a love note to pages
05.15.08 • comment (1)
It’s hard for me to spend money, particularly on myself. It’s a hereditary defect that makes me good at accumulating savings but bad at enjoying them. You can imagine, I’m sure, that dropping the cash for a MacBook Pro back in September involved a certain amount of trauma. Already delirious from the magnitude of the purchase, I tacked on a few extra bucks for the Mighty Mouse, which I regret buying, and iWork, which I do not.
iWork has Keynote, which by itself is worth the eighty dollars. Keynote does everything that I could ever reasonably want to do with Powerpoint, and does it better. A big part of grad school is the listening to and giving of presentations, and when you’re under a deadline it’s tremendously helpful when the presentation program goes out of its way to make your work look good. Also, there’s no need to wrestle with some God forsaken grid, which has probably saved me a dozen hours over the past few months.
But let’s not talk about Keynote. Al Gore pretty much has the sales pitch covered on that one. Let’s instead talk about Pages, Apple’s Word equivalent. No, wait. Let’s instead talk about Microsoft Office 2008, and how horrid it is. No, I’m not talking about The Ribbon. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a fairly minor change to the user interface, probably for the better. I’m talking about something deeper.
Prior to installing Office 2008, I was using its direct predecessor, which was not built to run on Intel Macs. This made it sluggish, or so I reasoned. I looked forward to a zippy version that was built for my computer. I suppose I should have known better than to associate a word like “zippy” with Microsoft. Office 2008 is just as clunky, if not more so, than the version that came before it. It’s not just the ridiculous startup time. The spell checker eventually gets around to underlining words I’ve misspelled, and likes to keep the underline there even when I’ve corrected things. It once insisted that I was misspelling the word eye, and the red underline wouldn’t go away until I right-clicked the word to make sure I wasn’t having a psychotic break. Writing in Word 2008 feels like swimming through syrup. Its overzealous autoformating is more annoying than ever, and costs me more time than it saves.
Pages, on the other hand, is the Firefox of word processors (Word is now pretty much the Mozilla Suite, remember that thing?). Lean but not lacking for features, Pages never feels like it’s struggling to keep up with my fingers and knows when to just write what I’m typing. I stayed with Word mostly because it’s the defacto word processor of every large institution, but the experience of it has become so irritating that I think it’s time to take advantage of Pages’s Save As Word command.
rust
05.12.08 • comment (2)
Writing is hard. Atul Gawande, whom you should definitely be reading, says it’s harder than surgery.
Last night I had a look at some of the posts I’ve written over the past two years, mostly to double check my feelings on this design. I am deeply satisfied with how the text looks on the screen, so this redesign is probably safe from the ax. I’m also relieved that most of what I’ve written since September isn’t completely awful. But how, exactly, did I churn out 241 posts in a year? Granted, not all of it was great and there was a high proportion of haiku, but in retrospect the output is mystifying.
Academic writing has a characteristic tone, full of precision and caution. This forces the author to inhabit a strange grammatical realm, as if a scavenger hunt is being conducted in the passive voice. This was found by Jones and McGill, the opposite was found by McCracken. Data is magically animate. It can indicate, it can suggest, and it can support. Needless to say, my writing has gotten a little specific. I had no trouble writing a paper that included the words “multisite electrophysiological recording” and “corticomotoneuron,” but the more free-flowing ideas aren’t flowing so freely.
So, refocus. Did I ever tell you why I started this site? I mean, yes, I had to defeat some Nazis (incidentally, I’m excited for Crystal Skull), but there’s another reason.
I talk to myself. Whenever I’m alone and my speech center isn’t occupied with something external, I just start talking. I hear it’s fairly common. I do this when I make a sandwich and when I use the bathroom (two ends of a spectrum, really). When I walk down the street without an iPod, I mutter quietly to myself like a crazy person. The topic matter varies. Sometimes it’s dialogue from a recently watched movie, sometimes I’m composing a presentation or an e-mail. Sometimes it’s a glimpse of the elaborate fantasy world that I’ve maintained since the age of fourteen. It’s always there, like the hum of a fluorescent lamp that fills an otherwise silent room.
The site gives me the opportunity to focus my thoughts into something coherent, and in the process, share those thoughts with someone besides myself. Now all I have to do is scour off the rust, get back in the saddle, and fire up the cliché engine.
that’s better
05.09.08 • comment (2)
I knew that other design didn’t feel right. Superfluous, trendy paint splatters and anemic text aren’t my style, apparently. It destroyed my desire to look at my writing, and looking is usually (though not always) a prerequisite for reading. So we’re back to something a little plainer, a lot brighter, and noticeably greener. Those of you who have been reading my site for a long time (hello, the two of you) might be getting a strange sense of familiarity. The current design is a retrofit and update of the first one I ever developed for this domain, almost three years ago to the day. Kick the tires, refresh the caches, and let me know if anything looks weird.
The dearth of posts over the past couple of months was purely a product of my ridiculous workload. After eight or more hours searching the literature, writing papers, and programming in Matlab, the last thing you’d want to do is continue to sit in front of your computer, right? Especially when there’s Mario Kart, like right there. Anyway, the semester is done and the storm has abated. Writing shall resume, because it must.
april sigh of relief
04.03.08 • comment
There I was, having a normal Wednesday. I checked my Inbox. There was a message from a friend. In the message was a link. I clicked the link.
The link was a trailer, a preview of a Legend of Zelda movie. Take a moment to appreciate the gravity of this moment. This is a fantasy I have entertained for approximately half my life. I watched with bated breath. I watched in a hyper-aware state, acutely conscious of every line of dialogue, every flap and flicker of green cloth. I closed the window, truly amazed.
I had to know more. I Googled. Since this was April 2nd, I learned that the trailer was actually an elaborate April Fools joke.
Thank God.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Zelda series. They are great games. They set up their rules and let you figure them out. Puzzles are hard enough to give you that nice “Ah hah!” feeling but easy enough to stave off the impulse to shatter your controller against a nearby cat. The logic that governs Zelda’s dungeons has been consistent for the past sixteen years, and thus an experienced player can bring a real tool set to a new Zelda game. It gives a person a sense of history, of experience, and most importantly, a sense that all the time spent playing the other games was useful. These are great games.
I will not, however, sit here and pretend that any Zelda game has ever had anything approaching a thrilling story. You’ve got your Hero of Time, clad in green, you’ve got Princess Zelda, usually confined to a castle for one reason or another, and then you’ve got Ganondorf, the undying King of Evil. Each of these three people represents one aspect of the Triforce, a mystical power source that, once united, allows its wielder to reshape the world to his will. Ganon wants to use it to reign over the world in a kingdom of despair for all eternity, you and the Princess would rather that didn’t happen. Between the start of the game and the big reveal that you, Zelda, and Ganondorf are the latest iteration of a predestined battle between good and evil, there are dungeons full of logic puzzles, monsters, and treasure. Aaaaand GAME!
There is no real story, no narrative. While I get a real sense of accomplishment from the completion of each Zelda game, I can’t say I’ve ever been emotionally or intellectually fulfilled by some kind of conclusion or, if I may, denouement. It is not the stuff of feature film, and I doubt it ever will be. While I am absolutely certain that you could do worse than an overly literal Zelda movie, I am enormously relieved that this was just a joke.
in which i give you all an excuse to giggle like fourteen year-olds
04.02.08 • comment (1)
The image at left is a slice of the course listings for the fall class registration. The course in question is “Real Analysis,” as taught by Professor Weiner. This is exactly how the course appears on the registration website. If God exists, s/he has an amazing sense of humor.