Y’know, the word malaise is intrinsically cool. After all, can you think of any other word for discomfort or depression that, as Dave Barry pointed out in one of his books, sounds as if it should refer to a sandwich spread?

The only reason I mention this, incidentally, is that I managed to work the word into a college essay. (And no, it wasn’t used in any of the source materials, so there…)

OK, I’ve become a bit too accustomed to Windows XP.

I was using a Windows 98 machine earlier today, and admitted to myself that its Start button and menu look rather strange.

Have the Evil Empire assimilated my mind or something? 🙂

I came across this editorial from the Salt Lake Tribune a few days ago, and I just have to link to it here. (Thanks to the folks over at RinkWorks for bringing it to my attention…)

Don’t Blaim Me, Blaim The Copy Editurs

Another thing that irritates my compulsive proofreading sensibilities: when a translator can’t decide how to transliterate a name and spells it two different ways in the same sentence. Seriously… this happens a lot more than one would expect. Right now, for Great Books class, I’m reading the History of the Peloponnesian War, and I’ve noticed that translator Rex Warner apparently can’t decide how to spell either Cam[a|e]rina or Aristog[e]iton…

And the situation was even worse in our humanities textbooks last year. Oftentimes the authors would use the accepted classical spelling of a name in the text, but in the caption of a picture they would spell it using a modern transliteration; one example I remember was when “Polyclitus” was mentioned in the text, illustrated by a statue of “Polykleitos”. I can imagine how this might quite easily confuse some students…

While we’re on the subject of interface stupidities, here’s another one from the otherwise excellent freeware FTP client SmartFTP:

Here’s a screenshot of the Tools menu from SmartFTP. Quick quiz: What key do you press to get to the Settings dialogue once you’ve opened the menu? “S”, right? Nope. You have to hit the up arrow and then Enter, because the “S” shortcut also belongs to the Smart Update menu item, which happens to be listed first.

This can be quite aggravating even for us experienced users. I needed to adjust some FTP settings tonight (thanks to a really horrid connection) and kept hitting Alt+T+S, but the blasted update wizard kept coming up each time. For a few minutes I couldn’t quite work out what was going on, but eventually I happened to notice the mnemonic for “Smart Update”– and the rest is history…

So please, programmers, do not ever assign the same mnemonic to two menu items; even if you’ve got 26 items in a menu, you’ve still got numbers and punctuation left over to be used…

Just discovered a minor, but rather amusing, glitch in the Windows XP Explorer.

Y’know how in previous versions of Windows, Microsoft would often skirt the issue of subject-verb agreement in prompts by using parentheses? For instance, you’d often see such things as “5 file(s) found”, “1 user(s) connected”, and the like.

Well, Microsoft apparently thought those parentheses looked a little amateurish, and, well, I have to agree. Unfortunately, by removing them, they (inadvertently?) brought back the problem that those parentheses were intended to avoid. How so? Well, check out this screen shot to see what I mean.

It wouldn’t have been that hard to work in a kluge that substituted the appropriate form of the word, now, would it? I mean, I’ve even done it in simple programming projects…

All I can say is, I’m the one who objects, because this glitch really bytes. 🙂

Well, I admit it– I’m one of that (perhaps overzealously) geeky bunch who actually preordered a copy of Windows XP. And yes, I did read the reviews before I bought it; I didn’t want to waste $90 (the discounted academic price, of course ;-)) on something that I’d absolutely hate afterward, y’know.

And, well, I actually like it.

OK, before you Linux freaks shoot me, I will admit that it has certain shortcomings. Indeed, I dislike the little monopolistic nuances that show through in some parts of WinXP (most noticeably, the infamous Product Activation and those recurring prompts to register for a Passport account). But as an actual operating system, WinXP isn’t bad at all, and in many ways is well worth the price.

How so, you ask? Well, for one thing, it is a lot more stable than Win9x/ME, something to be expected since XP is based on the Windows NT kernel. That’s the thing that most reviewers laud about it– if you’re sick of Blue Screens of Death, you’d probably be quite well off upgrading. (I remember that when I used Win98, I got a BSoD simply by disconnecting my Pocket PC’s docking bay; now, I can actually move the computer away from my desk without having to restart it!) Since Friday, I’ve only had one major incident in which a program crash ended up bringing down the entire computer– and that was an old DOS-based program which tried to use a video mode my laptop’s display can’t handle.

And then there’s ClearType font smoothing. If you use a laptop display, you’re going to love this; even if you’re using a regular old CRT, it should make text quite a bit more readable. Jagged edges– who needs ’em?

There are plenty of other enhancements, including the reorganized Start menu (which actually seems quite logical in its design), the new task-based folder views (which I love), and the revamped Luna interface (which I’m pretty much ambivalent about), but they’re not really worthy of devoting an entire blog post to, and besides, they’ve been covered in numerous other reviews anyway, heh.

As for the bad aspects of WinXP? Well, you’ve all heard the deal about Product Activation by now; if you recall, I even blogged about it several months before XP was released. Don’t get me wrong; the process of activation is actually quite easy, especially if you’ve got an Internet connection– it’s just that I wonder what Microsoft will do when XP is no longer supported. There’s also the aforementioned MSN Passport integration, which I’m not all too keen about, as well as the general promotion of other services from Microsoft and its business allies throughout the operating system; thankfully, unlike activation, you can at least find ways to circumvent these if you know your way around Windows fairly well.

My rating? Eh, I’d say 8 out of 10. The stability and interface improvements are what bring it such a high rating, and I’d even go so far as to say that it’s one of the best operating systems MS has put out– but still, some parts of the interface just strengthen my concerns about Microsoft’s business practices…

Oh. And here’s a screenshot of my Windows XP desktop. (Yes, I’ve obscured both my username and my AIM list; OK, I admit it, I’m paranoid…)

And also, I found a rather minor bug, but it’s still worth noting because I’m a fontaholic and because I’ve some obsessive-compulsive tendencies: Where’s the zero in the font preview character set?

Why does everyone act as if driving is so easy?

I mean, really, anyone who says such a thing isn’t really thinking about it. Not only do you have to be extremely adept at maneuvering the car and have extremely fast reflexes in case anything goes wrong, you must also be highly observant, able to notice the most seemingly insignificant things on the road, in order to succeed. And you must be able to do all these things at once.

And not only that, you must also have a “feel” for the road, so to speak. You need to be able to intuitively tell what speed you’re going (and, for that matter, whether it’s appropriate for the road you’re on). You should also be able to quickly identify where you are in relation to the road, preferably without even looking down at the front of the car to verify. You must be able to glance in many directions within a short span of time– through the windshield, toward the rear-view mirrors, down at the speedometer for a second, and let’s not forget those infamous blind spots–just to successfully carry out the most mundane maneuvers such as turning and merging.

Then there are all the rules you’ve got to keep straight in your mind as you do these myriad things. You can turn right at a red light, but not left— both of these cases, of course, having certain exceptions clearly marked on signs. And in the case of some red lights with special turn lanes, there’s no need to stop at all when turning. Then there’s the confusion involving who has the right of way at a 3-way or 4-way stop sign or at certain configurations of traffic lights; don’t even get me started there. And let’s not forget about those turn signals!

And these people say that driving is easy? I beg to differ…

A new classic video game font (is that an oxymoron?) posted on my fonts page: Manaspace, the font used throughout Squaresoft’s Secret of Mana.

If you’ve never heard of the legendary Portuguese-English phrasebook English as She is Spoke, I urge you to follow the link and read some selected excerpts that have been posted on the web. Seriously, this phrasebook was to the 1880s what Zero Wing was to the 1990s. Or at least “this is that I have think” about it, anyway; “how do you can it to deny?”