In case anyone’s interested, I’ve reposted the archives and other pages from before I moved to endofline.ca. You can find them under the “odds” and “ends” links on your left.
cheerio and toodle-pip
Non-fiction reader
Not very long ago, I was driving home from a play with my friend, Leanne, and the subject of books came up. We compared what we had read recently. I’d read a novel by Michael Ondaatje and a collection of science fiction stories by Larry Niven. Leanne had read a book about DHTML and an autobiography by a retired polititian.
“No fiction?” I asked, innocently, and she gave me a strange look.
“No,” Leanne said and gave a tiny derisive snort that I might have missed if I didn’t know her so well.
“Ah,” I temporized. “So you haven’t read any novels recently?”
There was a bit of a silence, in which I thought that I might have been better off letting the point go.
“I don’t read novels,” she explained. “I pretty much just read books that are about something.”
My mind boggled, then balked. Then it strained and stumbled for a couple of moments before accidentally becoming completely gummed up with the foolishness of the words she’d just uttered.
“You…” I faltered. “You… don’t read any fiction?”
That had been unwise. Now she was genuinely irritated with me and said, “I read lots. Magazines. Books. I bet I read more than you do.”
“But no fiction?”
“No! What do you get out of novels anyway? You can’t learn anything.”
What could I possibly say to that? Yes, she was correct in that she probably reads more than I do. I never stop at the news stand for a copy of GQ. I don’t buy newspapers (although I read one online). I rarely buy how-to books.
But to say that you can’t learn anything… How can anyone read a novel and not learn from it? The lessons to be learned from fiction are more important than coding with DHTML or how Pierre Trudeau got along (or didn’t get along) with the American president. Fiction allows you to think beyond the limitations of the real and explore the impossible and the imaginary. Fiction allows you to touch the spiritual and the whimsical at the same time. And even when it’s sometimes in the form of a ripping good tale of adventure, it takes you away from your miserable routine and gives you unlimited room to think and live.
So while Leanne learns how to make interactive web pages, I’m learning how to put a crippled spaceship into orbit around a Jovian moon using nothing but water as propellant. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is more useful.
Oil and water
Technical writing is about clarity; marketing copy writing is about obfuscation.
Mixing of the two will lead to widespread panic, packs of roving hamsters, destruction of property, impaired judgement, and irritable writers.
Tech tip: no more moiré patterns in scrollbars
Here’s a little quick-fix that all technical writers will appreciate. As you have probably noticed, if you make a screen capture of a Windows screen, then print it, the scrollbars appear to have an ugly moiré pattern. This is caused when the dots that make the scrollbar colour (called dithering) are matched to the printer’s dot screen.
How do you avoid it? A quick change to your registry will make your scrollbars a solid colour instead of a dithered colour.
- Select Start » Run, type regedit, and press Enter. The Registry Editor appears.
- Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER » Control Panel » Colors.
- Change both “ButtonHilight” and “Scrollbar” to 230 230 230.
- Close the Registry Editor.
- Logout and log in again to make the registry changes take effect.
The scrollbars should now be a solid colour. You can check this by making a screenshot and magnifying it. The scrollbars will remain solid until you next choose a Scheme in the Display Properties dialog box. If you like, you can save the current appearance (including the scrollbars) for later:
- Right-click the desktop and select Properties.
- In the Appearance tab, click Save As and enter a descriptive name, like “Solid-colour scrollbars”.
Now you can choose your solid-scrollbar scheme any time you want to make screenshots.
Freedom of expression
Over at Webraw, Eric raises the issue of censorship. Specifically, “How much longer until >>YOUR EMPLOYER<< shuts down your blog like http://www.denishorgan.com?”
Eric’s comments are worrysome… not only because he highlights a threat to freedom of thought and expression, but also because in his effort to comply with the desires of his own employer, he has effectively given away essential rights and freedoms. What possible right does an employer have to curtail a personal creative work that’s done on personal time?
Events like the closing of Denis Horgan’s site seem to be more common these days. We see legal fights over the employer’s desire to control their employees versus the right to freedom of expression. More and more, corporations are taking the legal postion that employees are chattel: the activities and ideas of employees fall under the control and ownership of the employer. This is very wrong.
An example is the case in which DSC Communications fired an employee because the employee wouldn’t surrender an idea that he had (link). This idea was unrelated to his job, concieved on his personal time, and wasn’t written down.
With the popularization of blogs, it’s more important than ever to draw a defining line between one’s work life and personal life. It’s a frightening prospect to imagine a world in which thoughts and opinions may only come from corporate HQ. The right to freedom of expression means having protection from those who seek to silence you, to control you, and essentially to own you.