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Computer fun... (not!)
Aug. 26th, 2003 06:41 amCriminy.
I started up my computer and fired up Word, only to find it opened a window and hung there, like a (virtual) cow looking at a (virtual) strawberry, with that silly hourglass sitting in the middle of the screen, not doing much of anything. A three-fingered salute was required to bring up the Close Program dialog box to kill Word, which was [Not responding].
Initially, I believed something had corrupted my installation of Word, but a little digging on the Web reminded me that there was a way of starting Word with no templates or add-ins ("winword.exe /a" from a command line), and when I did that, Word started with no problems.
I emptied out the template startup directory and then dropped the templates that were there back in, one at a time, until the problem manifested itself. The culprit was the Wordfast template, which is not a good thing, as I have been using it quite a bit lately and thus, have come to depend on it (not to mention shelled out $$$ for it). So I downloaded a new copy of the template and tried using that, with no joy.
When I went to use TRADOS (which I had upgraded prior to leaving home), the stupid program went into some kind of mode where it went looking for the install CD, which I did not take with me, unaware that I would need it again before running the program. (That's the second time TRADOS has popped me with a no-joy-can't-use-the-program surprise while on the road.)
So that's pretty much been my night, outside of the space-to-ground interpretation.
* * * Listening to a self-help audio from Franklin Covey, I am struck by how the traditional "call to action" has turned into a "call to panic." It seemed to me that half the audio was spent telling me famously useless information about the "speed of change" in the world today (a thousand "bits" of information per year in 1900, to the same thousand "bits" per hour today), followed by words intended to get my agreement that such a pace is "frightening."
Hey! The speed of change is not frightening, at least not to me, although I will freely admit that change is an ongoing thing, and there's probably more of it going on than we may want to be seeing. (Maybe I've gotten used to the pace, I don't know.) In any event, I don't see the utility in crafting a watertight case to convince me something along those lines is happening. If I don't believe things are constantly changing to begin with, I'm probably not listening to the audio. If I somehow stumbled across the audio wanting to find answers to unasked (and unformulated) questions, then I don't see how beating the "change" topic into the ground is going to help me deal with it any better (indeed, throwing me into a tizzy about it may push me into denial, so I won't listen to any more tapes).
I also noticed an interesting appearance of the phrase, "turn of the century." For just about my entire life thus far, "turn of the century" referred to the period of time a few years on either side of 1900. What does it mean today?
There is no clear-cut answer, I suppose, since any attempt to subject the idiom to the idiosyncratic mania of the late 20th century for high precision in temporal expressions is well and truly idiotic. Nonetheless, technically, if today one were to say "back at the turn of the century," one would be referring to, roughly, the period of time of the past five or six years of so. (Or would one? Heck, we may still be in the thing, for all I know, which raises the question: By what year will the phrase definitely refer to what is for us now the recent past?)
It will take a little thinking (or perhaps not) to realize, today, that anyone referring to events at the "turn of the century" may be evoking events of approximately 100 years ago. I'm thinking it would have been better for the speaker to refer to the "turn of the last century."
* * * The California Supremes have decided that trade secrets are not a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. This has, of course, made various folks in Hollyweird very happy, since - among other things - all of the buzz in the stories keep talking about how DeCSS is a technology for pirating DVDs, when actually DeCSS is only a technology that allows encrypted DVD data to be decrypted without Hollyweird's permission.
To many, the distinction is rather subtle, since the decrypted data stream can then be pirated, but what most fail to grasp is that by fighting to keep the ability to decrypt out of the public's hands, Hollyweird is effectively fighting to control how you may use the data that they sell you on a plastic disk. Today, for example, buying a DVD in the U.S. will not entitle you to watch the contents on a DVD that's not coded for the U.S. "region," nor to watch it on a computer that does not run an "approved" operating system (i.e., Windows).
Look for media prices to remain stable (or rise slightly) as the how and where and when of your rights to use the data is ever-restricted.
Cheers...
I started up my computer and fired up Word, only to find it opened a window and hung there, like a (virtual) cow looking at a (virtual) strawberry, with that silly hourglass sitting in the middle of the screen, not doing much of anything. A three-fingered salute was required to bring up the Close Program dialog box to kill Word, which was [Not responding].
Initially, I believed something had corrupted my installation of Word, but a little digging on the Web reminded me that there was a way of starting Word with no templates or add-ins ("winword.exe /a" from a command line), and when I did that, Word started with no problems.
I emptied out the template startup directory and then dropped the templates that were there back in, one at a time, until the problem manifested itself. The culprit was the Wordfast template, which is not a good thing, as I have been using it quite a bit lately and thus, have come to depend on it (not to mention shelled out $$$ for it). So I downloaded a new copy of the template and tried using that, with no joy.
When I went to use TRADOS (which I had upgraded prior to leaving home), the stupid program went into some kind of mode where it went looking for the install CD, which I did not take with me, unaware that I would need it again before running the program. (That's the second time TRADOS has popped me with a no-joy-can't-use-the-program surprise while on the road.)
So that's pretty much been my night, outside of the space-to-ground interpretation.
Hey! The speed of change is not frightening, at least not to me, although I will freely admit that change is an ongoing thing, and there's probably more of it going on than we may want to be seeing. (Maybe I've gotten used to the pace, I don't know.) In any event, I don't see the utility in crafting a watertight case to convince me something along those lines is happening. If I don't believe things are constantly changing to begin with, I'm probably not listening to the audio. If I somehow stumbled across the audio wanting to find answers to unasked (and unformulated) questions, then I don't see how beating the "change" topic into the ground is going to help me deal with it any better (indeed, throwing me into a tizzy about it may push me into denial, so I won't listen to any more tapes).
I also noticed an interesting appearance of the phrase, "turn of the century." For just about my entire life thus far, "turn of the century" referred to the period of time a few years on either side of 1900. What does it mean today?
There is no clear-cut answer, I suppose, since any attempt to subject the idiom to the idiosyncratic mania of the late 20th century for high precision in temporal expressions is well and truly idiotic. Nonetheless, technically, if today one were to say "back at the turn of the century," one would be referring to, roughly, the period of time of the past five or six years of so. (Or would one? Heck, we may still be in the thing, for all I know, which raises the question: By what year will the phrase definitely refer to what is for us now the recent past?)
It will take a little thinking (or perhaps not) to realize, today, that anyone referring to events at the "turn of the century" may be evoking events of approximately 100 years ago. I'm thinking it would have been better for the speaker to refer to the "turn of the last century."
To many, the distinction is rather subtle, since the decrypted data stream can then be pirated, but what most fail to grasp is that by fighting to keep the ability to decrypt out of the public's hands, Hollyweird is effectively fighting to control how you may use the data that they sell you on a plastic disk. Today, for example, buying a DVD in the U.S. will not entitle you to watch the contents on a DVD that's not coded for the U.S. "region," nor to watch it on a computer that does not run an "approved" operating system (i.e., Windows).
Look for media prices to remain stable (or rise slightly) as the how and where and when of your rights to use the data is ever-restricted.
Cheers...
