cbd

No, not my age. This:

I recently installed an under-counter microwave in our kitchen. That’s a photo of the 30″ template I was supposed to use for placing screws, drilling holes, etc. Yes, that “thirty inch” template is about 3/8″ too wide. (It was too deep as well.) Good thing (1) I’ve seen enough bad press work to know printed measurements sometimes lie; (2) I measured that sucka before I tried to install the microwave.

Composition Forum 20 has been published. This issue includes our first interview, a conversation with Gary A. Olson which is a companion piece to a recent Composition Studies interview. We welcome Jacqueline Rhodes to the CF editorial team as interview editor.

Two “lasts” with this issue as well. Derek Owens is stepping down as review editor, with Jeanne Rose and Lori Salem taking his post. And this will be the last issue of CF published by hand. I’ve installed Open Journal Systems, and while I have some configuration work to do, I’m already looking forward to using it and becoming more involved in the PKP community.

Peter Suber writes:

Today I step back from systematic daily blogging in order to free up time for my new position at the Berkman Center. The blog itself will continue and Gavin will continue at something like his current pace. I will continue my daily crawl for OA-related news. I’ll continue to tag what I find for the OA tracking project (OATP).  I’ll continue to write the monthly SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN). I’ll continue to work full-time for OA.

I’ve been an Open Access News subscriber for about two years. I hope the social tagging approach he envisions as a replacement for his valuable work will bear much fruit.

In preparation for a FOUR GIRL PLAYDATE today, a kid-friendly variation on the recipe I’ve been using this summer:

2 c cream, divided
1 c milk
1/2 c sugar
3 egg yolks
1/3 c real peanut butter
1/2 c sweetened ground chocolate
1 T vanilla

Make a custard with the sugar, milk, and half the cream, tempering in the egg yolks (low heat!). Remove from heat, stir in the peanut butter, then add the rest of the ingredients. Chill. Then freeze.

WIU web wonks posted a draft of their ongoing site redesign for comment. Here’s the design, which I rate as a win, and the commentary I wrote.

A lot better. Substantially better! The colors are much nicer, and reducing the number of links on the front page is smart. I like making the feature story bigger; I hope it will have persistent links. Getting rid of the funny font is long overdue. Same with the overlapped text, which is a problem in many ways. Search is much easier to see. The wider page is welcome (though it may be too wide: let’s not forget mobiles, and let’s not separate them either). Glad to see the college portrait go away. Adding the contact info is a plus (but see below).

Negatives: the reduced number of news and events. That’s a big problem: a nice clean design is great, but we need to dish information, too. I think there’s too much ALL CAPS, which forces type sizes down and reduces legibility. Many links are hard to differentiate: what’s the difference between giving and support? admissions and apply now? “Current students” link is too small.

Questions:

• Why two Quad Cities links?
• Is “Spotlight” for events only?
• Why “Macomb campus?” The impression is that we are two universities. Not good.
• Why is Distance Learning one of the biggest links on the page?
• Instead of “Academic majors”, why not just “Academics”—we have lots of non-major programs (certificates, minors, non-credit, graduate, etc).
• Can we just say “Jobs” instead of “Employment opportunities?”
• Why the vertical imbalance in “parents and families” and “alumni and friends”?
• Is it necessary to repeat “Western Illinois…” in the contact information? Can that text go with the copyright?
• I trust the omission of people of color is just a mockup oversight?

Finally, the home page is just one piece of the pie. Current WIU web pages have excessive navigation on most pages, making design of pages very difficult. Given that I can’t see what child pages look like, I would give this design an “Incomplete” if I had the option. I hope that a horizontal navigation scheme will be used on child pages.

Two kids means lots of pictures and movies. And that means a lot of hard drive space. Erin and I finally got sick of managing the stuff on our two 160GB drives and bought a new hard drive. One terabyte, five year warranty, less than $200. That’s 931GB when formatted. Amazing.

I backed everything up, put in the new drive, installed a fresh copy of Tiger on it, and used the migration tool to copy over our applications and data. That was slick; way less hassle than fiddling with a billion settings again. After I ran updates four or five times, everything looked kosher. We’ve consolidated Madelyn’s Dora library, digitized some more CDs, and still have 400 GB left to spare.

Only one problem. iPhoto wouldn’t load: when I clicked on it, one bounce in the Dock, and nothing. Using “open -a iphoto” from the Terminal failed as well. Googling “one bounce iphoto”, I found this MacOSXHints thread, which looked like our problem. I copied the missing libaries from our old hard drive (moved to an external case) to the new one, and all was well.

FWIW, here are the error messages I dug out of console.log. The fix was copying the two directories highlighted from our backup to the new hard drive.

dyld: Library not loaded: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iLifeMediaBrowser.framework/Versions/A/iLifeMediaBrowser
Referenced from: /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/MacOS/iPhoto
Reason: image not found
Jun 17 20:39:55 Erins-Computer crashdump[213]: iPhoto crashed
Jun 17 20:39:55 Erins-Computer crashdump[213]: crash report written to: /Users/erin/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/iPhoto.crash.log

dyld: Library not loaded: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/GraphicsAppSupport.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ImageKit.framework/Versions/A/ImageKit
Referenced from: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iLifeMediaBrowser.framework/Versions/A/iLifeMediaBrowser
Reason: image not found
Jun 17 21:39:17 Erins-Computer crashdump[255]: iPhoto crashed
Jun 17 21:39:17 Erins-Computer crashdump[255]: crash report written to: /Users/erin/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/iPhoto.crash.log

This is Jeff’s recipe, not mine. It is very, very good. My comments in parentheses.

3/4c sugar
2c heavy cream, divided
1c milk
1c coffee beans
5 egg yolks
Vanilla bean

In a saucepan gently warm the sugar, milk, and 1c cream.

Crack the coffee beans. Don’t grind them all the way. (I used a mortar and pestle and decaf beans. Madelyn doesn’t need to be louder than she already is.)

Turn off the heat. Add the coffee beans to the saucepan and scrape the vanilla bean in there too. Throw the vanilla bean shell in the mix after it is scraped. (I skipped the vanilla. I wanted just coffee.)

Let the beans steep for 1-3 hours. (I did 3.)

Then reheat the mixture, beans and all, and temper in five egg yolks that have been whisked in a bowl. When the mixture coats the back of a spoon, strain it all into another cup of heavy cream that is in a big bowl. A good sieve will help so that you get all the beans out. (I strained out the beans before adding the eggs.)

Chill. Then in the machine.5

I mentioned Bing yesterday. It seems like every time I fire up Google Reader, there’s a new search engine: last week it was Wolfram|Alpha, this week it is Hunch. I’ve played with the last two a little, but not that much.

Apropos Bing, frankly, I don’t see what all the “Google must fear!” is about. Bing results look like Google’s, down to the colors and formats of the links. Yeah, the site has a sexier front page and mouseover previews (which don’t work when you point to the link text, at least not in Firefox). I suppose Microsoft might as well try to compete with Google in search, though quite frankly I doubt they’ll make much headway. But with no ads and no apparent way to generate revenue (unless they are invisibly gaming search results), what will Bing do for Microsoft besides take programmers and resources away from other projects? Is it a giant publicity project? If Microsoft really wants to compete with Google, they should be creating an online version of Office which will take on Google Docs. Even better, Ms should try to extend the desktop Office so it collaborates as well as Docs. Hell, half as well would be good enough to keep the Office juggernaut rolling.

And more to the point: when Madelyn was watching cat videos on YouTube (a Google property), I saw this advertisement:

Show me a company whose competitors are also its customers, and I’ll show you a company with very, very little to fear.

Since I started using Linux as my everyday operating system in 1995 or so I’ve always done quite a bit from the command line. It appealed to me as long as I can remember: I liked the idea of being able to log in to a machine remotely and do substantive work directly. That made much more sense than other schemes of remote manipulation (downloading files to work on them, then uploading changes; keeping copies of files on a local hard drive and synchronizing, etc). I like command history, being able to combine simple commands into complex ones, and most of all not taking my hands away from the keyboard to use the mouse. When Mac OS X was announced, the presence of a command line was the clincher which convinced me it would be worth using, and adding Terminal to the Dock is one of the first things I’ve always done when reinstalling or configuring a Mac. And when I want to write intensively, I often boot my Linux box without the GUI and get to work.

Jeff Atwood recently wrote that the browser is the new command line. The post is a retread, and I’m not sure that analogy plays 100% of the way through. Regardless, as is often the case with Coding Horror, the comments point to good things, like Goosh, a shell-like interface to Google, and Vimperator, a Firefox extension which replaces the toolbars and menus with Vim-like commands. Very funny. (There’s even Conkeror, just in case Vi/Emacs holy wars weren’t enough.)

Playing with Goosh a few minutes shows just how limited Atwood’s argument is: the “commands” he suggests are little more than search queries or Google shortcuts. Maybe we could say that “bloomberg” is the command that brings up Bloomberg.com–but even this is mediated by Google. The browser address bar isn’t much of a command line if you use a standard Windows install, which pushes stuff typed into Explorer to Microsoft search engines which have far fewer bells and whistles than Google (though maybe this is changing with Bing). And Atwood doesn’t mention real browser commands like about:plugins, again browser-specific. More to the point, my guess is most people have a very limited number of “commands” in their arsenal, as URLs get more and more irrelevant. I’ve watched people whose only command is “google”. They don’t see the URL at all. Much the same way, I imagine, they never imagine a command line, since it’s all but vanished from contemporary interfaces.

Even Google is downplaying these commands as separate from graphical interfaces. They’ve moved several advanced search operators from display as search query terms to control via the “Options” sidebar which appears on the left of results. Operators like daterange:, link:, and related: still function, but Google’s advanced search form implements them without the use of these complex queries. Too bad. We don’t need to weaken the URL any further: that, more than anything, is what makes the browser address bar invisible to most people, much less a command line.

Six oh six: one summer day. Most times reasonably accurate.

5:50am: Get up and say good-bye to my parents, who are finishing a five-day visit. Make coffee. Medicate cat.

6:40am: Drive to Good Hope for 5K race.

7:00am: Race begins. 65 entrants. I am the second to last registrant.

7:22:17am: I finish (7:11/mi). First half-mile too fast. I am the second across the line.

7:35am: Plan carpools for a race next week.

8:02am: Leaving Good Hope, NPR is playing Weekend Edition Saturday, which I haven’t listened to in years.

8:20am: Help Erin get Madelyn ready for farmers market. Coffee. Finish Madelyn’s poached egg.

8:55am: Shower while Amelia watches. Head out to farmers market on bike: but rain. Abandon bike for Subaru.

9:20am: Roll into farmers market. Check out the FIG childrens’ tent, where Erin, Madelyn, and others are set up. Buy bread, tomatoes, and a trinket for Madelyn. Ask a couple vendors what they’ll have the next week. Watch dismantling of facade on arts center.

10:20am: Rain picks up. Vendors begin to leave. We do too, after buying a gift.

11:40am: Return to the house. Amelia goes down for a nap. Madelyn asks to watch a video. Crop, tag, sort, and upload pictures to Flickr. Erin goes to the store.

1:10pm: Play Dora bingo with Madelyn. She wins. Twice.

3:00pm: Triangle drill soccer, since only three showed up. No cleats, so all of us fall constantly.

4:05pm: After an hour, I’m worn out. Time for a slow bike ride home.

4:25pm: Drink water and beer on the back patio. Erin cleans strawberries for jam-making. We talk about sabbatical. Amelia hangs out in her bouncy thing. Madelyn orbits the picnic table, usual spaz mode.

5:20pm: Pick strawberries with the girls.

6:20pm: Duck inside and upload more pix to Flickr.

7:10pm: Finish strawberry picking. Madelyn dumps berries over her head. Deal with three-year-old meltdown.

7:20pm: Talk to the parents: their 12+ hour drive is over.

7:50pm: Erin heads to a friends’ house to feed their cat. Help Madelyn with bath, then get in with her. Hand off Madelyn to Erin when she returns.

8:40pm: Cut greens while it’s still twilight.

8:50pm: Pluck a fussy Amelia from bed and try to get her back to sleep. Fail. Cuddle her until Erin is done putting Madelyn to bed.

9:35pm: Make gigantic salad. Eat a bunch of leftover barbeque.

10:10pm: Check WIU web site and find that BOT “approved tenure for 29 faculty.” Assume that’s me. Woo tenure. Post something on The Book.

11:01pm: Press Publish on this post. Then water and sweet, sweet sleep.