question for fellow keyboard jockeys.

The office package on this PC is Office 2007, which is all shiny and glitzy.  It's very comprehensive, weighs in at 623MB on the hard drive, and sports a new look that makes its predecessors look like relics from the dark ages of computing.

However, there are two things it still cannot do.  The first is to remember its cursor position in a previously edited document.  When you open a document, it dumps you at the beginning of it by default, and you have to scroll down and insert the cursor in the proper position before you can start typing away.  That's a pretty minor grievance, but it's one of those little things that save five seconds every time I open a document.

The other thing is something that only one word processing program has ever managed to incorporate: different colors for text and page background.  I'm not talking about differently colored text that prints out as such, but rather text that only shows in your color of preference on screen, yet prints out as regular black-on-white text.

I don't like to look at black text on a white background on backlit screens.  It's like watching ants on a light bulb.  Word used to let you display white text on a blue background as an alternative, which is an improvement, but it's still not quite the way I want it, and they seem to have dropped that option in Word 2007 anyway.

On my old Macs, I run a 1990s-vintage word processing program called Corel WordPerfect 3.5.  It lets you configure any background color and any text color you'd like to see on the screen.  To my eyes, amber text on a dark green background looks most relaxing, and that's what I have set in WordPerfect.  That color scheme greatly reduces eye strain, and the ability of WordPerfect to let me make all documents appear in that fashion makes it my favorite word processor.  I even put up with having to export the document into HTML and then re-import and -format it into Word, which is a bit of a hassle. 

Why is it that no other word processor offers this simple feature?  Or do any of you know how to make Word do what the long-discontinued Mac version of WordPerfect delivered ten years ago already, and let me specify a text and background color of my choice?

(Yeah, you can change those system-wide through Display Properties > Appearance > Advanced, but then all document windows in all applications change color.)

on primitive computing.

A few days ago, I started a little experiment.

Before we moved to New Hampshire, I sold or gave away most of my small collection of vintage Macintosh systems. The only ones I retained were a Powerbook 3400c (because it's still useful with its built-in CD-ROM and network connection, because I have an entire spare 3400c for parts in case something breaks, and because it'll make a dandy first computer for Quinn), and a Color Classic (because it's cute as a button.)

Now, the Color Classic is an obsolete computer by any standard of the definition. While the Powerbook can run Office 2001, Internet Explorer, and other modern software, the little Color Classic doesn't have the wheaties to cruise the web or serve up YouTube videos. It's an all-in-one akin to the original Macintosh, a small beige box with a floppy drive and a very sharp and crisp 10" Sony color monitor built into the case. The main processor runs at 16 MHz (even cell phones have more powerful CPUs these days), and the system has 10MB RAM and an 80MB hard drive. It runs Mac OS 7.1, and very little else.

When I purchased my Alphasmart Neo, I discovered the benefits of minimalist computing. The Neo only does text--no web browsing, no email, no WiFi, nothing but you and whatever it is you want to commit to paper. In the six months since I bought it, my word count has increased dramatically, because the Neo's One-Trick Pony nature allowed me to concentrate just on my work, without distracting me with Instant Messages or tempting me with games or a Wikipedia safari.

Well, I took another look at the Color Classic, which had been stored in my closet since I got it for free from one of fellow Robin's Ph.D. candidates at UT a few years back. Then I realized that the little Mac might have the same decluttering effect on the creative process, since it couldn't run serve up any modern distractions, either.

So, I dusted it off, replaced a dead PRAM battery that prevented it from booting up (the original half-AA cell had finally run dry after 14 years), and fired the little thing up.

And you know what? There's something liberating about that old technology. You don't get Google or streaming video, but that little Color Classic boots from a cold start to the OS 7 desktop in ten or twelve seconds, and shuts down instantly. I spent a few hours on the Internet looking for a suitable word processor that would let me save my stuff in a format the Windows box would understand (I do my final formatting and printing from Office 2007 on the modern machine), and found one called Nisus Writer that actually fits on a single floppy.

I wasn't expecting too much from Nisus Writer. I mean, how sophisticated can a program be that fits on a floppy disk and takes only 1MB of system memory to run?

Pretty sophisticated, it turns out. Nisus Writer, last updated in the early 1990s, lets me do everything I usually do in MS Word. It has a thesaurus, a spell checker, word count, and all the formatting features I routinely use. It even opens previously edited documents to the precise location where you left off, which is something that Word still hasn't learned even in the 2007 version. In addition, Nisus Writer saves its files in plain text format, which can be copied to a floppy and then opened by Word (or any other word processor) on the XP box without any loss in formatting.

Well, if you use a piece of hardware for a specific purpose only, and it does that job as well as any modern hardware, can you really brand it as "obsolete"?

Now the Color Classic is sitting on my desk as the in-house writing machine. I still use the Neo whenever I go out, or feel the need to move around in the house, but the Color Classic now serves as the screen-and-keyboard version of the Neo. It doesn't take up much space, it looks good on the desk, it's just as useful as any other computer for the limited task of word processing, and it's fun to use.  Electronics recycling at its best, no?

those winter sundays.

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

--Robert Hayden

do you bite your thumb at me, matey?

Anyone out there who's a.) handy with Photoshop, and b.) interested in getting in at the ground level of my groundbreaking "Romeo and Juliet" production?

To recap, I noted a while ago that nobody's ever done a buccaneer-themed version of Romeo and Juliet. Therefore, I came up with the concept of a Shakespeare adaptation featuring pirates and ninjas. Romeo is the son of a pirate, and Juliet is the daughter of a ninja. That's a recipe for high drama in my book.

"In fair Sarasota, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where Ninja blood makes Pirate hands unclean."

The fight scenes between the Montague pirate crew and the Capulet ninja clan will be like nothing ever seen on stage. We're talking flintlock pistols belching, shuriken flying, and cutlass clashing with katana.

To that end, I need a weathered-looking playbill that has a katana crossed with a cutlass. It should look like it was inked on parchment by some Elizabethan advertising guy working for the Globe. That would be awesome--and by awesome, I mean totally sweet.

Now, another question is...can we work in werewolves, too?

on word processors, the weather, and guns.

At the risk of sounding like a shill for Alphasmart, I have to once again sing the praises of the little Neo.

I've had this thing for a little over a month now. I've written roughly 20,000 words on it, five or ten or thirty minutes at a time. The battery meter just dropped to 99% a few days ago. At this rate, the three AA batteries in this thing will run out of juice at some point early next year.

There's not a thing I don't like about the Neo. It's very well designed, and it does its one job better than anything else. No boot time--hit the "On" key, and two seconds later, you're ready to type away. No power issues--forget having to lug around a power adapter, or secure a seat next to a power outlet at your local Sip-N-Type. No big-ass laptop bag or thrown-out backs--the Neo weighs two pounds, which is half the weight of the skinniest sub-notebook out there.

Yes, it really is the best thing since sliced bread, and yes, you do need to toss out your laptop and get yourself one of these if you do any kind of heavy-duty writing. It lets you untether yourself from your desk, and you won't believe how many productive five-minute writing sessions you can squeeze into a day if you don't have to first grab your eight-pound laptop, wait for it to boot up, and hope that the battery is topped off.

It's the hottest stretch of the year. Here in the Tennessee river valley, that means heat and humidity so oppressive that it feels like you're walking into an industrial-sized bakery oven every time you leave the house. At this time of the year, I don't mind being stuck in the house with the kids, and any excursion is basically a quick transition from air-conditioned house into air-conditioned van to go to the air-conditioned store. Weeks like this one remind me of a line from that mediocre movie with Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek, where his parents spend time with her parents at some lake in Arizona for Cinco de Mayo...the Mexican part of the family has a great time in the sun, but the Anglos just sit there and sweat, until the white dad shouts at the Mexican dad, "The white people are melting!"

In Germany, residential air conditioning is virtually unknown, and considered a wasteful use of electricity. When I left the place in 1996, they had just started putting AC units into new vehicles as standard equipment, but I didn't walk into my first air-conditioned dwelling until I came over to the United States. We may use far more energy with our central and window AC units, but if its between me sitting in subtropical Tennessee heat sweating out a gallon an hour, and Gaia taking it in the pants, then set the thermostat to 68 degrees, baby. They make more kilowatts at the nuclear power plant every day.

Concealment is tricky in this kind of climate, of course, but I've had very good success with a close-fitting pancake holster under an untucked t-shirt. I never really understood the desire for those little subcompact guns made out of styrofoam--the smaller you make 'em, the harder they are to shoot well. If I can hide a steel K-frame revolver under an untucked t-shirt without even having to use an IWB holster, then why would I get one of those little compromise guns?

That's not to say that pocket guns like the Jetfire and P32 aren't neat. They are, and I've owned my share of both. I used them for backup, though, and not as a primary choice of sidearm. For that job, I want something made of steel, something that'll accommodate all the fingers on my shooting hand. There'll be enough factors spoiling my accuracy in a gunfight; trying to win a life-or-death shootout with a gun the size of a credit card is something I don't want to add to the menu.

random things.

Today's addition to the blogroll is Squeaky Wheel Seeks Grease. (Is that an original name for a blog, or what?) I just spent a bit of time going through her archives, and boy howdy, can she write. I particularly liked this post on Windbag Moore's latest agitprop piece "Sicko".

Speaking of writing: I've had the Neo for a day and a half now. My usual output per day is right around a thousand words. Some days, I only manage to get down a paragraph...but it's a really good paragraph. Other days, I crank out half a chapter. Most days, however, my natural cutoff seems to be right around a thousand words--nothing awfully prolific, but it adds up.

Yesterday, my word count was 2,500, and I can't recall having parked myself at a desk for the specific purpose of writing. I just dashed out all those words in quick spurts of typing during the day, thanks to the fact that I had a lightweight writing machine with practically unlimited battery life handy. Sit on the couch with the kid while he's reading a book and watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse? There's a paragraph or three. Sitting in the kitchen waiting for the baby's milk to warm up? There's another paragraph. At the end of the day, all those quick little five-minute writing sessions add up.

so long, laptop.

So the big brown truck of happiness showed up today and dropped off two packages: my eagerly-awaited Alphasmart Neo, and a CH Flight Yoke.

The Neo is simply excellent. If your daily routine includes a bunch of writing, for whatever reason, this thing is the device for you. It's about the size of a standard sheet of paper, weighs less than two pounds, and still has a full-sized keyboard. There's no waiting for it to boot--you turn it on, and a second later, you're looking at the blinking cursor waiting for your text input. If you turn it off, it'll pick up right where you left it once you get back to it. Every keystroke is automatically saved, so there's nothing to save manually. The memory has eight file spaces of 64k each, which comes to about 10,000 words per file. (It doesn't seem like a lot of memory in the age of multiple gigabytes of RAM, but this thing is just for ASCII text, and 64k times eight is a lot of text.)

When you're finished with the writing for the day (or week), you plug the Neo into your PC via USB cord, open Word or any other program that accepts text input, and hit the "send" button. Your scribblings paste themselves into the desktop program as if a speed typist on crank is hacking away at the keys.

Best of all: the thing is so light and sturdy that you can take it anywhere, and the battery lasts 700 freaking hours of writing time. (That's a month of non-stop writing.) Apparently, these things are popular with a lot of schools, and they run all year on one set of AA batteries. There's no laptop ever built that comes close to even a tenth of that kind of runtime.

Yeah, I probably sound like an Alphasmart rep, but this thing really is all that and a bag of chips. It's utterly useless to anyone who needs anything other than a word processor, but for writers, this thing is the best invention since Gutenberg's press.

Oh yeah, the flight yoke is the berries, too. Flying a Cessna with a stick just doesn't feel quite right, and the yoke adds a lot of realism. If you're into flight sims, and you can stand the snickers of your friends and family for getting your geek on with a flight yoke bolted to your computer desk, I highly recommend it.

Thus end today's product reviews. If anyone from Alphasmart reads this, contact me for my snail mail address, so you can send me a check and/or some free loot.

thoreau says: ditch your iphone.

Okay, so Thoreau was a tree-hugging hippie, but he had some salient points. His views on taxation and civil disobedience are laudable, for example, and the older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with his ideas on simplification.

Five years ago, I would have been in line to get my paws on an iPhone. I used to be a gadget hound of the first order--when the original iMac came out, I did stand in line, money in hand, to purchase one of the first ones for sale at the CompUSA in Nashua. I used to be a proponent of what my friend Mark calls "the all-singing, all-dancing multimedia device", coveting and buying gizmos that shoehorned the maximum amount of capabilities into as small a package as possible. The first Windows CE handhelds? I had a bunch of them, despite the fact that the software sucked, and their batteries lasted a tenth of the runtime offered by Palm's devices. Hell, I would have bought an iPhone simply for the fact that it says "Apple" on it, and because it's shiny and glossy.

Fast forward to today, and I'm not very tempted to get a combined phone/music player/web-browsing-and-email device. (And no, it's not just because the piggy bank for toy money is chronically empty these days.) Sure, it looks gorgeous, and I have no doubt that it does all those things in a beautiful and simple fashion, but it doesn't fit my recent trend towards simplification.

My carry guns are one example of this trend. I didn't wake up one day and decide to pare my carry guns down to just S&W K-frames--it just sort of evolved that way. When I made the K-frame my regular carry piece, it was the simplicity of operation and complete reliability that was the initial factor, but after a while I found that I also really enjoyed not having to carry extra magazines. (Speed strips are far easier to carry around--just stuff a pair into your front pocket and be on your way.) Then I appreciated being able to keep all my brass, and after a while I realized that I shot the K-frame better than anything else. I actually ended up carrying the same gun all the time, instead of switching to the Carry Gun of the Month every few weeks, and as a result my skill and comfort level with the old S&W improved quite a bit.

So I ended up getting a duplicate for my carry gun, which is identical in every respect except the length of the cylinder chambers. (My Model 13 is a .357 Magnum, and my Model 10 is a .38 Special.) Both guns are set up identically, with the same grips, loaded with the same rounds (.38 Special +P LSWCHP), and they ride in the same holsters. You can't tell them apart without reading the roll marks on the barrels. Now I have a backup gun for the one I carry, and if the M13 ever breaks or gets taken after a self-defense shooting, all I have to do is get its twin and stick it into the empty holster. I don't have to worry about finding leather, keeping magazines loaded, futzing around with "feed-friendly" carry loads, or getting used to a different manual of arms. Simple is good: you can see the loaded status of both guns just by glancing at the cylinder, both operate in exactly the same fashion, and there's no extraneous fiddle-faddle. Even the sights are just grooves in the topstraps and no-snag low front sights on thick barrels. Recoil is next to nothing even with the +P carry loads, and both guns put those 158-grainers exactly where you point them.

Well, since the simplicity concept works well in that particular area (self-defense weaponry), I started thinking that it might work well in other areas as well. The idea is to pare down the required hardware for a task to the most simple form that still allows full functionality.

I use laptops for writing, and up until recently I usually bought the most powerful machine I could afford every few years. Then I realized that I really only use my portables for writing, and that I didn't need the extra capabilities afforded by a new laptop. I started to regress my writing machines to earlier technology, just to see how far I could downgrade before getting less productive, and to my surprise I found out that writing on an old machine actually enhances my productivity because it offers fewer distractions than state-of-the-art hardware. A ten-year-old Powerbook will still run Word as well as a brand new MacBook, and it won't beckon with World of Warcraft. Then I took that equation to its logical conclusion, and bought one of these, which only lets you do writing...700 hours of it on one battery charge. No email, no Internet, no games, nothing but empty storage space to fill with letters, words, and sentences.

That Thoreau fellow...he may have been a patchouli-scented tree hugger, but that "simplify" thing seems to work pretty well. We seem to be in the middle of the ADHD Age, and our tools and toys reflect that. Buck the trend and try to shed the fluff for a little while, and it might just amaze you how much you can get done when your technology serves you instead of distracting you. I'm a complete and utter capitalist, so I get a twitch whenever somebody starts ranting about "unchecked consumerism", but maybe we don't need the latest and greatest all the time, and the term "obsolete" is used far too liberally.

oh, the shame.

Today I managed to break a 1.2-million-dollar aircraft. (Thankfully, it was mine...and a digital rather than an actual aircraft.)

I spent my past forty-odd flight hours trundling about Europe in a Cessna 172, which has fixed landing gear. Today, I decided to do a leg of my pretend cross-Europe flight in my old pal, the Beech Baron 58...which has retractable landing gear. (Some of you may anticipate where this is going.)

So I come in for a perfect landing at Vaernes in Norway...80KIAS, two notches of flaps, textbook flare, and touchdown right on the numbers, smooth as silk.

*skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

"Hey, what are those sparks in front of my windshield?"

*facepalm*

That'll damage your ego. Nailing the last twenty-odd landings with a fixed-gear C172, and then neglecting to hit the gear lever on final and ignoring the "GEAR UP" warning on the dash that's merrily blinking away. Put back the keys for the light twin and go back to the Sky Moped, rookie.

Light blogging...I've been busy juggling the kids. (Not literally, mind you.) I get a few hours in the evening, and maybe another hour or two in the middle of the day, during quote-unquote "nap time", which Quinn spends playing away in his room six days out of seven. The short one is putting on some weight, and now only wakes up two or three times a night as opposed to every hour and a half.

Mark Pixler, of Dillon's Blue Press catalog, has asked me for permission to run "Why the Gun is Civilization" in their September issue, which is enormously flattering. I may be able to contribute more to The Blue Press in the future, which is even more flattering. Their readership/recipient list constitutes a non-trivial amount of readers, which is an awful lot of exposure for a little niche blogger like myself.

more narcissistic whining.

I like the fact that someone at Gunsite likes my essay enough to put it on their page.

I don't like the fact that ol' Major Caudill is once again the one associated with it (albeit only in a forwarding capacity this time.)

I'm done with the whining now. You may carry on.

on plagiarism.

A while ago, I posted a little essay called "Why the Gun is Civilization". It was pretty well received, and got me a lot of positive comments from a variety of people. Some folks asked for permission to reprint and publish the essay in various newsletters and webzines, and I gladly granted it every time, only asking for attribution in return.

Recently, I have noticed my essay pop up on the Internet a lot in various forums, most of which I do not frequent. This in itself causes me no grief, but the reposts are almost invariably attributed to someone who is not me. Some are attributed to a Major L.Caudill, USMC (Ret.), and some are merely marked as "forwarded" by the same person. Others are not attributed at all, giving the impression that the person who posted the essay is also its author.

In school, we call reproduction without attribution "plagiarism". It's usually cause for a failing grade or even expulsion in most college codes of conduct. In the publishing world, we call the same thing "intellectual property theft".

Now, my little blog scribblings are hardly published works in the traditional sense, nor do I incur any financial damage from this unattributed copying, but it's still a matter of honor. I did, after all, sit down and type up that little essay. It may not make it into any print anthologies, but it's mine, and seeing it with someone else's name on the byline is a little annoying. Call it ego, call it vanity, but there it is.

In the end, I guess I should probably shrug it off and tell myself that I can produce something that's worth stealing.