for a solid week here (no joke; the bay is within half a foot of overrunning its normal banks).

Well, damn.

I’m calling it Mouser for the time being (after Leiber’s Gray Mouser, of course). Last night we were able to feed it and entice it up onto our back porch. This morning it came a few feet inside our bedroom, bribed by kitty treats. When we talk to it, it answers back in a piercing mew. Definitely not pettable yet… but we have hopes, at least of getting it to a vet to get its scratches seen to and its shots done.

We think Third Goth got scooped off the street and taken care of; I saw a “Found Cat” sign in the neighborhood that answered to his description. So now there is Mouser instead.

PRISM. Such a pretty acronym. Such a pity it looks to be a conglomeration of lying profitmongering scum.

Read Peter Suber’s rebuttal. Check out this reframing of the acronym. Recall the last effort along these lines. Then raise your voices with mine.

SCUM.

Edited to add: My excellent colleague kindly obliges with another translation.

Got my lab results back the other day. Thyroid checked out fine, so that wasn’t the source of the brain-fog I’ve been laboring under for the last some-while. What did turn up? Vitamin B12 deficiency.

Now, I should have thought of that myself; it’s hardly uncommon among vegetarians. But I didn’t, so I’m glad the doc did. Three days of supplements and I already feel more myself—made it through a six-hour meeting today without going all space-case once—though I have learned that I need to take the pill in the morning, because it acts like a pep-pill and causes me insomnia if I take it at night.

My heredity is catching up with me, in the form of a nasty cholesterol profile and borderline-high blood pressure. I am less than pleased about this, and I’ll do what I reasonably can, but hell’s bells, the family history I’m fighting is a regular Goliath.

On the whole, though, I’m only slightly broken, and I can live with that.

Lorcan Dempsey did:

I think we have a very dreary ‘published’ literature. We have a set of niche publications, many of little sustained interest. The literature is a citation farm for those involved in formal research activity, and in the US, a necessary career convenience for those librarians who work within the tenure system.

At last winter’s London presentation, I made the point at some length that communication is no longer the central purpose of the “scholarly communication” system; there are too many faster, easier ways to communicate. The central purposes of the scholarly communication system are marking territory (for authors and for disciplines) and lengthening CVs.

I’m glad to be out of the tenured-librarian rat race—not because I don’t have anything written to contribute to the profession, but because I don’t have to play CV-puffery games. Last year at this time, I was working on three-four written things at once. This year, I’m tying up one thing from last year and working on one other thing. (Okay, and a review… but reviews, I am discovering, don’t take me long. It helps when the book I’ve been handed is pure effluent, too. We don’t do technical reviews any more, I take it, Neal-Schuman? “XML is a language” on the very first page, sheesh.)

As for the literature… when I put together my syllabus for this fall’s course, I ended up with one book and two articles from “the literature.” (The book was Putting Content Online, because I think it kicks butt. The articles were on RFID. Couldn’t find anything suitable in the blogosphere. That probably says something about RFID’s future, but I’m not sure I should speculate as to what.) The rest is cobbled together from good tech sites, blogs, the tech-news site Ars Technica, and yes, Wikipedia.

Because our literature, it reeks, and we don’t read it anyway, so what’s the point?