Free Software: Cataloging Your Books the Easy Way
June 26th, 2008 by scott
Libra (www.getlibra.com) XP and Vista
If you’ve ever tried to catalog you book collection on your computer, chances are you’ve installed a program to help you do it, then quickly got tired of entering the information about each of your books. It takes a lot of time and, although it’s probably as good as any other task at helping you put off doing any actual writing, it’s really pretty boring.
I just discovered a free app that makes it easy. All you do is enter the bar code or ISBN number of a book (or CD, or movie, or game) and Libra scans online databases (mostly various Amazon sites, but you can point it to other sites) and pulls in the book’s cover and whatever information about the book it finds. This is much easier than typing it all in yourself.
To make it even easier, you can use a Web cam to scan the bar code to make entering your books even easier. I haven’t tried it myself, and a few people have reported problems on the Libra forums, but others claim it works great. It apparently depends on the type of Web cam you use. And if you happen to have a bar code scanner, it’ll work too.
If a book isn’t found, you can still enter the information manually. This is especially important for books that are too old to have bar codes or ISBN numbers. You can then scan or take a digital picture of the book’s cover to replace the boring generic book cover Libra uses when it can’t find a cover.
But easy entry is just the beginning.
You can track books that you’ve loaned to others, export your library to a spreadsheet or Web file, and add your own notes to the book’s info. The Web site says you can even create and print an attractive catalog of your collection. Supposedly, you can also set up the program to open a copy of items that are stored on your computer, such as e-books, music, or movies.
Your library is displayed face out on a virtual bookshelf, making it easy to find. This looks pretty cool, but my one wish for this program so far is that I could also display my books in a simple text list. Of course, I can export my database to a spreadsheet, but it would be nice to toggle between the bookshelf view and a list view.
So, if you want an easy way to catalog your media, give Libra a try. Oh, and you can ignore the one comment on the download page that claims that Libra contains spyware. It doesn’t.
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What a Game!
June 18th, 2008 by scott
Last night the family and I celebrated Michael Collins Day by going to the season opener for our local Pioneer League (lowest level of the minor leagues) baseball team. It seems appropriate for Michael Collins Day. All of the kids on these teams have to a very real extent dedicated their lives to becoming professional baseball players, and they made it, but only a few will achieve the ultimate goal of playing in the Major Leagues.
Now, I’ve been to countless baseball games in my lifetime. few things are as much fun as going to a ballpark, whether it’s to see children play, or a minor league game at any level of the system, or one of the Grand Cathedrals of the majors. But I’ve never had as much fun at a game as last night. It was an exciting game, with extras.
First of all, my local team was playing their in-state rivals, who also happen to be my brother’s home team, so the rivalry adds a little more fun. And, like I said, it was the season opener, so that adds a little more excitement, both on the field and in the seats.
But that wasn’t all. Baseball games can be a little dull, but not this one.
I should mention that during the game, fans were encouraged to take pictures of the game and the people watching and send them to the team. The best pictures would be displayed on the scoreboard at the start of the eighth inning. The joys of camera phones. The eighth rolled around, and several of the pictures we had taken of our family were shown, adding a little extra fun and vanity to the game. Here are a couple of them:
The Local Guyz were down 3-0 at one point, despite threating to score all through the game. Then, it was 3-2, and in the eight inning, the Localz tied the game. That put it into extra innings. For those of you who are less familiar with the game, especially my dear international readers, a baseball game is normally nine innings, but goes longer if the score is tied. In the 11th Inning, the vile-enemies-of-all-that-is-good scored two, so things looked dire for the home team. But then the other team’s pitcher hit the first two batters who came up for God’s Team, and the next guy singled. Bases loaded with no outs. In an excruciatingly exciting inning, the Home Team scored two but couldn’t get that last run they needed for the victory. The spirit of Michael Collins was obviously hanging around.
The next inning was scoreless, thanks to a spectacular diving catch by the Enemies third baseman that ended a rally by the Localz and kept the winning run from scoring. That took us to the 13th inning. This is when things got really crazy.
The visitors came up in their half of the inning and were stymied by the locals. During their inning, a wind came up, blowing “cotton” from the local cottonwood trees through the stadium like snow. Considering that it was almost 90 degrees when the game started, seeing something like snow blowing through the ballpark was a surprise and was almost magical. Could have been faeries, for all I know.
Then, almost immediately after the third out, the lights went out in the stadium. I mean, it went completely dark. I don’t know if it was caused by the wind, the faeries, or if the lights were just set to go off at a certain time because the game wasn’t expected to go so long, but the lights were gone.
You can’t play baseball in the dark. Oh, sure, as kids we used to try to keep the game going as long as we could, but at a certain point we had to admit that the night beat us and go home, usually when siblings started showing up at the field to tell us that our moms or dads said we had to get home “this instant.” It was usually “this instant.” Like that’s even possible.
To add to the night’s surprises, sitting there in the dark, we started to feel water. A light rain had come out of nowhere and snuck up on us in the dark. (Yeah, I know the word is “sneaked” but that rain snuck if anything has ever snucked.)
Anyway, being opening night, a fireworks show was planned for the end of the game. Since it was dark anyway and it would take some time to get the lights charged back up, they went ahead with the fireworks show before the game was even over. I’ve never seen that before. Neither have you, I’ll wager.
After a nice fireworks display, the lights were still not on. Most of the remaining spectators (there were over 4200 at the game, but many had already left because it was getting so late) left after the fireworks. Can’t blame them. Midnight was quickly approaching and the stadium announcer said it would be another 15 to 20 minutes before the lights were all the way back up.
But no way were we leaving. The game had been too exciting. We’d sat and cheered through too much to not see how it ended. We’d been there so long by that time the it was no longer a game. It was a lifestyle.
Two quick outs convinced us that the game was probably going to last forever. Then two guys got on. A two-out drive to right-center knocked in the winning run. After more than four and a half hours of exciting baseball that could have gone to either team, the game was over, and the Good Guyz had won.
It was a great night. Today we’re all exhausted and bleary-eyed, but it was worth it. Our first baseball game means summer is officially here.
If that game was any indication, it’s going to be a great summer.
Michael Collins Day
June 17th, 2008 by scott
I’ve been watching several shows on TV lately about the space program, and remembering how exciting those days were to this little kid. Like everybody else my age, I wanted to be an astronaut.
But one thing strikes me again and again.
Imagine focusing your whole life on a trip to Disneyland. It’s all you’ve ever wanted to do and all of your life and career choices are built around one day walking through those magical gates. Finally, after years of preparation, you pile your family in the car and drive them all the way across country. Then, when you get there, you have to stay in the car and drive around the outside of the park while your entire family is inside, riding the rides you worked so hard to experience.
Sure, it was your expertise that got them there, and your expertise that will get them home. But all you can do is drive around and look at the Matterhorn from a distance and know the family is out there somewhere. You know you were as important as anyone to the trip, and nobody could have gotten there without you. But still, you are orbiting the park and they are inside, exploring Tomorrowland.
No matter how positive a face Michael Collins has put on it over the years, and no matter how true it is that he was as much a part of the Apollo 11 mission as Armstrong and Aldrin, and no matter how much credit he should get for his part, there have to be moments when he feels like he made it to Disneyland but couldn’t go in.
Major General Collins is a true-life hero and he knows it and everybody knows it. But still.
So I declare today Michael Collins Day, and dedicate it to everybody who has worked hard to achieve their goals and who maybe fell a little short through no fault of their own, but in doing so made it possible for others to expand the limits.
And you know what? I’d give almost everything to have been able to do what he did.
So Happy Michael Collins Day!
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Now playing: Alan Parsons Project - Don’t Answer Me
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Body Language
June 11th, 2008 by scott
I’ve looked into a couple of words recently, and wanted to share my findings. The words are related, so I’ll cover them both in one post.
Today’s words, friends, are: finger and booger. I don’t think I need to dig into the relationship.
Finger
Finger interests me because it’s the same word in German and English. In German, the verb for to catch is fangen, with fing being a common form, so it’s obvious that a finger is a thing that catches. That makes perfect sense.
But what happened in English?
Obviously, the word finger has a history in English that is very similar to it’s close German cousin. Cognates don’t happen by accident, and finger isn’t the type of word to be borrowed from another language. In fact, if you look at the history of body part names, you often discover that the word is either a medical term or describes the part’s function. A finger is a very practical thing, so the function definition makes sense.
But finger and catch are about as dissimilar as two words can be. They are obviously not related. In English, this is not unusual. Turns out that catch shows up in Middle English in the 13th Century, as cacchen. This is well after the Norman invasion, and the word comes from the Anglo-French cacher (also chacer or chacer), to hunt, a word that comes from the Vulgar Latin word captiare. The words, catch, capture, and chase are all related.
So finger must go back farther, and come from a Germanic root, like it’s German cousin. And it does. In Old English, the verb fōn meant to seize. A finger is a seizer and, as it turns out, is related to a fang. This makes perfect sense when you think about it.
So what is a common thing to seize with a finger? This brings me to:
Booger
I wanted to know more about the word booger because it appears to be a slang word that has completely replaced the actual term. I wanted to know the non-slang word for booger. So I started looking.
In one unreliable source, somebody claimed that the medical term for booger is rhinolith, literally nose stone. This was promising and got my hopes up, but it turns out to be untrue. A person with rhinoliths is an unfortunate soul who has painful stones in his or her nose, not unlike gall stones or kidney stones. This is apparently a miserable condition, and one I’d rather not have. It’s rare, fortunately, and can cause all sorts of trouble, from nasal obstructions to headaches and sinusitis. It’s icky enough, but not a booger.
To my eternal disappointment, I discovered that the medical term for what we know as a booger is dried nasal mucus. That’s it. It’s not even a word. It’s a definition. There is no non-slang word, only a phrase. What’s worse, the best boogers aren’t even dry. They’re gooey and stretchy.
Booger is the American form of the British bogey or bogie. I couldn’t find definite confirmation, but I suspect that bogey is related to bog. It’s not hard to see how a booger might be related to swampy, wet, spongy, ground. So booger has an apparent etymology and is exactly what it is.
I say we start a movement to make medical science accept the word booger as an official term. If they want to define it as dried nasal mucus, that’s fine with me. We all need to compromise now and then. But it’s a pretty sucky definition. You’d think all of those years of medical study would have turned out a word and a better definition. But nooooo.
But what do doctors know, anyway? Obviously nothing about boogers.
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Now playing: Jan & Dean - Tell ‘Em I’m Surfin’
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Time
June 11th, 2008 by scott
I didn’t mean to skip the whole month of May in this blog. I’m hanging my head in shame.
You know, when I started working at home, I expected to have a little more time for my fiction projects. I’ve been so busy with my freelance tech writing and editing (a good thing, when you consider that it’s how I make my living), that I’ve had trouble spending as much time as I should on my other writing. I usually manage several hours a week, but it’s not nearly as much time as I need, considering the states of my three projects.
How do you make time in your busy lives for writing? And are you like me? Do you feel like, no matter how much time you can devote to the writing, it’s never enough? Truth is, when I have managed a couple hours a day for several days in a row, I still don’t feel like it’s enough.
But I’m not going to whine about it. For a long time I’ve wished I could work at home, and I’m doing it for almost eight months. So far, I’ve been really busy. That’s a very good thing. And I am able to make time for the writing that I’d like to have eventually become the money train. And, even when I’m not working on my fictions, I’m still writing and making a living at it. In the time since I started working at home, I’ve completely rewritten one project, made good progress on my newest project, published two articles, and started a major rework of my first project (as an experiment, to see if it helps add some needed oomph to the story). So it’s not like I’m not working. It just never feels like enough.
All this is to say that the blog has been a little lower priority. I’ll try to remember to post more in the future. I have a list of things I want to post about, when I can get to them.
On a positive note, I finally have my business name, Write Field Documentation Services, LLC. Next up, when I find the time: a Web site, and maybe a tech writing blog.
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Now playing: Rolling Stones - Love Is Strong
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Free Software for Writers: Kana Launcher
April 25th, 2008 by scott
In my first Free Software post, I mentioned the mac-like RocketDock launcher as a way to start your favorite programs and open folders. It’s still one of my most-used utilities. It looks cool, and works great, and keeps my icons easy-to-find but out of the way. There’s no need to close windows and search through gobs of icons on the desktop to open frequently used goodies.
Now I’ve discovered another app, Kana Launcher, that is sure to help me in my quest to break free of the Start menu and desktop icons.
Kana Launcher might not look as cool as RocketDock, but it has some great features. Basically, you can set it up as a menu in the system tray or a pop-up menu (my choice). Either way, you can load it up with folders and programs–even Web sites–that you frequently access. Then, with a simple keystroke, you can make it pop up on your desktop, select the item you want, and send it back out of the way. There’s no need to stop what you’re doing, minimize windows to get to the desktop, and find your icons.
Cool. But why am I recommending it for writers?
Because of one particular feature: Group Start.
With Group Start, you can open multiple items at once. So, let’s say you have three files that you open when you’re working: your manuscript, your outline, and your notes. In addition to those, maybe you use a spreadsheet to track your time, word count, or whatever metrics you use. Normally, you have to open each of those files separately. With Kana Launcher, however, you can create a group and open all of those files at once, with one click. The program remembers where each item was on your desktop when you closed it, so if you like to arrange your windows in a specific way when you work, with one click you can open everything and have it right where you like it.
This might not sound like a huge deal, and it’s probably not, really. It won’t help you get over your writer’s block or get rid of your excessive adverbs. But what it does is help you set up your work area so it’s exactly the way you want it. And you’ll save time by not having to find your files in the Start menu, on your desktop, or in Windows Explorer.
And I say anything that helps make your work environment more comfortable and more personal is a good thing.
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Is It Worth Writing?
April 23rd, 2008 by scott
In the early stages of a writing project, it’s often hard to know whether the thing is worth writing. That initial flurry of ideas is an instant high that makes you think it’s going to be the best story since The Iliad. Then you sit on it a while and the idea starts to cool and doubts set in. That’s often as far as a writer or wanna-be writer ever gets.
I’m in the early stages of a work, and have been for a long time. It’s an idea I first had about two and a half years ago, and I was really excited about it. The first sign that it’s worth working on came a year or so again when I started to get serious about planning it, and I discovered that I still liked the idea.
Then, slowly, I started to weave time for it in among my other projects. After a couple of false starts, it started to move. Good sign number two. I enjoy writing it. The bits I’ve shared with my critique group have been mostly well received.
True, one of my friends, after seeing nothing but my initial plot summary, declared it “my least favorite of your projects.” Believe it or not, that’s good sign number three. I trust her opinion, and she was a tremendous help with her reviews of early drafts of my first novel project. That her comment didn’t make me doubt the story or my ability to write it is another sign that this is something I need to work on.
But the kicker is, this project is hard. I don’t know whether it shows on paper, but this has been a hard project for me to work on. Not that the words don’t come or that it feels bad or anything like that. It’s hard because I have to stretch, and because some scenes scare me because I know that they’ll be difficult to write, either psychologically or otherwise.
For example, I’ve been dreading a scene that’s approaching fast, a scene that will be unlike anything I’ve ever written, and where the mental anguish my main character will go through is unlike anything I’ve ever felt. That scene is one of the reasons why much of my writing time has been spent on much-needed revisions of other projects.
I really think that struggling with this project for the reasons I have is further evidence that the thing is worth writing. I’ll have to stretch to pull it off.
Now, I don’t know whether the story will be any good. It feels good so far, but that means very little at this stage. If it’s hard for me to write, and I write it anyway, I’ll be a better writer for the effort, even if it turns out to be no good.
And that makes it worth writing.
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Now playing: Spider Murphy Gang (mit Wolfgang Ambros) - Skandal im Sperrbezirk (live)
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Shine On, You Crazy Diamond
March 26th, 2008 by scott
It’s been a long time since I’ve examined the history of a word in the blog (although I’ve done it plenty of times without writing about it.) So I thought today I’d examine the word shine and see if it has the relatives I suspect it has.
Shine comes from the Old English scínen and is a congate of the modern German scheinen and the Swedish skina, as well as similar words in other northern European languages. But where did it come from? How did it get into those languages?
I’ll put on my linguistic detective hat and see what I can find out. And you get to see my investigation in all its stream-of-consciousness glory. Aren’t you excited?
The Old English scínen has the same meanings as the modern shine. It meant to illuminate, be resplendent, flash–all the things you expect shine to mean. It also had an adjectival form, scínendlic, that corresponds exactly to the modern shiny. That’s no surprise. I expected to find that.
The related scinn is interesting. It’s a noun that, according to OEME meant “an extraordinary appearance, a deceptive appearance, illusion, a spectre, evil spirit, phantom; magical image.” It also meant skin.
So shine and skin are related. That’s interesting. The overall meaning has to do with light and appearance. That meaning of skin is interesting. It leads to other words, like shingle and shin. And in its German form, the noun Schein is used for official papers, such as paper money and driver’s licenses. It’s not hard to see the relationship between slips of paper and skin, especially if you look at the history of paper.
If we move forward into Middle English, we get even closer to the connection with German that I suspected. In Chaucer and other ME sources, you find the word scene. As in Old English, that sc- is pronounced like we say sh- in modern English.
In Middle English, scene could be used in a couple of ways. According to the University of Michigan’s Middle English dictionary, one meaning of scene is: “Of the sun, moon, a star, etc.: bright, shining, luminous; also fig.; also, as noun: the bright sun.”
Another definition is: “Of a person, esp. a lady: beautiful, fair, handsome; also used of a group of people; bright and ~; (b) as an epithet for a lady; the ~; (c) of Christ, the Virgin Mary, a supernatural being: beautiful, glorious; (d) of the human body or a part of it: beautiful, fair, handsome; (e) of a person or a group of people: illustrious, noble, excellent; (f) as noun: a beautiful person, esp. a fair lady; also, beautiful people.”
This puts us exactly into the territory I expected to end up in. The modern English shine is, then, a very close relative, in fact the same word (etymologically speaking) as the modern German schön.
So shine, sheen, skin, shingle and similar words come from the same root somewhere along the line, a word that has something to do with illuminating or shining forth which, due the metaphorical nature of languages, also came to mean something with a shining appearance, something beautiful. It’s not hard to figure out how it is related to another word that refers to something (hopefully) beautiful shining forth, sing (OE singan, to sing, chant, recite), especially since in olden days, people became illuminated by listening to somebody sing, chant, or recite. This root must be very old for it to have come into our cousin languages with pretty much identical meanings.
When seeking a common root word, none of the online dictionaries I checked went beyond Old English or Old German. I’d have to find this one on my own. I sought beyond Proto-European and went straight to Sanskrit, where the roots of many northern European words can be found.
I wasn’t disappointed. Hindunet.org has a list of Sanskrit verbs. Among them, I found s’cand, which means shine. Throughout the ages that led to the development of English and its cousins, the Sanskrit s’cand turned into scinan and its similar forms in the other languages, and gave us today’s shine.
This led beyond where I expected to wind up. That same Sanskrit root, which can also be written as cand because the s’ prefix can be dropped, led to the Latin candesco, which means “to begin to shine.” Candesco shares its root with other words like candidatas (candidate), candidus (shining white, fair, beautiful) and candela (a type of candle, often held in a candelabrum, or candlestick). It is also the root of candor, a shining whiteness or luster of character. And, of course, that root also gave us the English words chant and cant, in case you doubted the connection to sing earlier.
So look how rendundant this sentence is: I really appreciate my candidate’s candor about his having shingles; he is a shining candle.
There you go. That’s the skinny on the word shine. It’s beautiful. I hope you feel illuminated.
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Now playing: Harry Nilsson - The Moonbeam Song
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Ax me tomorrow
March 21st, 2008 by scott
It’s been hard to get to this blog for the last few weeks. I’ve been so swamped with work that I just don’t find the time.
But I read something last night, and I have to write a little about it.
I was reading “The Knight’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and I came across the word “axe,” meaning “ask.”
Now, you ask most Americans and they’ll tell you that axe (or ax) for ask is Ebonics, or black English. It’s not true, though. I mean, it is, and it isn’t. Ebonics speakers definitely say ax for ask. But so do some New Yorkers, and people who speak other variants of American English.
It’s actually very old. In fact, 100 years ago, Old English speakers used two acceptable words that meant the same thing as today’s ask: ascian and axian. Chaucer’s Middle English axe was just a modernization (for his time) of axian.
The -sk/-x thing also occurs in task and tax, as in, “That task really taxed me.” They used to be the same word, but have evolved into words with separate, but similar, meanings.
That’s one reason why reading Chaucer and his Middle English compatriots is so much fun. Every time I pick up one of those authors, I find some interesting little linguistic tidbit, like axe or German cognates. Maybe sometime I’ll write about how starve, spelled sterve in Chaucer but pronounced pretty much the same, is the same word as the German sterben (to die), and, in Chaucer’s day meant the same as the German word, and how it came to mean “to die of hunger.”
Some time when I have more time to play with words.
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Dammit
March 3rd, 2008 by scott
Ray Orrock, my first writing hero, the man who made me realize that a writer is something a guy could become, died this morning.
I’ve known he was sick for a little while, since his family shared the bad news with me, so I knew this time was coming. But today’s e-mail still took me by surprise.
I don’t want to say a lot in this post. There’s really not that much I can say. The first sentence kinda says it all. But I do want to say a little bit about Ray.
When I was a kid, first thing I did every morning was go out and get the Argus, the paper Ray Orrock wrote for. My first stop, at least during the summer, was the first page of the Sports section, to see how the Oakland A’s did. Baseball was paramount. Then, I went to Ray’s column and read it. Devoured it. The A’s score was news I had to have. Ray’s column was what I had to read. After reading it once, maybe twice, I went back to the sports page and checked the rest of the box scores.
In a lot of ways, Ray Orrock taught me how to write. He taught me how to look at the everyday things around me and find something wonderful and worth writing about. He taught me a lot about humor.
He taught me how to use a paragraph break.
He wasn’t alone, of course. I had great teachers, encouraging parents, and I read a lot. But when it came down to it, Ray’s daily writing lesson, a lesson I didn’t always realize I was getting, made him one of the most influential and enjoyable teachers I ever had, and I owe him a great deal.
But there’s something even more important. So often in this mixed-up world, we develop heroes only to learn that, no matter how much we admire their work, as people they are tremendous let-downs. Their work might be genius, but once you learn more about them, you realize there is nothing heroic about them. They just did good work.
That’s not how it was with Ray.
Since I wrote my tribute when he retired, I’ve heard from a few of his family members. They all say the same thing: he was their hero too. If a man can be a hero to his own family, then it doesn’t matter whether he was a brilliant writer or if he picked lettuce. That man is a hero. As his daughter Eileen said in her e-mail breaking the sad news to me, “He was our everything, and we’ll miss him.”
God bless you Ray Orrock, and your family too. You really are a hero.
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