Walt at Random

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, 1947, b&w. Stuart Heisler (dir.), Susan Hayward, Lee Bowman, Marsha Hunt, Eddie Albert. 1:43 [1:30]

A nightclub singer helps her boyfriend get a job as a radio singer. He succeeds. They marry. He succeeds more. She quits her job—after all, he’s making all the money they need or want. She has a baby. He’s gone a lot of the time. Meanwhile—well, the opening scene shows her downing a double (straight up) in about five seconds before going on, and as time goes on she has lots of doubles, to the point of seeing double, falling down drunk and starting out again the next morning. Also, she smokes and has a bad habit of dropping the lit cigarette when she’s pretty well lit. Eventually, her husband files for divorce and custody, she kidnaps the child…and, well, you can pretty much guess what happens next. After that, according to the sleeve, “with hard work and her husband’s support, she overcomes her addiction.”

Except that, in the version I saw (which appears to be missing a scene or three), the last minute of film has her going from being bandaged in a hospital bed to sitting up and assuring her husband that it’s all going to be OK from now on. No hard work, just instant cure. Never mind that. Susan Hayward is quite effective (good enough for an Oscar nomination), Eddie Albert is excellent as her husband’s songwriting partner and her friend and accompanist (the only constant through the breakup), and it’s well filmed (and a decent print), but certainly not a landmark in cinema, even as a “sudser” and precursor of all those Lifetime TV movies. Supposedly based on the life of Bing Crosby’s wife Dixie Lee. $1.25.

The Big Wheel, 1949, b&w. Edward Ludwig (dir.), Mickey Rooney, Thomas Mitchell, Mary Hatcher, Michael O’Shea, Spring Byington, Hattie McDaniel. 1:32 [1:23].

If you go by the sleeve, this is a similar story to Smash-Up, but with a race car driver as protagonist: He gets drunk, ruins his life (in this case by killing another driver because he doesn’t recognize that alcohol and gasoline don’t mix), and eventually manages to recover. Well, no. Set aside the fact that alcohol and gasoline mix very nicely; that’s not really the plot.

Mickey Rooney stars as a young would-be racecar driver whose father was also a race-car driver, who was killed in a crash at the Indy 500. The start of that last sentence may tell you a lot about how you’ll approach this flick. If you find Rooney immensely irritating as an actor, it helps that he’s playing an arrogant, bullheaded young driver—but makes him less sympathetic than I think he’s supposed to be. Anyway, yes, he crashes into another driver—and yes, he was drunk: But that was the night before, and he was trying to warn the other driver that his wheel was about to fall off. But, of course, since this punk was fond of saying “I’ll drive right over ‘em” with regard to other drivers, people aren’t likely to believe his story. That’s the key plot turn. Naturally, it all sort of works out in the end.

I’m not fond of Rooney and that may color my rating. It’s reasonably well filmed and not badly acted. Lots of car racing scenes. All things considered, it’s another middling $1.25.

Killing Heat (original title Gräset sjunger), 1981, color. Michael Raeburn (dir.), Karen Black, John Thaw, John Kani, John Moulder-Brown. 1:45 [1:30].

Let’s see if I can summarize the plot. A man asks a woman to marry him. She says yes. They wind up in South Africa (the old apartheid South Africa), on his badly-run farm. She’s miserable from the get-go, and doesn’t especially hide it, mostly moping around looking like death warmed over. He gets terribly ill from time to time. She winds up dead—but since the film begins with her dead, we knew that already.

The sleeve says something about her being a successful woman and having a hard time coping with the new country, and being involved with another man. None of that comes through in the picture. What comes through is…well, nothing much, as far as I could tell. Again, it might make more sense with the other 15 minutes. Maybe. Karen Black gives perhaps the most dispirited, dreary, flat performance of her career (or at least of any of her movies I’ve seen). I didn’t care about any of the characters. If I was watching this from start to end, I would have given up a third of the way in: It’s slow, uninteresting, with no particular point that I could find. It’s just blah, and unpleasant blah at that. Maybe I’m missing something, but I think I’m being charitable even to give it $0.25.

The Fat Spy, 1966, color. Joseph Cates (dir.), Phyllis Diller, Jack E. Leonard (in twin roles), Brian Donlevy, Johnny Tillotson, Jayne Mansfield, “the Wild Ones.” 1:20

I’d call this a triumph of programming. On its own, this teen/bikini/singing flick is a poor example of its kind, with third-rate songs (I’m being kind here), a plot that’s thin even by the standards of the genre, and dancers who don’t seem to much like dancing. But as the second disc on this side, it’s badly-needed comic relief with a little life to it, making it watchable nonsense.

It’s nonsense, to be sure, and mediocre nonsense at that. Maybe it’s intended as a spoof on the teen-bikini movies, but those always seemed to be spoofing themselves. Phyllis Diller is, well, Phyllis Diller. Jack E. Leonard is so-so in his twin parts. Jayne Mansfield makes the most of an odd part, but the script gives her nothing to work with. The Wild Ones were a very minor and (on evidence) not very talented band—apparently best known for doing the first, non-hit, version of “Wild Thing.” The print is very good and the sound is fine. Independently, probably $0.75. Through the genius move of pairing it with a depressing, badly-done downer, it shoots up to $1.00.

Continuing the catch-up group of posts that originally appeared on PLN Highlights, here’s the post from February 5, 2008–noting that PLN is now up to 371 users. If you’re not one of them, go to PLN to sign up.

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A lot’s happened at PALINET Leadership Network (PLN) since the last post. Among the highlights:

• More than 300 participants: PLN’s user list passed the 300 mark last week. (As of this writing, there are 319 registered users–up from 190 when PLN launched at ALA Midwinter 2008 and 70 when the “soft launch” began in December 2007.) Do you know library people who would benefit from PLN? Let them know about it!
• Library leadership institutes, mentoring programs, new member round tables and other resources: Jess Bruckner of the Kilbourn Public Library, Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, initiated the LIS Future wiki in December 2007, just as PLN was about to emerge. He developed excellent sets of links for library leadership institutes, library mentoring programs, new member round tables and other resources. (Bruckner also maintains the WisLISjobs.com site.) With Bruckner’s cooperation, those links have now been folded into PLN, expanding the “Other resources” page into a set of pages linked from near the bottom of the PLN home page as the heading “Leadership training, mentoring and other resources.” Thanks to Jess Bruckner for this pioneering work. (LIS Future no longer exists; the domain points to PLN.)
• Open source: You’ll find two new items on open source software to complement John Houser’s essay from last week. The PLN Challenge Panel offers diverse notes on how individual libraries are (or aren’t) ready for open source; Joe Lucia adds a second piece, “From open stacks to open source.”
• Revaluing words: Glen Holt offers controversial views on the value of words and the place of fair use.
• Citizens, engage! Jamie LaRue provides a stirring commentary on the place of public libraries as places and community centers and the need for community members and libraries to engage in community integration.
• Leader’s Digest: Leslie Dillon’s Leader’s Digest for January 2008 includes lots of trends (library and otherwise) and other new material, which you’ll find here and also distributed elsewhere.

Talk pages may not be mentioned here, but they’re the easiest way for you to participate actively in PLN. Disagree with an article? Have another perspective to offer from your own experience and your library? Add it to the article’s Talk page, add a link and write your own article, or send me your draft article (crawford@pln.org or pln.content@gmail.com) with a note on the article it relates to!

The PLN Forums are also starting to see some activity. They’re there for you–another way to communicate with other current and future leaders.

In the last three days, two more people have started following me on Twitter.

I’m flattered, I guess, because this means these are new readers–people who don’t know that I’m, well, not on Twitter.

I’ve been told that Twitter is no longer Hotel California software–that you actually can leave now. So I logged in (turned out I actually did remember my password), for the first time in months, and tried closing my account again.

This time, there’s no obvious sign that it didn’t take. So maybe I’m officially off Twitter (but can apparently recognize the error of my ways within the next six months and return…)

I guess I’ll know, if I don’t get more “followers.” And, yes, I am flattered that people chose to follow my twitters, even if there aren’t really any to follow.

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There’s a really interesting article on Slate today (2/26/08) on which is greener: Print newspapers or online newspapers. It’s not as obvious as you might think.

Lifecycle issues are complicated. Probably always will be. Take, for example, “which is better for the environment? Disposable diapers or washables?” The answer is, apparently, “It depends”–mostly on where you live.

For the handful of you already subscribed to PLN Highlights, apologies for the duplication…

This post appeared today:

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What’s new at PALINET Leadership Network?

• In Entrepreneuralism, the LLN Peer Panel offers comments on librarians as entrepreneurs.
• In On appearance and legitimacy, Iris Jastram discusses one problem of younger academic librarians and library leaders: Being taken seriously.
• In Should libraries host user generated content? Kathryn Greenhill makes a case for libraries hosting patron-writtenblogs and other user-generated content.
• And in Revaluing the book in the hypertext era, Glen Holt considers books, libraries and “the hypertext era.”

Take a look. Add your own responses. Try out the PLN forums!

I wouldn’t have read this Wired article at all, except that Peter Suber quoted a chunk of it…including portions of these two paragraphs.

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You’re probably experiencing it right now. It’s the basis of virtually all media. [Emphasis added.]

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.

Virtually all media. Isn’t that interesting? So, just to make it clear:

• Media: Commercial broadcast TV and radio. Most magazines and newspapers. Portions of the web.
• Not media: Books. Sound recordings. DVDs. Movies in general. Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc.) Other portions of the web.

OK, so he said virtually all Hmm. Let’s see what the government figures are for 2002 (they’ve changed since then, to be sure–but not enough to throw the percentages off all that much):

• Broadcast TV and radio, magazines, newspapers: $134 billion.
• Books, motion pictures and sound recordings: $106 billion.

I’m not sure that I can come up with any usage of “virtually all” that would fit $134 out of $240. Maybe my command of the English language is lacking. Or maybe my command of absurd generalizations is insufficient for me ever to get a job with Wired. I can live with that.

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Update: For some reason, I missed the Statistical Abstract when I was at the Census Bureau’s website. StatAbs has more recent figures–for 2005.

• Newspapers, periodicals, broadcasting: $149 billion
• Books, motion pictures, sound recordings: $120 billion

The percentages haven’t changed significantly: just under 45% of “the media” are paid for.

At first–here, I believe–I read the post, found it interesting, and went on by. The second one (if I’m not mistaken) isn’t in my aggregator, so I missed it. Then Rochelle encouraged others to play.

I’m not going to call it a meme. I think that term gets overused in blogging, and Rochelle hasn’t suggested that it is or should be. I’ll call it a discussion. I didn’t participate early on, mostly because my list of “TechNOs” is so long and mostly pretty transparent.

But Steve Lawson took things in an interesting direction and made me think, at which point I printed out some of the posts for later consideration. I see ten posts from nine sources; I’ll keep tracking the discussion for a little while, and might comment on it in Cites & Insights at some point.

What makes it comment-worthy is not that some bloggers, all of them techies or geeks at least to some extent, own up to being “low-tech” in some areas. As far as I can tell, everyone involved in the discussion has a life–and attempts to strike some balance between tech-oriented stuff and other stuff. Different people have different interests and needs.

What I find interesting is the contrast with an earlier set of discussions rolling around a few liblogs: The lists of skills that every library person must have, the universal tech competencies. So far, I haven’t chosen to talk about those lists, partly because I don’t work in a library. But I think there’s something to be said there. If our strengths and weaknesses in general technology areas can be complementary, why can’t–why shouldn’t?–the strengths, weaknesses, skills of staff members within a library be complementary?

Well, there’s something else that’s interesting about this discussion, and it’s something that I’m finding more of as time goes on (or maybe I’m ignoring the gaps). Civility–and, with very few exceptions, the lack of any need to tell people how to “get over” what they didn’t care about or understand. The whole discussion has been charming and positive–and, I think, useful.

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So, in the interests of ‘fessing up (although most readers already probably know most of these things about me), I’ll at least list the “TechNOs” that I share with others who’ve participated.

• I’m not a gamer or Second Lifer.
• I’ve really tried to listen to podcasts, but find it nearly impossible, probably because I don’t have a commute.
• I only use a cell phone in very special circumstances, and I’ve never even tried the camera in the cell phone we own. (When I hear about a $99/month unlimited calling and texting plan, I add up all that we spend on cell phone, landline phone, long distance, DSL, and cable TV: That still doesn’t add up to $99/month!)
• Tried Twitter. Didn’t like it. Can’t really leave. People still follow me–but they sure don’t get overloaded with messages!
• I do follow ebook developments (and am writing this when I should be working on a Kindle/ebook essay for C&I!), but not as something I’d personally use.
• Skype? I only use landline phones when necessary, and with PG&E, I’m not about to give up a phone that doesn’t require household power…
• When I wanted to help my Dad with an iMac problem, I found the Mac wholly unintuitive–because I wasn’t used to it.
• My wife (the photographer in the house) still uses an excellent compact 35mm film camera–but we might go digital for our next vacation.
• I didn’t own an MP3 player until this year, never owned a PDA of any sort or a pager or… –and while I now own a notebook, it’s essentially a mini-desktop, with no plans to carry it anywhere or even run it off battery power.

None of which should come as a surprise to anyone who reads my stuff.

Filling in the first four posts at PLN Highlights (to give you a flavor of some of the new material that’s enhancing the 295,000 words already in PLN), here’s the post from February 13, 2008. Again, some essays may require that you have an account…

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What’s new at the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN)?

The set of Leadership training, mentoring and other resources pages noted last time around now includes brief descriptive notes for each link–and there’s a new Current library leadership events page, where you’re invited to add appropriate events.

Most new articles come from a variety of blogs, extracting and combining posts that speak to leadership issues. For example,

• In Don’t be that boss, Tyler Rousseau offers some guidelines for good managers–based partly on previous experience with not-so-good bosses.
• Steven J. Bell, Wayne Bivens-Tatum and a number of commenters discuss an ongoing question: Are we doing enough to create the next generation of leaders?
• Reflections on library leadership brings together thoughts from Michael Golrick, Jeff Scott, Barbara Kelly and Brett Bonfield–plus comments from Meredith Farkas, Steven Bell, Scott Walter and Barbara Fister.

As always, we welcome your comments and new articles, and the PLN Forums are open for discussion. And if you don’t have the time for wiki markup, you can always submit an article by email to crawford@palinet.org or pln.content@gmail.com.

The tale initiated here and continued here (hey, the WordPress paragraph-swallower strikes again!) continues, with an episode that won’t matter to most folks.
I’m continuing to use the notebook as my only PC. Haven’t done more downloading yet (because I really don’t need those applications yet). With one enormous exception, everything’s been going fine–the software works, it’s snappy, I prefer Vista, etc.

The enormous exception only involves one application–but that’s the application that, other than Firefox, matters most to me. Namely, Word 2007 was taking forever to close files, move between open files, and shut down–”forever” being anywhere from seven to ten seconds or more. (And 5-7 seconds to open a file.) Taking more than a second to switch between multiple open files is simply not acceptable; if I’d had that situation with Word 2000, I never would have done the blog investigations (they basically require two open files at all time, switching back and forth frequently, in addition to Excel and Firefox windows).

The open web to the rescue. Turns out it’s my fault (sort of), and probably won’t affect many of you. I’d reinstalled Acrobat 7–knowing that I’d probably need to move to 8 (there’s no way that 7 will recognize .docx) eventually, but that 7 might do in the meantime.

And Acrobat 7 installed a COM addin into Word 2007, even though it couldn’t actually work.

And that COM addin was the culprit–I’m not sure why, but it was adding absurd amounts of overhead to any file-change operation.

Here’s the thing: I don’t even need Acrobat to produce PDFs directly from Word: Microsoft’s free download to add PDF save-as capability to Office 2007 works beautifully. It seems to offer the same flexibility as the old Acrobat toolbar, it’s a lot faster than the old Acrobat/Distiller combination, the output’s actually a little smaller than the old Distiller output, the bookmarks are there… It is, in short, a better tool, fully integrated into Word (and the other Office 2007 applications). And, to be sure, it’s free.

Where I will need Acrobat: To produce the book version of Volume 8 (which requires combining multiple PDFs)–and probably to produce the book my wife is working on (which also seems likely to require combining multiple PDFs). So eventually I’ll pay the $99 or so for an upgrade to Acrobat 8 anyway.

For now? I uninstalled Acrobat 7. The problem went away. It still takes a little while to open a file (longer if it’s still in .doc format), but “a while” is a second or two. Closing a file: Instantaneous. Switching between open files: Instantaneous. Closing Word: Instantaneous. As it should be.

(Why doesn’t Adobe offer a way to let you back out plugins without removing the whole application? That would be too easy…)

There’s the advice, if Word 2007 seems sluggish in certain ways: Check for add-ins (the start/Office button, “Word Options” in the lower right-hand corner, Add-ins on the Options pane). Disable any that you don’t need–especially COM add-ins.

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Now here’s another one that will affect almost nobody else, I suspect.

When I tried out Word 2007 by opening the the current issue of Cites & Insights (in .doc) form, it came out a little longer–taking up just a little of a 37th page. OK, so the spacing’s a little different. Turns out that I only had to compress one paragraph by 0.1 points to fix that.

But: When I convert any of the Cites & Insights issues to .docx–taking Word out of “compatibility mode”–the resulting documents are a little shorter than they were (and a lot smaller on the disk–a known change). Not a lot shorter, but C&I 8:1 has about a quarter of an empty column on page 30. (So that’s about 0.25% change, but it’s never that simple.) Looking at a page or two, it appears that Word 2007 does a slightly better kerning job than Word 2000–or maybe it’s got a better hyphenation dictionary. Maybe both.

Again, this only affects me when it comes time to do a book version of volume 8, and the changes are so small that I suspect I won’t bother trying to make pages match up exactly. I certainly approve of tighter kerning and better hyphenation. (I’m also seeing better grammar suggestions and a general move to preferring close style–that is, combining two words without a hyphen when that’s sensible.)
Oh, and have I already said how clear it is that dual displays will improve my productivity–e.g., when I’m marking up a PLN page, assembling a page from blogs, working on a C&I essay that’s partly derived from blogs, and especially if I do any more blog investigations? Even yesterday, adding another movie to a 50-pack file, being able to have the full IMDB page for a movie open while also having a good-size Word window open made life easier…

For a few of you, pardon the duplicate posts: I’m going to try reposting PLN Highlights posts here–typically once a week, but I may repost the first few of them. Why? To remind you that the PALINET Leadership Network exists and that we’re adding new resources all the time.

Note that you must have a PLN account to view some of these articles–and it only takes a minute or two to set up a free account.

This post appeared on February 19, 2008:

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What’s new at PALINET Leadership Network?

• In New leadership for new challenges, Frank Hermes reports on the OCLC Symposium at ALA Midwinter 2008.

• In “Hey boss, I want your job!”, Jamie LaRue talks to his staff about their desires for the next few years.

• In What can organizational structure do for user-centered change? Ryan Deschamps expects libraries to become flatter organizations–and points out some advantages of hierarchical structures that could be lost in the process.

• Finally, Ryan Deschamps argues that user-centric libraries must also be librarian-centric; in Users or customers: internal and external, Michael Casey agrees and discusses the need to treat “internal customers” (staff at all levels) well if you’re going to succeed in treating “external customers” (patrons, users) well.

Take a look. Add your own responses. Try out the PLN forums!

Update: The migration to the new Vista notebook is going surprisingly well–well enough that I’m using it (with a dual-screen setup) as my working system while finding remaining issues. “Easy Transfer” got pretty much all the files and settings–with the singular exception of Firefox bookmarks (an easy manual transfer).

I’m now in the process of unlearning/relearning some advanced Word things (I knew that would be necessary). I’m a heavy template user, and Word2007 (Office2007 in general) sensibly treats sets of style definitions as, well, sets of style definitions–which can be part of themes and templates but can also be separate. You can switch a set of styles in an existing document. In Word2000, the only way to do that was to switch templates (which, as far as I can see, you can’t do in 2007). So in 2007, a template really is a template: A full document design for you to add text to. Separating themes (which, so far, I don’t quite grok) and style sets makes good sense, and it’s easy to save new style sets from old templates–once I figured that out (which took a while). This fits the general theme I’ve heard from Office2007 reviewers: Different and with a learning curve, but ultimately more logical and with more useful features made visible when they’re useful.
Other than an occasional startup switching the right-left placement of the primary and secondary display (now that I realize that’s a possibility, I won’t think my cursor’s simply stranded), it’s going pretty well. I have no desire to drop back to XP, and certainly no desire to drop back to Office 2000. Or, for that matter, to return the notebook: Time to send in the rebate form.

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Promotion: Want to encourage long life and robust content for C&I? One way to help is by telling other people about it; another is to buy Cites & Insights Books.

Want to encourage library leadership in yourself and others? One way to help is to join the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN), where you’ll find a growing range of varied content. You’re encouraged to add your own relevant comments and participate in the forums.

A few weeks ago, I posted this request.

I got some good advice. I did some looking. I wasn’t convinced I’d found an answer. I was reminded of why I shop at Fry’s reluctantly and why I’m even more reluctant to shop at the big-box electronics chains (but really like our neighborhood Office Depot).

Looking at that post again, I can see that I ruled out an obvious choice–but my wife, who’s the smart person in the household and didn’t read the post, offered that obvious choice. To wit, she redefined the problem:

“You want a quiet computer? Why not buy a notebook?”

Consider the reasons I gave in the post for requiring a desktop and expansion slots:

• I wanted to keep using my wonderful wireless MS Natural Keyboard and mouse.

Hmm. Funny thing about connecting keyboard/mouse combos through a USB port: On any properly-built notebook, it adds them to what’s already built in.

• I wanted to go to a dual-screen system, sooner or later, which with most inexpensive desktops (might?) (would?) require adding a dual-head graphics card.

Hmm. Most contemporary notebooks have VGA ports–and at least with Windows Vista, the ability to define the internal screen and an external display as a two-screen system (as opposed to showing the same image on both) is supported at the OS level.

I also said I wanted at least 2GB RAM (the minimum for high-quality Vista Premium operations) and that I’d really prefer 3–and that I wanted at least 400GB disk space.

My wife really didn’t know about that last requirement–and when I thought about it, I had no idea why I wanted so much disk space. After all, in 5 years and 7 months, I’ve barely managed to fill half of my old computer’s 80GB drive, and the bulk of “my” files are 320K MP3s of my entire CD collection. And, you know, if I did start to do something requiring lots of storage space–well, external drives are really cheap and getting cheaper. Chances are, if I needed another (say) quarter-gig quarter-terabyte a year from now, it would cost less than $100 even as an external drive (that may be true now, for all I know).

So I broadened my search–and raised the price point to “around $800.”

That did the trick. While this is typed on my old computer, I’d guess I’ll finish shutting down that computer within the next week. Office Depot introduced a new “store-exclusive” notebook last week and, for some reason, chose to offer a $150 rebate up front, bringing the already-reasonable $850 down to $700–for a notebook with 15.4″ screen, Core 2 dual-core CPU (1.67GHz, but that’s fast enough, I think), the usual Intel integrated graphics–fine for the kind of work I usually do, 3GB 667MHz RAM, and 250GB disk.

And enough USB ports (3), a built-in webcam (dunno if I’ll ever use that, but it works just fine), 802.11 a/b/g/draft n (but I’ll be using it as a pseudodesktop, so the ethernet port is more important, since it’s one foot from our router/wifi/DSL modem)… Oh, and a startling garnet case. It weighs about 6 lbs., but this isn’t what I’d use on the road anyway.

Took it home to test the three critical factors: Was it quiet? Would it drive my desktop display as a second workspace? Would it recognize the wireless keyboard and mouse? Yes, yes, yes. I still have 12 days to return it–but since I’m just finishing the “easy transfer” of files and settings (21GB worth, and it seems to have picked up pretty much everything except Firefox bookmarks, which was an easy catch), it’s pretty certain I won’t be returning it.

Definitely not a technolust notebook–the CPU’s contemporary Intel technology (Core 2 Duo) but near the bottom of that range (1.67GHz), it would be a terrible gaming system, the display’s just fine but not quite as good as my wife’s Toshiba. But a technolust notebook would definitely be in the four-digit range, and the fact that I’m only anxious to replace this aging beast because Friday-afternoon virus/spyware scans slow everything else down so much suggests that I don’t need a high-end notebook.

I did a little due diligence: I tried putting together a comparable configuration at Dell and looked for closest Toshiba and HP models. A comparable Dell system would run around $1,100, as near as I could tell; same for the others. So, well, here’s another cow box. I guess that’s really Acer these days, and that’s OK with me.

Now comes the fun part: Checking everything that matters, so I don’t get rid of the old machine too soon. As soon as that’s done, I’ll have an odd dual-screen system (1280×1024 on one side, 1280×800 with considerably smaller pixels on the other) that should be highly productive and suit me just fine.

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Updated to change “quarter-gig” to “quarter-terabyte,” since that’s what I meant. Working at two computers simultaneously = the worst form of multitasking. Instant confusion.

And, just checking, I see that even relatively pricey chains do, in fact, already sell name-brand 250GB external 7200RPM drives for (just) under $100–but they also sell 500GB name-brand external 7200RPM drives for $110 to $150. So much for keeping up with the continued price efficiencies of that obsolete electromechanical device, the hard disk.

Interesting. I originally planned to publish the centenary issue of Cites & Insights toward the very end of February. Then, with all the copy ready, I moved that up to February 19 or so. Then, Friday, when I’d double-checked the draft printed version twice, after doing all the editing and copyfitting, I said “Oh, what the hey,” and published it right around 6 p.m. on Friday.

Including Perspective: Tracking High-Def Discs, in which I finally offered as firm a projection as I’ve ever offered:

• That the format war might very well end this year, although there was also a chance it wouldn’t.
• That the most probable outcome was Blu-ray as the sole commercially-viable high-def disc format, with that happening “sometime in 2009 or possibly late 2008.”

Good thing I published it Friday night. I was way too cautious (I don’t claim to be a futurist or to have any inside knowledge), but at least I got the right direction.

It’s not entirely official yet, but apparently Toshiba isn’t quite as “stubborn and profitable” as I thought–or at least not as stubborn. It’s been reported, and apparently confirmed by a company official (although not a named one), that Toshiba’s pulling the plug on HD DVD in the very near future. (At a loss of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars: If you believe some observers, Toshiba’s been losing money on every player it sells, and one can only assume that Toshiba forked over a big chunk of the $150 million that helped Paramount & Dreamworks to say they’d only release HD DVD versions, a decision you can expect to see reversed in a few weeks or months.) Understand: I like Toshiba. My wife is delighted with her Toshiba Satellite notebook; the only real flaw (a tendency to drop WiFi once in a while when running on battery) is a Windows Vista power-management defect, not a Toshiba defect.

So maybe “sometime in 2009 or possibly late 2008″ becomes “in the first half of 2008″–although there’s a second part to that probable outcome: “Blu-ray as the sole commercially-viable high-def disc format.” Whether that will be true in the first half of 2008, or any time, probably depends on your definition of commercial viability.

No, I don’t buy Wired’s latest (and wholly predictable) note that it doesn’t matter because it’s all going to be downloads. As I imply in the Perspective, true high-def downloads aren’t really practical on a mass scale–and in any case a lot of us actually like to own some of the movies and programs we expect to watch more than once.

It seems highly probable that Blu-ray will be a total market (combining players, drives and discs) in the hundreds of millions of dollars this year (actually, it may have been in 2007, depending on what percentage of PS3 sales you consider to be Blu-ray sales). I think that counts as commercially viable, although still a relatively small percentage of overall video disc and player sales.

So: I was too cautious–but at least I got it right (and I’d been saying since the get-go that Blu-ray had the edge.)

Oh…and yes, I know it’s “Samsung” not “Samsong.” Even reading in print, twice, I still manage to miss at least one typo in every C&I. Such is life.

Cites & Insights 8:3 (March 2008) is now available.

This is the centenary issue–#100–a nice round number that I’m a little surprised to have achieved. Naturally, that milestone affects the issue–but not as you might expect.

The issue’s long–36 pages–and PDF as usual, although all but the last section (My Back Pages, always exclusively PDF) are also available in HTML form from the home page.

This issue includes:

• 100 Reasons for Doing Cites & Insights - an introduction
• Trends & Quick Takes - ink costs, life without software, the significance of good sound and more: six trends, ten quicker takes.
• Perspective: Tracking High-Def Discs - including a prediction for the likely winner in the format war.
• Making it Work - the biggie: 19 pages devoted to aspects of making libraries better, including reading (reader’s advisory, slow reading, etc.), philosophy, hassles, balance, and “Library 2.0 debased.”
• Interesting & Peculiar Products - flashy labels, green PCs, supercheap laptops and more: 19 items in all.
• My Back Pages - 16 mini-perspectives, none of them terribly serious.

Ignore them, or at least most of them.

It was pointed out to me (indirectly) that, of the thousands of dead links to the old Cites & Insights site, some were under my control–that is, links in W.a.R. posts prior to July 2006.

So I’m fixing those links. I’m never quite sure what causes a post to look changed enough to trigger a feed. If these changes–which, with one minor exception, are nothing but URL changes–do that, then my apologies. I’m partway through, and will finish as soon as possible…

Sigh. At one point, C&I had a pagerank of seven (although I think Google’s generally adjusted pageranks downward). It’s at five now, and I wonder whether it will ever get back even to six, much less seven. Such is life on the open web.

---

Update: I’m done. I’m hoping that the URL changes were too minimal to cause new feeds, but I’m not sure. If not, my apologies: There are a lot of W.a.R. posts mentioning Cites & Insights (imagine that!).

Well, at least they’re cleaned up before the centenary Cites & Insights appears–which is likely to be this weekend or shortly thereafter.

Most blog spam attempts are pretty lame. LISHost’s server settings trap a lot of them, I think. My refusal to allow pings/linkbacks gets rid of many more. Setting a limit of six months for comments (unless a thread is active) helps–spammers are mostly out to improve their own pageranks, so they try to hide spam comments on very old posts that nobody looks at any more.

For the rest, there’s Spam Karma 2, which continues to do great work. As far as I can tell, no more than about one spamment (spam comment) makes it through to the blog itself every month, maybe not that many–and I rescue legitimate comments from the spam list about as often (maybe once a month–usually for having too many links). That means I do still check the Spam Karma logs, typically 20 to 40 a day.

I’m particularly amused by spam comments that try to disguise themselves as real comments, by referring directly to the topic of the post. That’s pretty transparent with most attempts here, because my post titles are, how shall we say it, not direct subject headings by any means. (”Obscure” and “peculiar” will do equally well.) So you get some, well, really strange comments–most of which get trapped for the usual reasons anyway (blacklist matches, “Flash Gordon was here” [comment completed faster than any human could type], etc.)

I saved a few over the last six days to give you a flavor. I won’t cite the commenter’s “name” (frequently not a name at all) and certainly not the URL… After looking at these, I’m almost pleased to see the blatant ones that start “Your post about X,” where X is the topic of the link URL and has nothing to do with the post. Where it might not be clear, I put the post title (or the portion they quote) in bold, noting that sometimes it’s the last portion of the title–apparently following something like an apostrophe or ampersand–that gets used. Anyway:

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And, for something entirely different, submitted to Present at the Big Bang?

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And, to be sure, if you see comments! like! these! on other blogs…now you have a clue as to how they got there.