Word Art

My dad sent me a link to Toogle and told me to search James Lucas Hepokoski. Here's what I got:

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Word Up

I spent an hour or so this afternoon working with Sandra, the housekeeper of the Highlander, on Microsoft Word. She's taking a computer applications course, and she's got most of the concepts down (her understanding of applying formatting to different parts of text is surprisingly complete), but she was having trouble with inserting clip and word art. In some respects, I think the world might be a better place if more people had her set of Word skills. I cringe when I see clip art laden signage that has such poor formatting that the message is hard to understand.

Selecting text was also difficult for her. I showed her the trick of using the left margin (looking for the backwards cursor) to highlight a line at a time, but I was probably confusing at times. I've grown very used to the (far-superior) configuration of Word 2002, and going back to Word 2000 was frustrating. It's nice to see that Word is improving as a word processing program.

Halo Иineteen

I received an email this morning telling me that Nine Inch Nails' newest album, With Teeth, which is to be released on 3 May is now available in its entirety online. The album is indeed up at NIN's page at Myspace, a website which is pretty interesting in itself. Many tracks on the album remind me in some manner of "The Perfect Drug," which NIN released on The Lost Highway soundtrack. Sometimes the connection is in the sound; sometimes it's in the lyrics. I kind of think of it as an explosion of that one song, and the result is quite good. The album is tightly constructed and impressively organized. It's not as beautiful as The Fragile, but beauty is not the goal of this album. It's an album of energy, and it succeeds. It packs the power of NIN's inconsistent debut album Pretty Hate Machine into a work that is a cohesive as The Downward Spiral. Trent Reznor's falsetto on "All the Love in the World" and "Sunspots" is particularly exciting. It's not strong enough to be used for long durations, but it's highly effective used as is. Reznor is a talented musician, no doubt, and his stuff still has so much edge that it seems strange that he'll be turning forty in May. I feel like he should be exempt from aging.

Nat and I took two of the art history professors to lunch today. Prof. Menocal, who prefers to go by Narciso, and Prof. Buenger both wrote letters of recommendation for me during my (successful) bid to gain admission to an architecture school. Prof. Buenger wrote a letter for Nat as well. We ate at the Great Dane Pub, where my mother took me one Saturday during my first semester here. I had a "Full Monte Christo" and I enjoyed it greatly. I wish I could take my favorite professors with me to the next school. I'd gladly take both Narciso and Prof. Buenger along with Prof. McDonald (from whom I learned Russian History) and Prof. Begam (with whom I currently have James Joyce).

A Forest Consumed

I'm sitting in a pile of books, notes, and printed-out articles and essays. My James Joyce paper was due today (I titled it "Wandering of the Sun: Astronomy, Scientific Discourse, and Father and Son in 'Ithaca'"), as was my second Environmental Conservation paper (in which I wrote on land-use in Tambopata, Peru from the point of view of an ExxonMobil executive). Neither was terrible experience, but the combined total was more than I'd perfer to do again. Its hard to say, but maybe it won't be necessary.

I had a 80 minute nap this afternoon to help compensate for the short night's sleep. I'll need it since due tomorrow is an Ancient and Medieval Art paper.

Blink of an eye

My best friend Claire visited Madison for the weekend, arriving Friday for a late dinner and departing mid-afternoon today. I think the past 44 hours were surely among the most fleeting I've experienced. We had dinner with her good friend, future roommate, and traveling companion Melissa, Melissa's host for the weekend Brenna, and Brenna's friend Rachel. During the next day and a half, Claire and I succeeded in visiting Memorial Library to retrieve a volume of James Joyce Quarterly I needed, in applying an oatmeal facial mask (below), in visiting the Elvehjem art museum, in visiting Memorial Union, in taking a nighttime stroll around the capitol, and in mixing and consuming cosmopolitans. We failed to visit Jamba Juice (in part due to the surprisingly frigid weather) and the Community Pharmacy. We had two memorable meals; Sarah, Evan, and Mike's girlfriend Annika took us out to King of Falafel to both meet Claire and celebrate my admission to Syracuse School of Architecture (Mike was unfortunately away visiting family). It was a most enjoyable meal and get-together. We had our last lunch at Pelmini, a hole in the wall that serves Russian dumplings. They serve potato dumplings and beef dumplings; you can order them butter-style or spicy-style. That's it. (They do have a fridge with cans of soda and tubs of sour cream, both of which are included in an order.) The dining experience, like the rest of the weekend, was very highly enjoyable. Claire's visit most pleasantly bisected our two months apart between spring break and summer vacation.

|n\/a1id Pa55w0rd

I set up my NetID for Syracuse this morning before class, and the process confirmed my suspicion that computer administrators' expectations for having "hard to guess" passwords are getting way out of hand. Back in the mid-90s many servers would let you use pretty much anything over four characters. Granted, you could be stupid and use something guessable (say, password), but you could be smart and use a phrase that means something to you and you alone (say, elvis24). Around 2000, though, many systems started being choosier, but for the most part requirements were reasonable. A seven character minimum or requirement of letters and numbers would prevent you from using password or j0hn, but still allow elvis24. In the past couple years, however, password requirements have become increasingly strict and are now downright ridiculous at times. Businesses like Amazon.com don't want to irritate their customers, so they're easier going, but school servers are the domain of the nerdiest of the computer nerds, and no one is more paranoid about password security than ultra-nerdy computer nerds. Look what I had to face this morning:

Rules for a Good Password

· The password must be 7 or 8 characters.
· The password must include at least one lowercase letter.
· The password must include at least one uppercase letter.
· The password must include at least one number.
· The password must include at least one non-alphanumeric character from this list:

` ! # $ & * ( ) - _ = \ | [ ] ' ; : / ? . ,

· At least 4 characters must be different.
· The password must avoid any known word.

Examples of a password that will NOT pass: a2b!ccd!, zab!bcd#, a*a*a*a*
Examples of a password that will pass: Abc!jk1!, D1ngd!ng, B*12fr*g

I think we've got some major concerns if zab!bcd# is not sufficiently secure. And is Rock_00- really less secure that oRck_00-?

Up Top!

It's National High Five Day!!!!!

The first use of 'high-five' cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1980:

Maclean's Mag. 20 Oct. 48 They used to slap palms ('Gimme five, man'), but what they do now is reach high and bang hands up there ('The high five, man').

The Phrase Finder says of the origin of the term and associated gesture: "Began in the basketball circuit in the US in the 1979/80 season. The University of Louisville player Derek Smith claims to have coined the term."

A Tundish For Malapropism

I noticed this evening that James Augustine Aloysius Joyce is an oft quoted author in the Oxford English Dictionary. They list practically everything he wrote as sources:

Chamber music 1907
Dubliners 1914
Exiles 1918
Finnegans wake 1939
Giacomo Joyce ed. R. Ellmann 1968
Letters ed. S. Gilbert & R. Ellmann 3 vols. 1957-66
Pomes penyeach 1927
A portrait of the artist as a young man 1916
Stephen hero: part of the first draft of "A portrait of the artist as a young man," ed. T. Spencer 1944
--(ed. J. J. Slocum & H. Cahoon) 1955
Ulysses 1922

While this doesn't really surprise me, I find it amusing nonetheless. It amuses me in part because there are numerous occasions when Joyce intentionally misuses words, but also because a significant piece of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has to do with Stephen Dedalus (certainly a representation of a young Joyce) deliberately choosing to use English, the language of Ireland's unwanted occupiers. There is a very interesting scene with Stephen and the dean of studies at his university in which the dean, an Englishman, shows his ignorance of the word tundish and apparently assumes its from Gaelic, when in fact, it is an English word that Shakespeare himself employed in Measure for Measure.

I've come to feel that Joyce intended to conquer the English language (if such a thing can be done), and there is not a small amount of irony in the fact that he's now being used to define that same language. Does this mean he succeeded? I'd like to think so, but I'm not sure.

XVI

It looks like "God's Rottweiler" has a new nickname: "his holiness." Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger will be installed as Pope Benedict XVI this coming Sunday. As with the outcome of our recent presidential election, I can claim neither surprise nor pleasure, although I do take satisfaction in the knowledge that the new pope, regardless of his stance on homosexuality, probably won't be starting any wars. In fact, if we are to assume that Cardinal Ratzinger chose his papal name based upon the career of the most recent Benedict (the pope during the first World War) instead of the first one (about whom we know very little), we can expect a strong stance against Bush's questionable use of force.