What guns are for some people, books are for me. I’ll never give them up. “Cold, dead hands,” all that.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Nicholson Baker and the Kindle
Nicholson Baker’s consideration of the Kindle in the new New Yorker is unlikely to move many units. A sample:
The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.Baker’s conclusion, supported by many other reasons:
This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?
Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things.A related post
No Kindle for me
“Two large black men,” et cetera
The “two large black men with backpacks” who were supposed to be breaking into Henry Louis Gates’ house last week: where did that description come from? Not from Lucia Whalen’s 911 call. And Whalen’s lawyer insists that she did not talk to James Crowley at the scene.
Beagle Bros disk-care warnings
Founded by Bert Kersey in 1980, Beagles Bros created sophisticated and incredibly useful software for the Apple II. A distinctive sense of humor marked Beagle advertising and packaging — old clip-art, fictional staff (Al Gorithm, Flo Chart), and short BASIC programs that yielded strange, entertaining phenomena when you typed them in. Even the company’s name was surreptitiously funny. Why no period after Bros? No room.
Beagle Bros showed tremendous generosity to and trust in its customers, shipping software with bonus utility programs, stickers, and no copy-protection. I still remember calling Beagle in 1986 with a question about its new program MacroWorks (an AppleWorks add-on). “Would you like to talk to Randy?” asked the person on the other end. So I talked with Randy Brandt, the program’s creator. MacroWorks was my great encouragement, early on, to tinker and tweak, computer-wise.
While thinking about Beagle Bros yesterday, I realized that I probably still had some Beagle disk sleeves among my old Apple //c disks. Here’s a scan of the disk-care warnings from the back of the sleeve. Heed them well.
Related reading
The Beagle Bros Online Museum (“Being a tribute to the coolest software company of the 80s”)
Beagle Bros Software Repository (with ads, catalogues, posters)
Beagle Bros (Wikipedia)
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Today’s Hi and Lois
In today’s Hi and Lois, camp counselors say goodbye:
“We may never see each other again.”Pretty tough talk. Hemingwayesque even, style-wise. Chip and C.J. must be the only teenagers in the country who don’t know about Facebook.
“Yeah.”
“Have a nice life.”
“You too.”
[I’m trying smart quotes — “ ” — in this post. If you see anything strange, punctuation-wise, please let me know. Thanks.]
Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Blurry blue line
The line of when to put on handcuffs is a personal and blurry one, varying among officers in the same city, the same precinct, even the same patrol car.In the aftermath of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrest, an examination of varied attitudes toward "what in police parlance is called getting 'lippy'":
As Officers Face Heated Words, Their Tactics Vary (New York Times)
Friday, July 24, 2009
"How to e-mail a professor" in print
My #1 hit, How to e-mail a professor, appears in the new eighth edition of Barbara Fine Clouse's The Student Writer: Editor and Critic, just published by McGraw-Hill.
Ten good questions follow my piece. I especially like this one:
Explain the reference to Maggie Simpson in paragraphs 10 and 15. Why do you think Leddy includes this reference?
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