December was when devices spontaneously started going wrong. Or, in one case, more wrong than they had been.

This was by no means the first time in 2011 that my laptop had issues.

I started off the year dependent on a USB keyboard because the A and S keys died in The Root Beer Spill Incident – or, rather, died because of my fiddling with them before everything had dried out entirely. Part of my 2010 Christmas was the gift of a replacement keyboard from a family member, but it was 2011 before the delivery and installation.

It was however the first time the errors had come so closely.

At some point this past spring or summer, I made a bit of a mistake while loading the car one bright Sunday morning. I can attest that a simple laptop sleeve is no protection at all against a paperback study Bible gone airborne. Within a week, the right hinge had started to go. By October, the left hinge had started to go with it.

By December, both hinges were held together by binder clips and the laptop had made it clear the lid was not going to close again. It made it through NaNoWriMo nobly, and I’m now wondering if there’s a technological equivalent of the human habit of holding onto life just long enough to do one last thing or see someone one last time.

Total estimated value of parts required for replacement? At least a fifth of the original purchase price.

I spent most of December dealing with a laptop that was acting like a desktop, only lighter and more compact.

Also in late November and December, the back button on one of my two mp3 players decided to fall out (really, the internal button just came loose and I cant get it to stay back in) and the battery on the other entered the point of simply not holding a charge anymore.

I had purchased a new 4GB USB drive just before Thanksgiving. In trying to recover from an error in early December, I managed to mess something up just enough that Windows and Ubuntu both can’t tell there’s anything on the drive. I’ve managed to recover the spreadsheet that had my NaNoWriMo word count tracking stored in it, but that’s pretty much all I’ve been able to recover usefully from the drive – making me very glad most of the contents had already been backed up elsewhere before that error occurred and that Scrivener was set to store backups in a different place than the working files. Thanks to the laptop problems, I was spending a good deal of time working on another machine and using that USB drive to store working files.

So imagine my surprise when a box arrived just in time for Christmas. My boyfriend surprised me with a new laptop.

This is the first time I’ve had the chance to play with Windows Seven since early in the beta process. I’m really quite pleased and may even be inspired to do some software reviews later on, because there have been some nice little surprises along the way.

And Windows Live Writer came pre-installed with the plug-in directory finally working again (it was offline when last I tried to use Live Writer), so I’m typing this now on a mobile laptop, offline and with the capacity to export and backup all settings and drafts whenever I want so that the first time I have to or choose to restore the OS to its factory state, I can be up and blogging again in the time it takes to install a plugin and import the backup file.

In the next few days, I’ll wade through whatever’s gotten stuck in the comment spam filter. and get started back on my read through Wicked.  I only just found out the fourth book exists, the local library has a copy, and I’ve sworn to myself that I’m not going to read it until I’ve blogged through the end of Lion Among Men.

I can now attest that writing 50,000 words in four weeks does interesting things to the human mind. I’m not sure if I’ll do it again next year because of how my brain was processing things near the end, but it was definitely an experience.

I’ve twice attempted to participate in the past, and twice I failed to make it past the first week.

The first time, I was going to redo the novel I tried to write in high school, but I was still in college at the time, on the semester system, with professors who expected close-to-length rough drafts either just before or after Thanksgiving Break. I managed to write under 500 words the next day, failed to have the time for two days after that, and then just admitted to myself that it simply was not going to be possible that year. I was trying to write longhand in a five-subject notebook.

The second time was last year. Unfortunately for me, the concept I wanted to play with got to the mental point I couldn’t hold off any longer a few days before Halloween. I managed to get out 10,000 words or so, and then spent the rest of the month working on editing the book I’m currently trying to get an agent for. The project that November was intended to be a sequel to the novel I’m currently sending out queries for. That time I had learned from a previous mistake and switched to single subject notebooks that were much easier to carry around. Even though what I managed to write overflowed into a second notebook, that didn’t matter much since part of the concept of NaNoWriMo is not spending all of one’s time referencing back.

This year, I had planned to expand some mystery story concepts I have been mulling over into one connected novel-length narrative. That fell through on Halloween. There’s a single scene – really just an image – I’ve had in my mind for years from a vampire story, and suddenly I started piecing together just what kind of a world would have to exist for that scene to take place.

I did some very strange Googling this November and it was probably the first month in my entire life where reading TV Tropes actually made me more productive instead of less.

I only used the notebooks when I didn’t have computer access. For the computer-aided writing, I used FocusWriter when I didn’t have Internet access and played around with the new web application Yarny when I did have Internet access.  Eventually the project size grew unwieldy and I transferred the Yarny export (this was before they offered formatting beyond plain text) into yWriter5. I’ve been using yWriter off and on in various forms since it was in Version 1; the Spacejock Software wiki claims that version was never publicly released but I still have the installer on a computer backup from back in 2002-2003, so it was indeed available for public download. And unwieldy to use, something that was fixed in the complete restructure between it and yWriter2. One thing I’ve always liked since yWriter2 is how easy importing external projects is after doing a bit of pre-formatting, and the import from Yarny went about as smoothly as any of the imports ever have in the past.

And now I’m playing with a Scrivener For Windows trial in anticipation of using the NaNoWriMo winner’s discount code soon (yes, the codes have already been released).

One fun side benefit is that since I finally have the concept out of my head, I feel a lot freer about reading existing vampire novels now that the basic ground rules of that universe have been set down in text – and since I ended up with co-evolved vampires instead of supernatural vampires, the chance of accidentally lifting something besides general public domain vampire lore is pretty much down to nothing now. My previous exposure to the vampire genre was the book Dracula, the original anime Hellsing, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Very early in December, I discovered the odd-numbered volumes in Susan Sizemore’s Laws Of The Blood series on a discount rack and I’ve found them to be a rather enjoyable read. Each focuses on a different set of characters within the same general time frame, so not having access to two of the five books honestly didn’t keep me from being able to understand what was going on.

And no, I still have not watched, read, or listened to the audiobook of Twilight.

So, that was my November, and I do apologize for the absence. The next post will be about December.

This chapter is where we first get a clue that Frex and Melena’s daughter, now named Elphaba, may not be independently strange. It’s an important thing to note for the future, but it’s not what I want to discuss this time.

This chapter, we get a really good glimpse into the kind of upbringing that Elphaba is going to experience.

[TW - emotional abandonment of an infant]

Nanny, a woman who has only lived in nice places and has no clue how to deal with the town the family has been living in, is the only adult in Elphaba’s life that will not speak of her as a demon or something better off dead in her presence. Period.

In fact, Nanny’s sure that before she showed up, even with the threat of the baby’s sharp teeth temporarily neutralized, Elphaba has barely been held if at all.

No one has tried to emotionally bond to the child, and Nanny is the only one even trying to give an opening for Elphaba to emotionally bond to someone. And that’s verbal. As a near-newborn, Elphaba isn’t going to understand speech yet. She might understand vocal tones and overall speech patterns, but from Nanny those are still going to carry overtones of rejection and revulsion.

Elphaba is a few days old and beyond having her basic physical needs taken care of, she effectively has no one. She is surrounded by family, and she has no one.

Next time, we’ll see what a few years of this do to her as she grows into a child.

Frex’s marginal power as local minister is completely and utterly gone. It doesn’t matter that anyone coming to his house and pillaging isn’t going to find any gems. He now knows that only one member of the community was willing to save him from a bad end, and he has no clue which members of his congregation might have been one of the hooded men who attacked him.

And Melena has to take cover while in labor. [TW – woman in danger during childbirth, threatened infanticide]

Oddly enough, helping Melena give birth does change the opinion of the women helping her a bit, once they see that she is just another woman – even after they see a few mementos of her life before Frex in the house.

They even help her to safety once the Clock riles the crowd.

There’s a mythological/religious aside to be made here. Melena’s helpers are identified as a maiden, a fishwife, and a crone. These lifestages/roles (maiden, mother, crone) are traditionally the three faces of the Greek goddess Hectate, who was strongly associated with witchcraft, and my understanding is that they serve as similar divisions of a woman’s life in some forms of modern Wicca. (I will admit that I am only vaguely familiar with Wicca and the older religious traditions that inform its modern beliefs and traditions, so if I’ve gotten this wrong please correct me.)

And then the baby shows up – green and failing to cry. Melena is completely drugged out of her wits. The three women decide that killing the child is “the kindest course of action”. Luckily for the child, she has already grown a set of sharper-than-usual teeth and is capable of defending herself.

In the end, the same Clock that set the night in motion provides shelter for mother and daughter once the three women leave.

But the really interesting thing for me in this chapter is Frex’s lack of a clue. Melena may be framed as the one with little understanding of the world people without means live in, but Frex is the one who makes dangerous errors.

He’s about to set his family up for probable disaster.

[Trigger warning: discussion of pregnancy, childbirth, and spousal irresponsibility and temporary abandonment in the face of impending childbirth]

Frex has left Melena, his extremely pregnant wife who believes she’s about to become extremely formerly pregnant before the day is through, alone in the house.

Instead of finding someone in the neighborhood who can marginally stand her, he asks the first people he comes across to please get “a woman or two” to go stay with her for the day. The women of the community do not like Melena because of things like her accent which give her away as having come from a place that is not a little border town in the middle of nowhere near Munchkinland’s border.

Frex does not even put in the personal effort to ask women he knows either a) have a better than average attitude toward Melena or b) have any personal experience helping others through childbirth.

Melena does not live in and was not raised in a culture where women are expected to or praised for giving birth alone. If she were, she’d have been taught what to expect weeks or months ago, if not when she was a child. Even then, this is her first pregnancy. As I recall from an article I read years ago, even cultures where women are expected to handle childbirth completely on their own do not slight women who have help the first time – it’s expected that they will need help until they know what being in labor is like from first pains to the child being born.(And I would personally assume that even after that, the community would make sure a relative or female friend with experience helping would stay in earshot Just In Case.)

Frex has put his wife in a position that not even a community that routinely leaves pregnant women completely alone for labor would expect her to handle, and then he’s arranged ‘help’ in the form of the possible presence of women who may conceivably turn out to be the people in the community who hate her the most.

Certainly not women who would necessarily feel a need to defend her – or her child – against a threat.

And there’s going to be a threat. Frex is clueless enough to think being a lowly minister who has survived on next to nothing in a small town voluntarily is enough to make people who have been living that way involuntarily their entire lives listen to him while in the influence of a device he knows has already inspired violence.

Monday, we’ll see just how badly Frex has miscalculated his place in the community.

“The Root Of Evil” is only a few pages long, but it begins the introduction of Maguire’s specific version of Oz.

Here, we meet Melena, Frexspar, and Frex’s sense of what his concerns ought to be in the world.

Frex’s misguided sense of what his concerns ought to be in the world, since he’s about to walk out of the house to go preaching with Melena certain she’s about to give birth to his first-born child.

We learn several things about their family here.

The first is that Melena comes from a family of privilege but that they certainly aren’t living that way themselves. She has had so much privilege that she knows nothing about birthing in a region where no woman of childbearing age is expected to have escaped knowing such things. Despite this, Frex is still very much the dominant figure in their relationship.

The second is that they are living in an area which, according to the map at the front of the book, is almost at the border of Oz. From the names of the towns, it’s apparent that this isn’t even a somewhat important border region, just a rural part of Munchkinland.

The third is that Frex thinks he’s about to go try to save the neighborhood from some horror through preaching that he thinks is almost certain to fail.

The fourth is that in Oz, birth time superstitions – or at least one version of them – are based on time of day instead of days of the week. Woe for everyone, just in different flavors.

And the fifth is that a figure known as the Unnamed God figures highly in Oz religion – particularly in Frex’s opinions of what proper religious belief is.

It was the art. The art, which is all done in a woodcut style that would not at all seem out of place in an exhibit of newspaper woodcuts from just before photography took off, and which just would not fit in a small-format paperback.

And with the beginning of “I: Munchkinlanders”, the art of Wicked begins. It’s time to meet the Time Dragon and his Clock.

The Clock of the Time Dragon will come up repeatedly, and so will the Time Dragon’s role in the religious life of Oz. More about that soon, as we’re about to meet the missionaries (not his, although an argument could be made about the keepers of the Clock being clergy of a very odd sort).

The cover of “Munchkinlanders” is of the Clock with the Time Dragon perched on top of it and a crowd gathered beneath.

The Dragon is glaring – the effect made even better by the style – and pointing one claw at the reader.

The crowd isn’t much happier. All of the eyes are overshadowed. There’s a lot of judgmental frowning going on. One of the two smiles present is downright predatory.

In short, whoever the viewpoint character of the image is, that person is not going to be having a good night.

And it’s just before midnight according to the Clock.

If you don’t want to have the default “[Title]:[Shortlink]” message, schedule a post time far enough in the future to give you a chance to edit (and remember, you can change it back to Immediately while editing), hit Publish, then either tell Writer to open your new post after publishing or go to your WordPress dashboard yourself, and finally edit the message.

I wish there was a way – after all, the shortlink length is constant enough that having it as a variable to be filled in during the publishing process wouldn’t affect the character count if the shortlink length were included when the variable was placed. For all I know, there may have been a way at one time, but Microsoft took down Live Gallery except for the sidebar gadgets, and that was where the Live Writer plugins were kept.

At the very least to the characters, which admittedly it’s rather hard to avoid knowing something about in the USA these days – or at least in the parts of it I grew up in. The image of Dorothy and her companions skipping along is iconic. The Hallmark stores in the malls and anywhere else that sell their ornaments proudly display characters from the movie come the Christmas shopping season. And then there were the commercials for the anniversary DVD a few years back…

I never saw the movie all the way through until I was a senior in college – thank you ‘films as historical documents’ class, for being the reason I still have the DVD – despite nearly managing to do so between middle and high school, and I may or may not have read the book in middle school. I remember reading some of Baum’s other books, most or all of which are available as free e-books now on Amazon or elsewhere online legally, while riding home on the school bus.

But I was still very, very sure of what the Wicked Witch, Dorothy, and Dorothy’s companions looked like.

One of the things that strikes me in the prologue as someone who has read The Wicked Years before but has a bit of distance since her last reading is that so many of the rumors going around either are based somewhat in the truth or come directly from the experiences of the character voicing the rumor. I won’t talk much about that here, because some of it ties into much later chapters and the other books in the series.

And despite Dorothy’s traditional ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ framing as someone who thinks everything should work out for the best eventually (just how many total strangers does she trust without question by the end of the movie?), she’s the one who voices a true urgent concern and gets told it’s an over-reaction.

Storms are the one case where her Kansan knowledge is of more value than everyone else’s knowledge of how Oz works, and her insight is brushed off until she points out that even close but indirect lightning is a mortal danger to at least the Scarecrow and they’ve taken shelter under the largest tree in the area despite lodgings with an actual roof being available a short dash away.

Another thing: even as the Witch (she isn’t named yet, even though the prologue is from her point of view) catches sight of her late sister’s slippers, we’re introduced to just how careful she knows she has to be around water. A rainstorm is enough to completely ground her.

Oddly enough, Maguire doesn’t actually let us know whether Wicked is set in the movie’s version of Oz or in Baum’s books, at least not yet. The description of the shoes is a hybrid, containing references to both the ruby slippers of the movie and the silver slippers of the original book. At this point, it could by either way or even a bit of both.

Speaking as someone with a bit of experience writing stories based in multiple-choice-canon worlds – in my case Greek mythology – trying to pick what to take from which source is one of the more interesting parts of the writing process. Here, Maguire has two sources to chose from, and he appears to have kept his options intentionally open. If he makes a specific choice to follow one or the other later, that choice will now be to either follow that canon or both since the indecision about the shoes makes it clear he’s not firmly attached to either (despite including places and terms later on that only come from the books).

And as a last comment: even here and this early, there are signs that Maguire’s Oz is not the clean and innocence-accepting place of the movie. There are a few spots where the group can skip as they did in several iconic moments in the movie, but the rest of the Yellow Brick Road has fallen into disrepair. This is a place where not even the highway to the current capital is kept in good condition – or at least not the highway to the Emerald City from Munchkinland.

As I said in my introduction, this is a book series set in a cracked world. Even before Maguire starts showing where the cracks are – although the Witch’s reference to the political climate is a big hint – he’s made it oh so clear they exist. And in the large-format paperback (and I presume also the similarly sized hardcover), we haven’t even made it to page 5.

Within the space of a few weeks, I had gotten my hands on Son Of A Witch and A Lion Among Men. This summer, I found copies of Lost and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, neither of which I have found time to read yet.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that reading these books and doing chapter by chapter – or nearly so, as some chapters in Wicked are barely a page long and Liir’s misadventures in Son Of A Witch are over a hundred pages if I remember correctly – reactions would be interesting.

They’re a kind of guilty pleasure for me, as much of what gets highlighted in the books are things I can’t stand or rant about in real life. But Wicked and its sequels don’t pretend that they are discussing a perfect world – it’s a world absolutely cracked and growing worse, and there is no secret made of it.

I’ll try to update as often as I can.

Obligatory though not I think legally required in this case statement: I paid less than retail price for all of the books I currently own by Gregory Maguire. In each case, it was either because they were purchased used or bought off a clearance rack. I am receiving no money from he or his publisher for doing these.

1) OEM users technically are supposed to get support from the computer manufacturer. This means I as an OEM Vista user technically cannot tell you that your Genuine Advantage plugin does not attempt to validate anything in Internet Explorer 9, and in fact redirects me straight to a page telling me how much I’ll love Internet Explorer 9 every time I try to run the validation tool.

2) When I ignore the fact that I am an OEM user and try to make my way through the technical support online tree I am not meant to use, the fact that this is a Genuine Advantage issue routes me onto a page intended to deal with issues with valid Windows systems being not-validated or with people needing to make stolen software legal. There is nothing to click on for complete failure of the tool to run. There is nothing to click on for me to tell you that the tool is redirecting to a page telling me how much I should download the very browser the tool will not run on.

3) Most of the answers having anything to do with this? Are for XP users, because apparently the tool never fails to run in Vista. And again, I can’t use the little ‘Ask A Question’ box to alert you to the failure because I am an OEM user – you will find this out the moment things get to the ‘What is your specific OS?’ question and have given me every reason to believe I will get the online equivalent of a hung-up phone once I get that close to an answer even though neither the validation tool nor IE 9 came with the OEM operating system.

So basically, I just went through switching back to the OEM Vista (reimaging off the handy partition my laptop’s maker put on the system) off of XP to use the better speech recognition system, have in my hands the information that hey, the Genuine Advantage Validation tool is borked on at least one system when installed directly on IE 9 instead of on a lower version and then upgraded to IE 9, and because I am an OEM user and your support pages presume most issues with the tool will be cases of mislabeled counterfeit systems, I can’t tell you that there’s something up that could be an issue for anyone trying to install everything through Windows Update after a reinstall and then trying to download anything requiring Vista validation.

Fail, Microsoft.

At this point, I’m less interested in the help (I think I’ve got a backup of the macros installer somewhere) than in the possibility of warning your tech support and development teams that this is a possible issue, but you technically won’t let me do that through anything but posting this and adding your Twitter accounts to the people the Twitter notification is aimed at.

Oh, and the reason I honestly need the macro capability? Even when I stick my last name in the user dictionary, every time I say it I trigger something requiring administrator approval. Every. Time. There’s no way to get rid of that little ‘function’ without using a macro. A setting to not allow speech recognition to trigger anything requiring user rights elevation would have been handy.

Dearly wishing I could directly gripe at a human,
megaforte84

Short Version:

Matthew 6:

5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

(KJV, courtesy BibleGateway)

Long version:

That pair of verses I cited above? It means that expectations of public prayer, whether in groups or as an individual, are a problem, sometimes a very big problem, for some Christians. Including me.

And it’s not an issue of ‘well, if we got the kids in the churches to lead or just participate in prayer more often, participating in an event like the National Day Of Prayer wouldn’t be an issue for them.’ In fact, that’s my problem with it.

The church I grew up in was a praying church. Three or four times in the worship service, once at the beginning of Sunday School and once at the end.

The prayer at the end of Sunday School, at least for the youth department, was Prayer Requests Time. The teacher got to write down who everyone mentioned. If it was a week when I was lucky, we got to pick whose request we’d be praying for. If I wasn’t, I’d be given nothing but the name of the person doing the requesting. After that, eyes closed, heads bowed, let’s take turns praying.

Only we didn’t take turns around the circle, it was whoever thought to speak next in a group of ten to fifteen girls, most of whom had never heard of who they were actually supposed to be praying for more than the once five minutes ago.

So this was my experience of public ‘me praying out loud’ prayers through high school: me trying to judge when to jump in with no visual cues, trying to remember whose relative I was praying for, that person’s name, the reason I was praying for him or her, and around all that trying to remember the specific combinations of formula phrases our church used. This was before an actual thought of God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit managed to fit in edgewise.

If you got the name wrong, the requester and the teacher knew. If you had to be nudged at the end because everyone else had already prayed and you hadn’t realized until the long silence had fallen, everyone knew. If you managed to mangle the formula phrases, the teacher seemed to look at you a little weird.

There was a reason we nearly fought to be the one to pray for all the ‘unspoken prayers’. That one was easy.

Eventually, I just stopped volunteering. There was a point in college where I realized it had been years since I had prayed out loud as something other than participation in a ritual group prayer like the Lord’s Prayer – and this was in a church that did not do ritual group prayer.

I’ve voluntarily prayed out-loud without a formula less than five times in the past ten years.

That statement would be scandalous to the people I grew up with in church, but here’s the thing: Those prayers I was forced through as a child wouldn’t have been half as bad if I hadn’t had a private prayer life like they told me to have.

My private code phrases were different than the semi-official ones our church had. I favored different titles for the almighty than they did. I flipped words from the standard.

I even had in-jokes with God. Still do, in fact.

And when I have to pray in front of human witnesses, I have to edit all of that out. I have to remember whether the people I’m praying in front of favor ‘Father God’ or ‘God the Father’ – yes, there is a difference, and congregations that favor one tend not to favor the other anywhere near equally. I have to remember that some of the terms I use privately for God have major modifications from similar identical-meaning terms in general use.

It’s a lot like trying to write a very formal business letter for external consumption to a best friend you’ve been constantly around since you were three years old. It feels wrong. Even if Matthew 6:5-6 weren’t in the Bible, it would feel wrong.

So I stopped.

I stick to the formula prayers now, and because of the religious tradition I am a part of that means that the Lord’s Prayer and Doxology (‘Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow’) are pretty much it. ‘God is great, God is good…’ as a formula for saying grace went out the window a year ago because of someone deciding that using it out loud in front of witnesses meant I was some sort of immature Christian who had never learned to pray – never mind one of my pastors was well known by the congregation for using it himself any time he had to pray over food in the church. So I don’t say grace out loud now, which apparently doesn’t count to a lot of people.

This can be a problem.

Under the social model of disability, personal attributes or behaviors that wouldn’t interfere with life otherwise do so because society makes choices or observations that make it so.

Under the expectations of churches in America within the branch of Christianity I belong to, me not praying out loud is a form of social model disability.

I cannot lead a Sunday School class – I cannot perform a closing prayer. I cannot lead a Bible study despite the fact I’ve been asked once – I cannot perform a closing prayer. I cannot take part in witnessing drives – I cannot pray out loud with someone who has decided to enter the church. I cannot help with the youth department – Sunday School teachers are expected to not only lead but teach public prayer.

If I am in a church that allows women to hold leadership roles, nearly all are closed to me because of the risk I could be expected to perform a prayer with little warning or chance to back out. I may never be able to serve on any church board or committee because of the chance someone could say at the end of a meeting “Megaforte84, why don’t you give the closing prayer this time?”

Announcing to the congregation that I just can’t pray out loud outside a shared ritual formula isn’t an option. Too many would take this as a sign I ‘just never learned’ or as evidence I’m not as ‘spiritually mature’ as I act otherwise.

I certainly can’t participate publicly in a National Day Of Prayer.

And somewhere today, at a Christian private school today that observed the event, some well-meaning teacher or pastor may have pushed a kid one step closer to ending up like me in the name of making sure he or she could pray properly – even if it means not having enough mindfulness left to pray sincerely.

(Incidentally, this is also a reason I have issues with families guiding children through early childhood prayers and trying to explain a ‘right way’ or laughing at particularly badly-phrased bits of impromptu holiday graces – they may be creating an internal prayer editor that will keep the kid from praying out loud at all!)

The ‘Add A Contact’ page has a significant gap in its range of potential contact types, one that won’t effect established professionals as much as it will the yearly influx of newly minted college graduates joining the site.

There’s no category besides ‘Other’ that college professors can truthfully fit into. And, unlike other categories offered, ‘Other’ requires a valid e-mail address for that contact.

This is a problem because truthfully connecting with a college professor, no matter how close the contact in the classroom and at other school functions was, requires knowledge of an e-mail address the professor has previously provided to LinkedIn.

This can be a problem because professors, like students, can have multiple e-mail addresses. And as with their students, sometimes the school e-mail address is one used only in situations where the school requires it.

The last school I attended switched halfway through my time there to a setup through Google. As far as I know, no one at the school ever figured out how to get any e-mail program to fetch mail from the new school accounts. If you wanted Outlook or Thunderbird or even an inbox checking Windows Sidebar gadget to have any idea if there was new e-mail in your inbox, you used another service.

I got my first Gmail account to avoid using an account delivered through Gmail.

However, with schools encouraging the use of their accounts for school business, the professor’s e-mail on the syllabus is usually the school e-mail account. The professor’s school e-mail account is very rarely not the one listed in campus directories, whether online or in print.

The professors I ever had non-school e-mail addresses for were the ones who either quietly said ‘but I check this one more often’ while giving those addresses to students or who had websites online that listed another address.

Compared to other settings about what to display and not display, and links to the pages for adding content to LinkedIn, the page for adding e-mail addresses is a bit hidden. Not truly hidden, because it only takes one click on ‘Settings’ and then a click on ‘E-mail Addresses’ to get there, but not somewhere a user would just come upon the option.

What that setting location means is that its likely a user who was most interested in getting resume contact up and networking ties with colleagues made is more likely than not only going to have their original sign-up e-mail on record with LinkedIn. For a professor with a school e-mail used mainly with students and other professors in the department and another used for all other uses, it’s not inconceivable that one e-mail would tend to be the non-school e-mail.

The one his or her students are themselves less likely to know about.

The coworkers and friends who know that address are the ones who don’t have to type it in.

This issue probably won’t cause many problems for established professionals. If they still have contact with their professors, it’s likely through a non-school e-mail or justifiable enough for them to truthfully click ‘Friends’ as the nature of the connection. They’ve had jobs at one or more companies, and most of their future listed references in job-seeking are most likely going to be colleagues, coworkers, or employers.

Not so for the graduating student, or the graduated no-longer student just beginning to work in the field a degree was given in. Even if there is a past work history, even a strong one, it may take a professor to vouch for knowledge and experience earned while seeking that degree.

There needs to be a classification on LinkedIn that doesn’t require matching company to company or school to school, but rather the school of one to the company of the other, and there needs to be a way to look up that same connection pattern on the search page.

That’s the connection type that may be most important to the new field of potential LinkedIn users that walks across a stage each spring – the sort that matches up where one person taught to where another person learned from them.

This has also meant, for the first time since college, that I’ve been dealing with wanting to look something up and realizing that no, that book either isn’t where I am or is inaccessible where I am. And while the local library in the new place is a lot better at having current bestselling fiction than the library in the old place ever was, the nonfiction section is sparse. Very sparse.

It’s an interesting feeling. I generally bought and held onto research material when possible. I checked out the clearance table in the school bookstore whenever I walked through, which was often. And on top of both of those book-accumulating practices, I didn’t sell back textbooks.

I’m used to having my own library, accessible to me.

The shelves went back up this week.

(Oh, wait, I know – dead people can’t sue.)

The most recent occurrence of this is the death of 30-year-old Johnson & Johnson heiress Casey Johnson.

As I write this, the toxicology reports aren’t in and no one I’ve listened to or read had bothered to mention even the general type of medication that was found. This would seem to therefore be a cause to pause and wait. But no, prescription drugs have to be pushed as the main suspected cause of death even if the authorities aren’t saying that.

There are many valid reasons for having prescription medication in a home. Johnson had one – she was diabetic, and while I’ve not had the suspicion confirmed at her age it was likely Type I. Someone with Type I diabetes will have prescription medication in the house.

And this happens Every. Time. Billy Mays died with medication in his home because he was about to have hip surgery. Sometimes the medication prediction is right – as with Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson – but with so many diseases and disorders that used to have no treatment at all now having medication that can increase quality of life and length of life, it’s probably more common than not to have prescription medication in an American home.  Other countries with widespread medical facilities probably would also have that hold true.

Have one last antibiotic pill left in a bottle tucked in the back of the medicine cabinet? Ever needed prescription strength pain medication for something like pulled wisdom teeth, didn’t need to take them all, and never threw away the last few? Live in a state that requires a prescription for pseudoephedrine  and need it for sinus relief every spring? Congratulations, you have prescription medication in the house. Even if you aren’t currently on it, even if it’s been long enough that it wouldn’t even show up on a hair sample screening, it’s in your house. And if you’re famous enough for CNN or the other networks to notice, and unfortunate enough to die in a way that doesn’t have an immediately apparent cause, you too could be used as a symbol of The Dangers Of Prescription Medication Abuse.

Yes, some people do abuse prescription medication. But just having it around doesn’t mean it was being abused. That assumption in the reporting around deaths is something of a ‘All Users Of Prescription Medication Abuse It’ signal to the culture, even when the medications in question don’t give highs at all. An antibiotic is theoretically enough to trigger the days-long discussion of the dangers of drugs the deceased may have never taken in his or her entire lifetime.

And when there are diseases and disorders that some people have to take medications for for decades, even medications that are sometimes abused – heaven help the Attention Deficit Disorder adult community if anyone ever dies in the possession of Ritalin, even if the handful of deaths of children who were prescribed too much were pretty much ignored by the world at large – those people get hit with the same Must Be Drug Abuse brush.

But oh, wait.  I forgot again. The only ones who can bring the defamation, slander, and libel suits are dead and the dead can’t sue. The living who weren’t directly labeled don’t have standing. I guess they can carry on with the fear-mongering and blame-fests, then.

I’d experienced this before, but Creon’s surprising me again.

I read Oedipus Rex for the first time as a high school senior. To me then, Creon was just the royal brother-in-law who ran errands to the Oracle and who ended up as pick-up-the-pieces regent when the tragedy ended. He wasn’t a bit character, by any means – the methods and requirements of Greek theater meant they really didn’t have room on the stage for bit characters – but he wasn’t really a fleshed-out player in what happened.

Creon’s actions were bookends to the real action.

The next year, I read the complete Oedipus Cycle as a college freshman. It was a 9am class. We’d read through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey with the same professor at the same hour, and I’m sad to report that some of us did do the reading in the three hours before class started, required page long response included. This meant that despite the fact it was a discussion course, we really didn’t get all that deeply into the text. Even if we had read the text well before class or even several times before class, it was still the first experience most of us had reading either Oedipus At Colonus or Antigone.

Creon is barely mentioned if that, and certainly doesn’t appear, in Oedipus At Colonus. That play takes place far from him, and his position in the family is still as Uncle Fix-It. There’s no sign he will be anything else.

That changes in Antigone. Creon’s pretty much framed as the villain there, making edicts against the will of the gods and completing the destruction of his sister Jocasta’s family and of his own. He and his niece Ismene are left as the only two surviving members of the family. In class we focused on Antigone’s fulfillment of divine edict despite personal risk and Ismene’s following of human law; this meant that Creon was pretty much Mr. Horrible.

I spent three of four graduate school semesters focusing on and rereading these works.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time since then immersed in these works while working on my novel (thusly the categories this post is filed under).

It wasn’t until I flipped through a random copy of a translation I hadn’t seen yet off of a library sale cart that I realized there was a very simple explanation for why Creon was mad enough to make an edict against a nephew’s burial.

If someone was thinking entirely logically at the moment Creon made the edict, the choice would have been against the brother who had been fighting on the side of Thebes. He violated the power-sharing agreement, which led his twin to attack the city seeking the throne that was supposed to have been his at that time. It was his action that caused a war.

(Or it would have been a ruling against both, or dooming them both to the simplest burial that would not anger the gods.)

But that’s not the brother Creon dooms to non-burial and everything that means in the Greek religious structure of the time. He rules against the brother who attacked the city. He doesn’t want so much as a handful of dirt sprinkled over the body.

And flipping through that paperback, with the lines and scenes in different places than in the battered copy I used as an undergraduate and as a masters student, I suddenly realized why.

I had been judging Creon as Uncle Fix-It, always dealing with actions of relatives that only affected him when he had to help figure out what was wrong and how to clean things up. But in Antigone, Creon is not Uncle Fix-It anymore.

He loses one of his two sons in the battle, defending Thebes. The entire contents of the play take place in the week or less following this.

Creon isn’t Uncle Fix-It anymore. He’s a father in mourning who directs his anger at the brother who brought force of arms into the tragedy of the family for the first time.

Antigone is the tale of what happens when a man who has already lost a brother-in-law, another brother-in-law(/nephew, but Creon never really deals with Oedipus as such), and a sister to the problems the family has gotten into with the Fates and Apollo suddenly loses three family members in the span of hours and just can’t deal with it anymore.

And who could?

That’s the tragedy of Creon. Not that he’s a complete and total idiot, as I had thought until recently, but that he just can’t cope with what he has to cope with and that, unfortunately, means his problems increase through his reaction.

It’s the Cosmo article which I’m really responding to here, since I pretty much agree with Kate Harding’s points. The holidays are stressful enough without turning food into another point of stress – and when people are stressed and Grandma’s Comfort Food Stuffing is available in quantity and on demand, things happen.

Pay attention to what you eat, yes. Stress out over it, no.

The one major thing that’s really irking me about the article is the assumption that every family’s recipe and default portion size is the same.

This is the first I’ve ever heard of putting sausage in stuffing. Honest. We don’t make it quite like the recommended veggie stuffing the article offers as an alternative, but it’s usually regarded as one of the more healthy dishes on the table, right after the mashed potatoes (which aren’t made according to Cosmo‘s assumptions, either).

This assumption of everyone cooking the same reminds me a lot of a horrid health class experiment involving the words “Use the stats from the book, not from nutrition labels” and “I think you’ll all be surprised how many more calories you’re eating than you think you are.”

The book had added milk and butter to insane numbers of items, draining fat off of anything  during cooking didn’t exist (my beloved microwaved turkey bacon had to be counted as thick-sliced pan-fried pork bacon), and all ground beef was presumed to be the cheapest ground chuck on the planet. I’m not even sure the local grocery sold beef with that much fat in it.

That was the first I had ever heard of putting butter and milk in scrambled eggs, and I’m still not entirely sure I’ve ever eaten them that way. Certainly not intentionally, but with cafeteria lines you can never really be sure.

No wonder the teacher assumed my generation had eating issues, and had that backed up with every class that took the course. It was easy to rack up several hundred extra calories per day just through being forced to say you ate things you didn’t! No one in the class looked heavy, and most of us were average weight or below, but all that butter and milk and extra fat we weren’t actually eating meant we needed to shape up our diets or else we’d pay for it later on.

The article is also full of serving assumptions.

I don’t know about other families, but we had a single can of cranberry sauce on the table today, and it was not a big one. There was no backup in the house. Anyone eating an entire cup of the stuff here would swiftly have had much worse problems than worrying about his or her waistline. Managing to get a fourth of a cup would have been an overly large portion here. Cosmo listed the calories for a full cup as if readers ate an entire cup of just the cranberry sauce every Thanksgiving. I’m sure someone somewhere does, but I’m thinking that’s a well above average serving size.

Different families stress different items on the table, and I felt like the article was assuming the items that were the worst nutritionally were the ones that would be piled highest. This plays into both traditions and into presumed serving sizes.

The biggest problem for me in that department was the discussion of the bird itself. At least they didn’t assume everyone was going to deep-fry – but the assumption that everyone has the same answer to the dark meat versus light meat conundrum bugged me as much as if they had talked preparation methods. Around here, dark meat is known as ‘leftovers’. Cosmo‘s article read as if they were assuming female readers always pile up the dark meat and ignore the turkey breast – which is bought at a premium sliced, ground, and in its original form but without bones the rest of the year by the same women who are reading the article.

Families have different traditions, and cooking according to tradition doesn’t always mean fixing Heart Attack On A Plate for Thanksgiving. It would be nice if the people writing articles for holiday-themed issues of magazines would remember that when talking about eating healthy for the holidays.

I don’t know precisely when deep-fried turkeys hit the public awareness the way they’ve been popular the past few years. I know I didn’t see the fryers large enough for it in the grocery store around Thanksgiving until at most four years ago.

With this cultural discovery of deep-frying turkeys has come another new cultural standby: the “How Not To Fry A Turkey” video, a new and predicable mainstay of pre-Thanksgiving television news. Watching at least a few of these has become an annual tradition of mine.

So, here are some current favorites.

My new favorite, which was released last year but I somehow missed, is by the firefighters of Cobb County, Georgia. I love the delivery style in this one.

Turkey Deep Fat Fryer Public Service Announcement by CobbFireVideos

Another official organization PSA, and my traditional standby because of its desire to be as destructive as possible, is the Underwriters Laboratories discussion of why no turkey frying equipment bears a UL seal of approval. To my delight, it’s now available in high quality as of earlier this month.

Underwriters Laboratories Turkey Fryer Demonstration by safetyathome

And in the amateur video category, gloves and closed-toe shoes are Very Important. If you’re frying a turkey this year, remember that it’s not just the things that can cause a conflagration that you have to be careful about – grease splatterhurts.

How not to deep fry a turkey bywelderb

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

This would normally be just an issue of ‘Oh, I need to run Windows Update to get the newest version’. In fact, that would have been true through Media Player 10.

With 11, there is no longer a way to backup media licenses manually. The content provider gets to decide how many times – and if at all – you get to ‘renew’ the license.

In other words, if the kid the DVD was bought for gets a computer of his or her own in high school, you may have to forget transferring it over from the parental machine it was registered with.

I chose the iTunes version because of this.

An iTunes account has leeway of allowing four complete No Chance To Deauthorize computer crashes and still having the file readable on one device. As long as older devices are deauthorized, the file can be moved from machine to machine as a child grows with no problem. If she wants to take the complete Disney princess collection with her to college on her laptop, no problem even if the files were generated years ago so long as there’s an open authorization spot for the laptop. (Well, problem if her classmates don’t think college students should like Disney princesses, but that’s not Disney’s or Apple’s problem.)

Windows Media? From what I’ve been reading online, a DRMed WMV or WMA file may not be readable after an intentional and planned OS reinstall. I tend to reimage at a frequency of under 6 months, and from what I can tell the WMP identifiers for protected files aren’t in the factory image I use.

2) Differences in policy for WMV versus iTunes

Someone choosing the Windows Media option? Only gets one chance to make the file. After that, the code is used and there is no second chance. If a small child accidentally deletes the file from the system instead of just from a playlist, tough luck unless you made a backup. And backing it up requires about 2 gigs of space, or a blank DVD and DVD burner.

The iTunes version? Can be remade at any time using an iTunes installation authorized for the same account. I’m not sure if it still works after the expiration date, but at the very least until then the file can be remade whenever. I’ll test it once mine is supposed to expire (with the file stuck safely away from iTunes’ view, rather than just flat-out deleting it, of course).

This mattered greatly to me. When I started making the file, iTunes tried to put it in a location that didn’t have enough room. I had to point my library to a different location and then start the ‘download’ over. If this had happened while using the Windows Media option, I’m not sure I’d have gotten a file out of the process.

3) Digital Copies? Expire.

No, not the file you make. Don’t worry, Disney is not just renting you the digital version of the movie.

However…

They have set it up so the code in the DVD case is only good for a year… from the time the DVD was released.

So, if someone gets into Narnia movies with the release of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is only just now in production, the digital copy in a DVD set of Prince Caspian will have expired before it was even purchased, even if bought new. (Even if bought directly from Disney.)

If a child with a July birthday receives as a present a DVD released for the previous Christmas season, half or more of the activation window will already be gone.

This also means that someone knowing they will be changing systems or upgrading an OS in the next few years cannot just sit on the WMV version until making the transition. They have to make a choice about what to do, given instructions that even in the online long form assume that the current OS install and system will be used in perpetuity or that there’s a way to move Windows Media identity with the system change (see #1 above).

4) And yes, I know it’s a corporate sore point at the moment, but…

Could there have been a captionable option?

I mean, okay, chances are if you’re carrying a Digital Copy around on an iPhone or iPod any text overlaid over video is going to be well-nigh impossible to read. I watched Between The Lions on someone’s video iPod once, and there was no reading half of what was meant to be read from across a room in the broadcast version.

But that’s not true for netbooks and laptops.

Leaving out the standard arguments of accessibility, I wrote papers in college that referenced C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I took film courses. I’ve even considered talking about the differences between the movies and the books here, because I am one of the people who does like both as what they are.

Not all movies that have Digital Copies are aimed at the little kids. And there are some serious academics who look at the Disney movies that are aimed at the little kids.

Being able to quote accurately without having to break out the DVD or look for a transcript of questionable legality would have been a godsend in those film courses. It would be a godsend when discussing films online.

And really, given the price of 1 TB portable externals on the market now, technologies like Digital Copy should become industry-standard, in my opinion, for the good of the movie companies. The space makes it too easy to just .iso archive an entire film library, and if the MPAA doesn’t want people doing that or using CSS breakers to rip the video, there ought to be legal alternatives that don’t require much effort on the part of the user.

Developing the technology for doing that with Digital Copy and similar programs would also spread the capacity around for downloadable video files. Need the entirety of the original Star Trek series for a paper, and need it quotable? The free youtube series channel does not have captions or subs. Someone might be willing to pay just for the captions, even if the same image quality was free elsewhere.

But right now, the parent of a Deaf child can rip the video off a DVD with the subtitles there, and can’t chose to show captioning at all with the Digital Copy that came with that DVD. A student working from a netbook in a noisy dorm may find looking for that online dialogue rip easier than trying to get hallmates to quiet down.

And sooner or later, that’s going to need to change.

As it is, Digital Copy was incredibly easy to use for me. The process of setting up an iTunes account was quick, and the file was created in less time than it would have taken to watch the opening credits.

But for others, who need the subs or captions to watch anything at all, this isn’t easier than looking at the not-legal rippers.

…

Shorter version: I like it. I’m pleased. I’ll probably post again with reasons I’m pleased. But like any relatively new technology, it needs some work – and a lot of it is not Disney’s problem, but issues with the technology that was widespread enough for them to use.

There’s just something that rubs the wrong way with me about an online service that requires a credit card number or paypal account to sign in to look through free stuff. Yes, free stuff. The non-DRM podcast directory and iTunesU are both behind the same “Please Get An Account” wall as the m4p music downloads.

This had lead to me sitting on a Disney Digital Copy (Prince Caspian, if it matters) for quite a while now, thinking I needed an account to use the iTunes version (and the usability of the file over time is WORSE in Windows Media, but that’s a rant that can wait). And also thinking I needed a credit card number I was willing to hand over to get said account.

So, it’s November. I’ve had the disc set for over nine months. Because of Disney policy, Digital Copies expire unless claimed within a year of the DVD being released. (This is stupid, IMO, for several reasons I shall not go into here.)

For Prince Caspian, this date is in very early December. As far as I was concerned, today was Claim It, Or Don’t Claim It day.

It turns out Digital Copies work like gift certificates. Including the whole ‘can get you an account without a credit card’ policy.

Personally, I think this needed to be in great big type in the DVD packaging, since setting up a not-card-linked account for a kid using Disney movies and then passing on the account name and password upon reaching a reasonable age for responsible use of the account would be a better idea than sticking the Digital Copy on a parental iTunes account the kid the DVD was purchased for will eventually lose access to.

Anyhow, this means I finally have an iTunes account.

It also means I now have an insanely large iTunesU download queue. (Let’s not discuss the podcast queue just yet. That one’s still growing.)

The Open University has an insane amount of stuff up in iTunesU. So do many other schools.

There’s a seminary with beginning Hebrew and Greek courses up – including video if you’ve got the hard drive space.

There’s an entire course on museum design over time.

There’s even an entire course on dealing with disabilities in a church.

I do have some gripes with it, which I’ll likely discuss at length once I’ve had a few more experiences dealing with the interface – and have actually looked at what I’ve downloaded, as some of my problems are with labeling – but overall I’m pleased with finally having access.

I just wish Disney had thought to tell me the DVD I got as a late Christmas present would have given me access to all this months ago, when the Greek and Roman historical, architectural, and art history courses and downloads would have been extremely useful.

I’m not a saxophone player. I’ve never been a saxophone player.

I did, however, play the bass clarinet.

While Mr. Sax is best known for the instrument that bears his name, he is also the reason that the bass clarinet and the even rarer contrabass clarinet have their distinctive outline, with a bell and neck resembling that of the deeper saxophones.

The resemblance is not accidental. In fact, sheet music, mouthpiece ligatures, and reeds can be shared between tenor saxophones and bass clarinets.

(In situations where no bass clarinet sheet music exists, it’s often better to reach for tenor saxophone music than for clarinet – not only is there a natural octave difference between clarinet and bass clarinet, but clarinet is often written higher on the stave than is comfortable on bass clarinet given the greater air requirements.)

There’s one reason (and my understanding is that it’s functionally the only reason) tenor saxophone mouthpieces and bass clarinet mouthpieces are not interchangeable. All saxophones have the cork on the neck, with the mouthpiece sliding onto it. All clarinets have the cork on the mouthpiece in the exact opposite configuration. This holds true no matter what specific instrument of each type you’re looking at.

The resemblance of the bass clarinet to both the common clarinet and to the common alto saxophone has become a joke several times in my life. The most memorable was when I was looking at class ring options in high school. The ‘Woodwind Section’ activity side was a crossed clarinet and saxophone (which did play a large role in my choice of that side, since the bass clarinet is literally a cross of those two instruments). Years later, I still laugh sometimes when I look at it.

So happy belated birthday, Mr. Sax, and thank you.

I’ll leave you all tonight with the London Symphony Orchestra masterclass clip on youtube for the bass clarinet, which is a wonderful sampler of the sounds the instrument is capable of producing.

(LSO Masterclass – Bass Clarinet)

Most of the time, no one really notices it. The majority of readers don’t have much reason to – it’s stuck in the front matter that just gets in the way of finding the Table of Contents or first chapter.

It’s useful for citing a book, whether a simple high school report or a nonfiction tome several hundred pages long. But most people don’t write nonfiction books, and I honestly doubt most of my classmates ever cited anything after their final graduation. A number of my grad school classmates would have, and several of them do teach English and Composition courses where students have to look at that page, but the others? Not likely.

In today’s world of increasing digitization of library records, it gets even less likely. Both colleges I attended had an Internet-enabled catalog that included everything needed for the minimum of MLA and other citations, and sometimes everything the more intricate MLA forms could need (hello, books with multiple authors, multiple editors, and a translator–and multiple editions). No need to look at the copyright page, just copy and paste from the official library records, then apply the right item order and formatting in the citation.

But at the same time looking at it has become less necessary, the copyright page has become generally more useful.

The practice of putting the ISBN on the copyright page seems to have started about the time ISBNs came into use. This is incredibly useful when trying to use personal library software with books that came from any of a number of booksellers who obscure the ISBN. (Yes, college bookstores that stick the USED sticker over the cover ISBN, I am thinking about you. You, and K-mart’s forced “Scan inside front cover” practices.)

The IBSN itself isn’t useful for much more than Internet searches for library software once you own a book, though. It changes with format and edition shifts, so that hardcover purchased when a book came out doesn’t have the same ISBN as the trade paperback does months later.

The real reason I adore the current copyright page practices? People finally thought to include the Library of Congress card information.

It’s been a practice for a while to include the LoC card number. I suppose this was and remains useful to actual libraries that could access that record, but the numbers start showing up before Internet access was common. For people who can’t access the Library of Congress card records, it doesn’t do all that much good.

But now? It’s usually the actual card information, which is far more than needed for simple citations.

They include the Dewey Decimal and LC numbers now.

For most people, that probably doesn’t mean much of anything, particularly since “Look in the front of a book in the bookstore, and you’ll find out where it’ll be on the shelf in the local library” isn’t something the publishers and bookstore companies are likely to shout from the rooftops.

It would have been useful for the woman who ran the library at the church I attend, though. When there was a workday in there earlier this year, we discovered the church had several copies of the same book, sometimes even the same edition, under completely different Dewey Decimal classifications. Since the books didn’t come with the number, she’d used a guide to the system to guesstimate where they ought to end up. At least one book had a copy under “Religion” and another under “Childcare”. Since the records weren’t in a computer database and the physical card catalog was nowhere near up-to-date, no one had noticed before. I’d imagine ours was not the only small library that ever happened to.

It’s useful to me in contemplating trying to document my own book collection again (I always manage to either nearly finish, or only manage to record certain books and not others), because I’ll have a way to figure out at least which of the newer books fit into subject clumps.

And it’s going to be useful to me and therefore to you once I manage to start doing book reviews here, because I can tell you where to find something in the library instead of only being able to offer an ISBN, even for nonfiction.

In honor of the holiday, have some zombies, courtesy of the people at DragonConTV, who were kind enough to not disable embedding.

Zombie Field Reporter

Thinkin’ Strips

Re Your Brains

Hi.

I’m a young American woman with a Master’s in a writing-related field, currently trying to finish up what will hopefully be my first completed novel.

I have a fondness for the sorts of books that end up in discount racks and the abandoned corners of library booksales, and will be reviewing some of my finds here.

I’ve also been a computer user since I was small (I’ve been banging on a keyboard since before I knew what those little squiggles on the Commodore 64′s keyboard meant). Because of this, and the fact I learned computers in the first place by poking around rather than reading the manuals, means I’ve been through more than my fair share of writing and other freeware. I’ve noticed that most of the reviews written are from either the ‘what can this program do for the programming community?’ viewpoint, the casual home ‘I want to write and print a letter to Grandmother’ level of usability need, or the ‘can we replace a $200 program suite with this?’ business market.

Only the stuff targeted directly at writers gets writer-oriented reviews, and even those are few (and usually of the non-free software that beginning writers may not be able to afford). I want to change that.

And there will also be randomness, because what is life without a little randomness?