Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[From fairly deep in a thread that started with the usual (disproven) "being polite is always more effective" claim and went on to what people deserve/should expect.] "When you are intolerably rude to others, accept that you have no protection from those others being intolerably rude to you. Racism presented in courteous tones is not, and can never be, courteous." -- zoeiona, 2009-08-14

Last night on I-95, I passed a flatbed truck carrying two ambulances and an SUV. (I guess those big, boxy mobile-intensive-care ambulances don't fit well on a usual deliver-a-bunch-of-cars-to-dealers truck, huh?) Alas, no photo.

Though that did remind me that someday I want to get a picture of one of those car-carrier trucks filled completely with police cars. That has to happen every so often, right?

The spreadsheet part of AppleWorks is surprisingly lacking in features I'd grown accustomed to in 1-2-3, Symphony, and Excel. I've been surprised over and over by what it does not do, and UI quirks that make it more effort to use the things that it does do. Time to clear off enough disk space to install OpenOffice like I'd planned. (I'll need to install Dia as well, since the drawing tool doesn't quite do what I want either. I haven't tried the word processor yet -- though I used to use word processors constantly, and could make Word Perfect 4.2 sit up, beg, jump through hoops of fire, extinguish the hoops of fire, move the hoops to another room, relight them, and do it all again[1], in the past several years I've just used text editors (mostly vi), only ever opening a word proccessor app to read a document someone sent me in a wp file format. Every so often I notice how long it's been since I used a class of tool that I used to rely on every day, and it strikes me as kinda funny.)

A not-trying-to-be-entertaining quote about the current kerfuffle in fandom, but one that provides some perspective for rating the wankiness level of this failfest: N. Pepperell, who is not in fandom but got sent links to this mess regarding Ogas and Gaddam (because of teaching a Research Methods class, I presume, or maybe a colleague was just going "WTF?!" and had to share?), wrote (after comparing Drs. Ogas and Gaddam to the bank robber who thought rubbing lemon juice on his face would render him invisible to security cameras), "I'm not going to write my own critique of this mess: the community has already done this, eloquently, thoroughly - and, given the circumstances, with admirable patience. I am always warning my students when I teach research methods that something like this can happen - that this is why I'm so harsh on their research designs. Welcome to my new case study. I'm serious. I'm thinking of assigning parts of this trainwreck when I teach research methods next term." And a little later, in response to a comment: "There were plenty of people in the original discussion with scholarship and expertise in the field - including people with qualifications in psychology, the biological sciences, and neuroscience whose expertise is far more on the mark than mine. The reason I piled on as well was because there had been some suggestion that this mass of well-thought-out critiques could somehow be dismissed as some kind of overreaction of fandom to outsiders or academics as such. I figured the one thing I could add was that the folks who were saying that they were angry as academics were having an absolutely plausible reaction: anyone looking in with any sort of interactive research training would react critically to this."

Ears especially sensitive today. Though not as bad as much of yesterday afternoon or late last night, I'm definitely hating the ice-cream truck from an even greater distance than I usually do. (I think it's three or four blocks away ... no, no, it's circling around again, damn it.)

[1] Okay, an MS-DOS batch file, a WP Program Editor macro, and two WP Macro Editor macros were involved as well, but I did make Word Perfect do stuff like that, and invoked it automatically from a dBase program. Pre-WYSIWYG Word Perfect was wonderful. (I never explored the WYSIWYG versions as deeply; I don't really know how wonderful or not they were, but they did what I needed them to do at the times when I used them and didn't get in my way (a recurring theme when I talk about tools), so I was happy.