More editing annoyances

Have I mentioned that our manuals are sometimes sloppily written?

"To validate [x]," it says here, "follow the proceeding procedure." Then it lists the procedure to be followed.

I guess if you don't know what "preceding" means you might not spell it right either.

Oh Lord

I wish I were making this exchange up:

"QUESTION:You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?

BUSH: I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. "

???

From Cox.net, quoted in its entirety: "Verdicts Reached In Charges Against Qwest Execs
04/13/2004 17:04:11

"(Denver, CO) -- The jury in the Denver fraud and conspiracy trial of four former Qwest Communications executives has reached a verdict on 24 of 44 counts. The defendants each face eleven counts of conspiracy, securities fraud, false statements and wire fraud."

Uh. That's nice. Now what were the verdicts?

Amateur hour

One of my co-workers (whose job in our organization has nothing remotely to do with creating artwork) fancies himself an illustrator. He's doing somebody's CD cover, and every now and again he comes around to ask me for some basic pointers.

So far I've had to explain to him why he needs to work in CMYK, why pixel resolution matters, what bleeds are and why he needs to include them in his artwork, and why he needs to talk to the printer himself rather than communicate with him through the band.

Oh yeah--when I tell him this stuff he tells me that he can't stand doing commercial work--the number of commercial projects he's done can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare--because he sees production requirements as arbitrary restrictions on his creative freedom.

Odd dream

I’m still in my late teens, still living at home. I see a movie having something to do with a group of American women offering relief services in Iraq—but not quite the Iraq we know. I write a blog entry about the movie; when I post it I see immediately that the particular blogging software I’m using has filtered my content in a way that is not incorrect or objectionable, but neither is it what I want. I decide I’m going to rewrite the entry from scratch, and just as I do I’m called to dinner.

Dinner is unmemorable except that in the dream version of my family I have a brother.

I return to my room to fix the blog entry. I have two computers to work with. One is the computer I normally use (in the context of the dream; it’s more like a Mac IIsi than anything else). The other is a Mac Color Classic. I’m amazed how quickly it runs Panther, but then in the dream I recall reading that Panther is specially optimized for better performance on legacy Macs.

I should add that I have no siblings and that Apple Computer did not yet exist when I was in my late teens, never mind the particular models mentioned. (I’ve only had passing acquaintance with either of them.)

(There were no blogs then, either, of course.)

There's an echo in here.

I kept the CNN coverage of Condoleezza Rice's testimony on in the bedroom while RP, an inveterate channel surfer, flipped from network to network. The CNN feed lagged about a second behind CSPAN's; the delay on the CBS feed was a few seconds more.

Was CBS afraid of a wardrobe malfunction?

Cross-dressing heats up Texas Republican race

From the Houston Chronicle: "What started as a dull runoff race to field a Republican candidate for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives has heated up due to a controversy over cross-dressing. "

Distressing spam trend #385620

Egad! Some of the randomly generated names of purported spam senders are starting to look familiar; I'm sure Mauricio Sims, Les Puckett, and Robert Velasquez have showed up before. I expect I'm wrong, though.

Fear Factor, are you listening?

From EurekAlert: "Diet of worms protects against bowel cancer". Whoever wrote that headline has probably been waiting for decades for the chance to use that pun (via Dan Goodman).

File-Sharing Getting Bad Rap?

From RollingStone.com: "A controversial new study by economists at Harvard and the University of North Carolina has found that file-sharing is not the cause of declining CD sales. Researchers spent a year and a half analyzing downloads and sales figures for 680 albums -- and what they found contradicts the record industry's claim that online piracy has led to a fifteen percent decline in sales since 2000."

Interesting--I've never felt file sharing had anything at all to do with reduced CD sales, because my take's always been that in the natural order of things a middle-aged guy with a lot of disposable income is going to buy more CDs and be more profitable to record labels than a 20-year-old with essentially no disposable income.

In spite of this, the major labels seem to have a problem selling to me: I don't bother with their traditional promotional tools (like commercial radio and MTV), and they don't seem to know how to reach me. This isn't my fault.

Ford didn't have any trouble communicating to me that they sold a vehicle I might be interested in; why should Warner Bros. or Interscope be any different?

Puppy love -- it's better than you think

From MSNBC: "Pets trigger our 'feel good' hormones, research suggests"

There's something soothing, even hypnotic, about a cat's purring. I notice this with myself, of course, but more importantly it's apparent that when Zoe purrs in his general direction, Toby (our youngest, most rambunctious cat) settles down considerably. Are there any studies on this?

And while we're talking about birthdays...

RP's grandmother, known to everyone even vaguely related to her as Mother Claudie, passed away several years ago at 91, the first of a long string of sad events in RP's family.

So it pleases me to report a happy event: the daughter of one of RP's cousins bore a daughter yesterday. I'm even more pleased that the baby is named Claudia Camille after her great-great grandmother.

Belated kitty birthdays

I've been remiss in acknowledging the birthday of our cats Referee and Zoe, littermates who turned six on March 30.