Caveat Lector

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…

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.

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!

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.

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.