Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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June 27, 2012Computer Hell
Just one of many small irritations that come with using a computer: When I am in Word writing a document, I have a bank of icons above the page: format, undo, redo, tables, columns, show, navigation, gallery… I do not even know what some of these are, and I never use any of them. But one icon is the most useful and necessary of all. In the 2008 version of Word it is called Toolbox, and it is where you go to choose the font: the face, the size, bold, italic, underline, allignment and spacing, all that good and useful stuff that everybody uses in word processing.
So why is the Toolbox, the most useful helper by far, way out on the right end of the icon bar, so that it is not even visible to click on unless I allow Word to cover more than half my screen, while all that other, much less useful stuff is always prominent?
Who designs this stuff?
Any computer user can make up a list of these foolish little inconsistencies and inconveniences. And every time you change computers or download the latest version of this or that, you get a new set of sillinesses; it’s as though there are no grownups in charge.
Novelist and screenwriter Delia Ephron published an amusing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (June 19) called “Upgrade Hell” about all this; in particular she mentioned a bit of software for screenwriters the latest version of which is so bad that older versions are selling at a premium second-hand. Similarly, I used to be pestered all the time with appeals to download Windows Media Player, about which one of my music chat-list friends wrote the other day:
WMP is a truly dire programme which has only got worse over the years. It's the only programme I know which will blithely download and display incorrect track information for a CD which has a *different* number of tracks, with *different* durations, from the one which WMP 'thinks' it is.
This morning I downloaded a piece of music and immediately received a receipt by email. These receipts and discount coupons and whatnot always take at least two pages when you print them out, which is a waste of paper, so I highlight them, paste them on a page of word and edit them. Today it won’t work. The printer icon shows a blank page, and prints a blank page (after you wait a couple of minutes for the machines to communicate at the speed of light). What has changed this morning? Who the hell knows?
But of course the programmers and innovators are all geeks and don’t want to hear any of this: they just don’t get it. For those of us who are not using spreadsheets or composing symphonies or making 3-D movies on our computers, the damned machine ought to be as easy to use as turning on a TV, but the geeks have never heard words like “intuitive” or “user friendly”.
A day or two ago a Pieter J. Huizinga from Rotterdam responded insultingly to Ephron in the Journal’s letters column:
She is representative of the 80% of computer users who are clueless but still decline to take a course, read the fine manual (RTFM) or use the help function. […] I have advice for Ms Ephron, “Use your keyboard.” That’s why it is placed there. For example, the command to get bold type has been Ctrl-B since MS Word 2.0, and still is.
If your geek friends knew how to do their jobs properly, Huizinga, we ordinary folk would not have to take a course or read a book in order to write a letter on a computer. Oh, and by the way, I am using Word, and Ctrl-B doesn’t work on my keyboard. I do “control B” and type my name: no bold. I highlight my name and do “control B”. No bold. Why doesn’t it work? It must be my fault. I’m using a Mac. I have the wrong keyboard. I’m not doing it right. The geeks will have a hundred excuses for problems they have created themselves. Why can’t I just have my Toolbox where I don’t have to search for it?
I am happily using ClickRepair to clean up my old LPs. First I dub a vinyl disc onto a CD, then I dump the CD into my iTunes, then I have to translate the Apple lossless files into something else so that I can drag and drop them in ClickRepair, which does not support M4A files, then translate them back again with all the ticks and pops from the old LP removed. I don’t really mind all this: ClickRepair is really more technology than I need, but what the hell, maybe someday I’ll learn more about it, and anyway the maker provides a manual of 56 pages that I can study if I want to. So I’m using Max to translate the M4a files to AIFC, which ClickRepair says it supports, and XLD to translate back again, to reduce the amount of screwing around I have to do. Max provides 40 (forty!) different file formats, include several varieties of WAV and several others; XLD provides no information at all that I can find, but I thought it was working. Then it was not. So I emailed XLD:
I thought I had XLD working, but now I don't. I want to convert AIFC music files to Apple lossless, or vice versa. Can that not be done? I can find no instructions nor a list of input or output files that are supported.
Back came this reply:
AIFC, not AIFF?
There are many subformats for AIFC. XLD uses libsndfile for reading AIFC, but not all subformats are supported.
I guess I’m supposed to know the difference between AIFC and AIFF is, and what a libsnfile is, but I’m sure I‘m not supposed to ask “How many subformats are there, and what is their purpose?” However, I deduce from this cryptic message that AIFF might work, so I make that switch in Max, and sure enough, XLD can translate that back just fine, and I have to say that I’m proud of myself for negotiating that little bit of gobbledegeek.
Having dubbed, translated, cleaned up, translated back and uploaded to Mediafire a 60-year-old LP of Bartok’s 1938 violin concerto by Tibor Varga, with Ferenc Fricsay conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, next thing I get an email from one of my cyberbuddies:
Since I'm a barbarous bronze-age PC user, these elite M4As just do not play at all for me. I tried dancing round an inflated wineskin but that didn't help, nor did hammering my PC with knapped flints, nor did flinging an effigy of Steve Jobs into a volcano while chanting Bill Gates' name […] would it be possible to post in a format that's universally and easily playable by anyone, such as WAV, FLAC, APE, MP3...?
Another lister pointed out that an obscure program called iTunes launched some years ago by a company named after a fruit will work perfectly well on a PC. Somebody else recommended Foobar, whose acronym suspiciously resembles the WWII slang “fubar” (“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition”). Curious, however, I tried translating my M4a files into FLACs, just to see if it would work, and it wouldn’t, though Max offers it, apparently because the files were too big. So I tried WAV, and that worked. But now I was in a certain position, reminded of when I had been living in London long enough so that when a tourist stopped me and asked me “How do I get to the Royal Festival Hall?” instead of gleefully shouting , “Practice, man, practice!” the boy from Kenosha was actually able to give directions in one of the world's great cities. I emailed back to the list:
On account of all you guys and your RARs and your cue sheets and your winbars and your wombats, I have had to acquire and learn how to use All2MP3, Max, XLD, Unarchiver and a bunch of other stuff that either didn't work or was too much trouble or was already obsolescent, and I think the rest of you should do the same. Or before you dance around the bloated wineskin you could try consuming a plate of newt's eyes: that would make about as much sense as the frantically silly variety of zips I have seen in the last two years. You want "a format that's universally and easily playable by anyone, such as WAV, FLAC, APE, MP3": nobody here wants an MP3, and none of those others are playable by me, easily or otherwise.
However, I have translated this Bartok into WAV (sometimes seen as WAVE, to add to the confusion) just to see if I could do it, and uploaded that. I hope it works, but I will never do it again. Ever. Why should I?
Nyaa, nyaa!
June 27, 2012Looking in the wrong placeOne of the strangest editorials I have ever seen in the Wall Street Journal today, called "What Good Is a GOP Senate?" I had to read it over and over to understand it.
In Montana, Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg is running against Democratic Senator Jon Tester. Rehberg's TV adverts brag that he "refused to support a Republican budget plan that could harm the Medicare program..." And so on, and so forth, making Rehberg out to be a maverick, whereas in fact he is more conservative then 80% of the House, and has voted the party line nearly 100% of the time. The Journal snorts, "His claim to independence is a vote for business as usual on entitlements, which makes him another wildebeest in the herd that has created trillion-dollar deficits."
Oh, dear. We are sure the Journal approves of the world's richest people being able to throw billions at the candidates they don't like, yet the paper expects honest and forthright political advertising on television? What the editorial does, finally, is highlight the fact that the Republican party of today is such a dog's breakfast that its candidates have to run against themselves. Including Mitt Romney.
June 27, 2012Reading on the Net
From The Economist Group's annual report 2012:
When publishing on the web really took off about ten years ago, we at The Economist reasoned, rightly (in part), that this was the beginning of a general shift in reading habits from print to web and, wrongly, that in order for The Economist to continue to satisfy our readers' needs in the same way as it did in print we would have to find a way of repackaging the newspaper for the online environment.
In fact, although the web did herald something new, our research told us that, regardless of age or geography, our readers enjoyed The Economist in print as a ritual, lean-back, immersive reading experience which could not be replicated on a desktop computer. We saw, then, that the web would not replace print in our readers' lives. Indeed, over the past ten years, while the web has devastated the business models of many newspapers, our print circulation has nearly doubled.
Well, of course. The Economist is worth reading. All the other weekly news magazines have given up the ghost. To be fair, with all the competition from the Internet and 24-hour news stations on TV, there was no longer room in the marketplace for Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and all the rest, but the best one of all is still going, because it is worth the time and trouble to actually read the damn thing. My old boss at Barnes & Noble thought that magazines were a "dying industry"; in fact it's just that the chaff is blowing away: the celebrity trash isn't doing so well. But Taste of Home, Organic Gardening, The Economist and quite a few others are doiing just fine, thanks.
June 27, 2012The Rise and Fall of Nations"Why the Euro Crisis Will Go On and On"
"EU Leaders, Divided, Push Growth"
"ECB Eases Collateral Standards For Loans"
The European economic news won't stop. Those countries, after fighting vicious wars with one another for centuries, have decided to bind themselves together, and of course the process will be troublesome and will take a while. Perhaps more centuries. Certainly it is true that a common currency is not all there is to it; there must be common rules as well. And it must be galling to the right in the USA that Germany, with strong labor unions, welfare and health care for all, is the healthiest of the lot. But I predict that the nations of Europe will continue to bind themselves together, while the United States of America falls apart.
When I moved from Iowa to the USA, I was perfectly happy with the insurance on my house in Iowa, and wanted to buy insurance in Pennsylvania from the same company. Couldn't do it. Health insurance companies are not allowed to compete across state lines. Nobody is allowed to buy prescription meds from Canada. In Iowa you can buy a bottle of wine from a supermarket anytime. In Pennsylvania never. In Texas not before noon on Sunday. In Minnesota nowhere on Sunday. Tort law is different in every state, so the doctors' malpractice insurance is more difficult and more costly here than there. Pennsylvania is loaded with nuisance taxes; in other states not so much. Various states spend taxpayers' money trying to lure businesses from other states, while Congressmen from 50 states sell themselves to the highest bidder. This week the Supreme Court of the so-called United States is deciding how united we are allowed be with regard to immigration law, national health care policy and who knows what else.
Ah, but we are exceptional, aren't we, and free. Free to be mediocre.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken said that. Actually, there have been a few national emergencies. We survived the Civil War, and we responded as a nation to Pearl Harbor. Then came 9/11, and George Bush told us to go shopping.