In the palace of Rumor

From Ovid, a picture of the palace of Rumor:

There is no quiet, no silence anywhere,
No uproar either, only the subdued
Murmur of little voices, like the murmur
Of sea-waves heard far-off, or the last rumble
Of thunder dying in the cloud. The halls
Are filled with presences that shift and wander,
Rumors in thousands, lies and truth together,
Confused, confusing. Some fill idle ears
With stories, others go far-off to tell
What they have heard, and every story grows,
And each new teller adds to what he hears.

Metamorphoses 12, translated by Rolfe Humphries, 1955

Sounds remarkably like a white-collar workplace.

Florence Wolfson's diary

From tomorrow's New York Times:

In its nearly 2,000 entries, the diary paints a picture of a teenager obsessed both with her appearance and with the meaning of existence.

Jan. 16, 1930: “I bought a pair of patent leather opera pumps with real high heels!” On April 8 that year: “Bought myself a little straw hat $3.45 — It won’t last long.” On April 20 the following year: “Dyed my eyebrows & eyelashes and I’ve absolutely ruined my face.” On March 13, 1934: “A fashion show for amusement and almost overcome with envy — not for the clothes, but the tall, slim loveliness of the models.”

Yet interspersed with observations about frivolous matters are equally heartfelt remarks about the books she loved — Baudelaire and Jane Austen were particular favorites — the paintings she studied, the performances she attended and the city that was her home.

“Slept long hours, read ‘The Divine Comedy’ and for the most part too exhausted to think or even understand,” she wrote on March 12, 1934. Four months later: “Reading ‘Hedda Gabler’ for the tenth time.”

Music, a recurring theme, scored her life with exclamation points. Beethoven symphonies! Bach fugues! “Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven,”“ she wrote on June 28, 1932. “I feel like a ripe apricot — I’m dizzy with the exotic.”

As a teenager, Florence Wolfson kept a five-year diary from 1929 to 1934. She and her diary were recently reunited.

Link » Speak, Memory (New York Times, registration required)

[Update, May 6, 2008: There's a book: The Red Leather Diary.]

XP, Vista

The curmudgeons of this world know that every new operating system brings with it at least much hype as benefits, and more often than not means spending lots of money in pursuit of the ever-elusive goal of making life at the keyboard perfect. And so they'd rather fight than switch.

From an artlcle on why it might be smart to stick with Windows XP and avoid Windows Vista.

Link » How To Stay Happy With Windows XP
from InformationWeek (via Lifehacker)

From the Levenger catalogue

These richly textured pieces of genuine lizard will endure years of use. Inside are pockets of genuine calfskin.

[From the description of the Lizard Card Wallet, in Levenger's "Mega Summer Sale" catalogue]

Just how many mad scientists are now working for Levenger anyway?

American reading habits

Sad statistics:

Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.

42% of U.S. college graduates never read another book.

58% of the U.S. adult population never reads another book after high school.

70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

And on an ironic note:

81% of the U.S. population feels "they have a book inside them."

Link » Facts and figures about publishing
from ParaPublishing.com, via kottke.org

Dark Room

A free new tool for anyone interested in distraction-free writing on a Windows computer: Dark Room, a Windows version of the free Mac program WriteRoom. Dark Room allows for distraction-free writing with minimal editing capabilities — cut, copy, paste, undo, redo. (WriteRoom has more options.)

What makes Dark Room different from a text-editor: the full-screen mode removes access to the desktop, so that there's nothing but a blank "page" — no titlebar, no taskbar, nothing to pull you away from writing. And full-screen mode keeps the "page" in the middle of the screen (very different from writing in a text-editor with a maximized window, with text running the width of the screen). DarkRoom's defaults are old school — green text with a black page and black background, but colors and margin settings (along with font style and size) can be changed to your liking. And you can toggle between fullscreen mode and a smaller, conventional window with F11.

I love the idea of a computer program emulating a typewriter (the Mac program Blockwriter, in development, goes further, removing cut and paste.) And I find it interesting that as Microsoft Office is on the verge of becoming even more visually complicated, people are creating alternatives for writing that function with extreme simplicity.

Related blog post
» My version of "Amish computing"

Links
» Dark Room (requires .NET Framework 2.0)
» WriteRoom
» Blockwriter
» Microsoft Office 2007 (Wikipedia article with screenshots)

Playing in Peoria

All your needs in one place: hair, sportswear, and martial-arts instruction.

[Photo taken in Peoria, Illinois, by Rachel Leddy]

Jumping out of Windows

A while ago I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop (thereby bringing an antique back to life). This past weekend, I wiped out Windows XP and installed Ubuntu on our family desktop computer. So with five computers in our family, the score is now Windows XP 3, Ubuntu 2. Our absolute reliance on Windows has come to an end.

The care and feeding of our family's computers has always fallen to me, and over the past six or seven years I've reinstalled Windows 98 and XP on various computers at least six or seven times. No matter how careful we are, problems, mysterious, impossible ones, appear. That's what happened this past weekend — bewildering freezes that could only be undone by disabling our wireless connection. Our arsenal of anti-malware, anti-spyware, and anti-virus programs could find nothing wrong; restoring the system with ERUNT was no help. The only way to resolve this problem was to reinstall Windows. That would have meant getting all of SP2 (an endless download), patching XP to allow a custom theme, reinstalling dozens of programs, tweaking all sorts of settings — in short, giving up a day or more to bring the computer back from the dead. And for what? I'd likely be doing it all again a year or so from now. So with my family's blessing, I went for Ubuntu.

Switching was simple. Wiping the hard drive and installing Ubuntu (from one CD) took about thirty minutes. (The installation includes Firefox, the GIMP, OpenOffice.org, and other programs.) As with the old laptop, establishing the wireless connection was a simple matter, and the system recognized and installed our printer in less than fifteen seconds. Updating Ubuntu and adding some programs from online "repositories" was quite straightforward and also took very little time.

Is everything perfect? No. The major problem thus far is that Suspend and Hibernate don't work, so all we can do is leave the computer running or shut it off. Ubuntu starts up and shuts down very quickly, so even this problem doesn't seem crucial. (It's widespread, so I hope that it will be solved with an update). I miss the backup service Mozy, though the Firefox extension Gmail Space gives us free online storage via a Gmail account (alas without automation). I'd like to have a program similar to AllChars, so that I can add em dashes in text files and type, say, /link and have the appropriate HTML for a link appear. (I would think that such a program must exist, but I haven't found it.) And there are various small issues that should get resolved as I learn more about Ubuntu. There is, yes, a learning curve, at least for the person who's maintaining the computer. I need to learn, for instance, about the advantages or disadvantages of partitioning our hard drive (I know how to partition; I just don't know whether it's appropriate to do so). The Ubuntu forums, easily searched, have already provided answers for many questions.

I suspect that as everyday computer users think carefully about the costs and complications of "upgrading" to Windows Vista and Office 2007 (both hideous, from the many screenshots I've seen), Ubuntu will become increasingly popular. I'd go so far as to predict a near-future in which many households are running at least one computer with a free operating system. It's relatively easy to jump out of Windows and land on your feet.

Link » Ubuntu

Water-slide, syllables added to pool

Our town pool has been renamed an "aquatic center." But that doesn't mean that we will be swimming with sharks. According to our local newspaper, the change of name is meant to show that there's more to the pool than a pool. There is also a water-slide.

Poem of the day

The Fourth

Valid hunches are rampant in this house,
like the one that just was — this past one,
every other word! — a rich explosive field
at whose center a romantic American
attempts to speak to a not-yet-romantic
(but soon-to-be) American, & no,
I would not like a piece of "funeral pie,"
we'll all be stiff soon enough, mind you,
"after postponing the obvious."
Little town, your shades are down,
you can tell, I know, no more.

[I wrote "The Fourth" on a late-20th-century Fourth of July.]