More of the Day

Already?

The calendar may say February, but we've had warm weather and thunderstorms the last few days, and the air smells suspiciously of spring.

Fun Stuff

57
Found via a post at the Common Room.

Sense and Sensibility

My friend Ginger and I are reading Sense and Sensibility together - about two chapters a day. She plans to summarize chapters to help her remember them (narration?)

I've seen the movie with Emma Thompson (the guy who played Willoughby is her real-life husband) but never read the book. It's helping to fill in some things - such as why the dying father couldn't leave the house to his dependent wife and daughters. The property wasn't actually his to begin with. It had been left to his little boy when the little boy was a four-year-old who charmed and won the heart of the rich uncle, and he willed it to the little boy - and that little boy grew up to be the man with the stingy wife who pressures him to be less generous with the half-sisters and stepmother he promised his dying father he would care for.

I thought this was interesting about the youngest sister: 'Margaret, the other sister, was a good-humoured, well-disposed girl; but as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne's romance, without having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life.' I wonder whatever happened to Margaret?

The scene where Hugh Grant pretends not to know where the Nile River is in order to lure Margaret from her hiding place - that's not in the book.

Linux Progress

Edited: I've found a way to sync my Palm TX using a DOS-looking program called pilot-xfer! I have to type in a CI (command line interface) but I think I understand just enough to be able to copy or even copy/paste to install what I need.

I'm still working on the text editing end-of-line replace, but I'm certain that it can be done and it's just a matter of time until I learn how to do it. Thanks to Jon's comments, I'm coming closer to understanding. I need to unravel something called "regular expressions," and I've found that box in KWord.

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I said a few weeks ago that my New Year's resolution was to take the year learning enough about Linux to replace Windows, with a tentative goal of installing by spring.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 7.10 a few days ago and it's so much like Windows that it's not going to take a year to learn it. I'm already editing html pages and uploading them (I installed gFTP), listening to my favorite radio station (it actually seems to work better with less cutting out on Linux!), and doing just about everything I was doing before. I was already familiar with the browser (Firefox), word processor (OpenOffice) and photo editor (Gimp).

Just a couple of glitches - I'm having trouble getting new files, documents and programs loaded onto my Palm TX PDA, and I have yet to find a text editor or word processor that removes line breaks (although I found an online program that does that!) While testing different editors, I found a replacement for Notepad, which is what I mostly used in Windows. It's called Leafpad, it's super simple, no bells or whistles, and opens and works pretty fast. I still plan to find something like Total Recorder, and I haven't yet tried burning a CD, although the system should be ready to do that. I just haven't done it yet.

Installation was easier than Windows - you install one CD (and even that's a free download) and everything is right on the screen - you click for your language preference, time, and keyboard layout preference. And after the single CD is installed, you don't have to install a bunch of programs because it comes with OpenOffice, Gimp, media players, Firefox, almost everything, already installed as part of the system.

Did I mention that all of this is free? The only thing I've spent is what I used to buy a couple of Ubuntu for Dummies types of books, but, really, with the forums (I've seen three) and Wiki's and how-to pages, the books weren't necessary. They just helped to lay out the information in sequence.

Prince Caspian: Can Hollywood Be Restrained?

The article over at Hollywood Jesus talks about the problems of storytelling in a society used to instant gratification, and worries how Prince Caspian will be adapted.

I think the the article is spot-on. I'm looking forward to PC (despite its already-obvious deviance from the book) because I think it looks like a fun film in the swashbuckling fantasy vein. But I'm also kind of waiting to get past it so we can get to VDT, which I have hopes will be a more serious adaptation. Michael Apted (director, Amazing Grace) will be at the helm and the franchise should be established firmly enough by that time that they won't have to turn it into a summer money-maker. (Not that they won't, but I'm hoping.)

*sigh* Yes, I'm a cynic. It's hard not to be after seeing so many books butchered. The movies don't mean to murder them, but they so often succeed in completely missing the point.

Teething

Miss M is trying to get things straight. It was news to her that she used to put toys in her mouth when she was a baby and teething. We had to go through every one she knows: friend C chewed on toys when he was a baby, Daddy chewed on toys when he was a baby, Tim chewed on toys when he was a baby . . . she finally got it and added, "and when dragons are babies, they chew on people's heads!"

No More Windows

I've taken the plunge and installed Linux Ubuntu. I didn't even partition my drive so I could fall back on Windows if I run into a software I can't install - I erased my whole hard drive and started over installing just Ubuntu.

So far so good. Mostly, it's as easy to set up, configure, install things as Windows. It recognized my printer and internet automatically (easier than WinXP). My main concern was that I wasn't sure I'd be able to listen to my beloved WDAV classical streaming MP3 station, but I installed the "codec" that allows the computer to read MP3 files (a copyrighted format) and it works - I'm listening now!

And blogging is apparently no problem.

I Need a Vacation

I need a ticket to Narnia. That's what I think every time I hear Roar of Love by Second Chapter of Acts.



I don't know of any music that so captures any story or place - I think this CD is even more effective than any of the movie variations. I can't believe that every time I see this CD brought up, all anybody can say about it is, "It's really dated."

I wish they had used the song Roar of Love as the ending credit song when they made the Narnia movie. It would have been a nice nod to this effort, and provide a sense of continuity - that this story isn't just for our time, but has affected people in the past, too. The datedness would have communicated that perfectly as the movie closed.

Connecting the Dots

"...The things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. ...This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately."
- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter IV: The Ethics of Elfland

"To us a man's character is that which is peculiarly his own; it distinguishes each one from the rest. To the Greeks it was a man's share in the qualities all men partake of; it united each one to the rest. We are interested in people's special characteristics, the things in this or that person which are different from the general. The Greeks, on the contrary, thought what was important in a man were precisely the qualities he shared with all mankind."
- Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way, Chapter XVI: The Way of the Greeks

(Both excellent books, by the way.)