Awesome Information from Sarah the Guru of All Internet Utility

sarah just showed me how to get rid of the find bar in firefox when done with it (initiate with ctrl F and close with ESC). if you want it to go away by itself after a little bit of time just use forward slash (the button to the right of the period).
this made my day. i've been wanting to know this for a while now (just didn't really know what to search on or even if it existed). yup i'm that nerdy.

An Interesting Color Test

from some weird link that sarah posted in some feed thingy i don't feel like taking the effort to re-find. here's a color test thingy that seems simple but is actually surprisingly difficult. i got a score of 7.... perfection is a score of 0.

An Interesting Article by Desmond Ford

rather than do some useful work this afternoon i have been reading various interesting things like the sections on sustainability in C&EN from Aug 18 and reading some on Desmond Ford since we are going to hear him speak at the Loma Linda campus hill church this sabbath.  here's a link to an article by Desmond Ford and here's a quote that i found poinent.

A vast array of modern sciences blatantly contradicts the literalistic reading of the opening chapters of Genesis. In addition to this fact the church must recognise that its efforts to evangelise the world are largely unsuccessful among educated people because there is this same issue of the great gap between science and Genesis when the latter is interpreted literally. Thus the Christian church today makes progress in the third world but is retreating in the industrialised countries of the globe.

Vista - another crappy view

vista has some internet commercials called the mojave experiment where people are told vista is mojave and then they love it. clearly not actual users given time to realize how it has created new problems. myself, yesterday found a new realm of crappiness when i tried to delete a dll that was part of a program I, wanted to delete. it pretended to be all Unix-y and didn't allow me to have file permissions to delete it. i found some command line instructions for giving myself ownership & permissions for the file. still no delete. had to boot to safe mode to delete a dll. you go mojave. granted some stuff is nice like the integration of good handwriting recognition for the tablet... but if you don't have a tablet stick with XP .

Software List

so i think i finally have my software where i want it on my new tablet for work. for those of you who are truely nerdy and want to know what i consider needed on my tablet here's my list.

• firefox (duh!)
• truecrypt (thanks to kev & neal for encouraging me to encrypt my data)
• 7zip (because i like it better than windows)
• openoffice (i can't stand using word anymore)
• M$office (excel still rocks, unfortunately)
• java (need this for some web stuff and other programs i run)
• flash, shockwave (online homework system we use for two classes needs these)
• quicktime and real player alternative (the real ones are so annoying and these seem to work)
• paint.net (for that quick graphics edit)
• inkscape (vector graphics!)
• exifer (i can't escape this program even though it is no longer being supported. it allows for saving exif data and putting it back on, which doesn't get lost as often as it used to thanks to paint.net, but this program also will redo the thumbnail and allows me to edit the exif, iptc, jpg information in bulk)
• gimp (for any massive graphics editing i decide to do)
• canon utilities (so i can plug my camera on the microscope into the tablet)
• eclipse with texlipse and miktex (for doing TeX projects like writing tests and potentially pdf's for lecture, the miktex takes care of the packages while exlipse and the texlipse plugin allow me to do the editing of my giant basically text file that is then plugged into the actual TeX compiler)
• jabref (a database interface for keeping track of references for use in TeX, makes it so much easier to do a bibliography)
• chemsketch (this is free for educational use, i don't like it as well as chemdraw but that is expensive, i have also used bkchem with good results esp since it saves it in svg so i can edit it with inkscape if it needs more work)
• scifinder scholar (a very, very good searching tool for chemistry put out by chemical abstracting services, CAS, i'm glad that we decided to spring the money from our red budget for this)
• putty (used to talk to the chemistry server neal helped me set up)
• openvpn (so i can dial into the vpn on the campus for servers and scifinder)
• jarnal (an opensource program that allows writing on all sorts of thing, including fake notebook paper, but important to me pdf's. then you can save them as a pdf. this works great on a tablet. so i can write on forms or write on pdf presentations and save the results.)
• pen attention (allows me to use the pen as a pointer in a way by putting a bubble of pink around the pen cursor so that students can see while i wave about on the screen with it)

Reading Online vs. Print

an interesting article from the new york times on kids and reading on-line. it raises many questions for me on how i spend my time as well as what i emphasize in class. should i be requiring the e-book edition of the text instead of the print?

Gender Words

i recently bough "MySQL in a Nutshell" from O'Reilly. and was intrigued by the usage of her as a pronoun so i did a quick google and found this response from the publisher to another buyer's similar question. my first response to the practice of alternating the gender is YAY! i enjoy having the generic be a woman. trivial? yes. but still when i am reading along and it says "she" i do in fact think 'hey it is talking about me!' which says i am more affected by gender language than i would like to admit. and i would dearly love it if english did come up with a grammatically correct gender neutral set of words for this usage (without it sounding so ugly as we have culturally made "it" sound)

my response to the guy that originally wrote the letter is "dude, if you are going to reject books that contain good technical information merely because they use a pronoun that you find offensive than you don't deserve the knowledge they contain." we all can choose to be offended or not. i personally chose to try my best to not be offended when people assume i am a guy or assume because i am a woman i have a particular role (except pregnancy that is an acceptable assumption of gender role). i don't always succeed but i do know that i wouldn't let it stand in my way of obtaining an education from a person or a book. this guy and his offense to using the feminine form would not be a welcome addition to my classroom.

and as long as i am rambling about gender... i heard on NPR that a postal worker is trying to get permission to wear a kilt to work (technically a male unbifurcated garmet). i think if men aren't allowed to wear kilts then women shouldn't be allowed to wear skirts.