OFF TOPIC funny

ellice wrote:


Haven't you looked into uploading a different dictionary? I don't know
about the PC world of Word, but on the Mac side I can set my Word
preferences to other dictionaries. And I try to remember to check my custom
one regularly to remove words that are misspelled but were accidentally
added.

D'you know where I can get an Oz dictionary for Word? I'm not aware of
one, but would be happy to get hold of it if I could.

Don't get me wrong: Word's my all-time favourite program! It's so
stylish and intuitive and easy to use. I just wish we could get an
Oz-flavoured version, that's all.

I bet there is something out there. Word is definitely not my favorite
program, but it's certainly convenient. I use Quark when I can for setting
things that will be published - but it takes work to use Quark or the Adobe
graphics programs. However, once you learn them - what fun. I really,
really love Illustrator. Ah, well. Word has definitely improved over the
years - I did prefer WordPerfect back when, but now Word is fine for most
things.

Oh, I love Quark too! I started on Ready, Set Go! a zillion years ago
and have always loved the interface (very similar between the two). I
love the way you can 'wire' text boxes together and govern the way the
text 'flows' on your page.

I'm also in love with Illustrator! I've done the odd bit of graphic
design work and the tracing facility of Illustrator is just yumptious!
Don't you just love working with beziers? It's so absorbing and
relaxing: hours pass while you tweak and smooth and the result is
usually spectacularly good!

I use CorelDraw these days, but your post has reminded me of the good
old days on the Mac with those superlative programs at hand! D'you
remember one called 'SuperPaint'? It was a real beaut: had a bit of
everything. You could use the usual paint tools on one layer and
ray-tracing etc on another. You could combine elements from layers at
will and then print it all out in colour... or not. That was 'way back
in the eighties! *Nothing* on the PC came anywhere near it. Sob! If only
a brand new Mac would tumble into my lap! Snif! I so miss them!

--
Trish Brown {|:-}

Newcastle, NSW, Australia

ellice wrote:
On 2/23/09 8:10 AM, "Bruce Fletcher (remove dentures to reply)"
wrote:

anne wrote:
says...
Multi-Mate! All I remember is that in 1986 or thereabouts it came on an
incredible number (over 40?) of 3.5 inch floppy disks.
Are you sure it wasn't on the 5 1/4 disks? I'm pretty sure the littler not so
floppy ones came around a bit later.

You could be right, I'm not sure when we upgraded from 5.25 to 3.5 inch
disks. I'm sure that it was about a year after we upgraded from tape to
5.25 inch disks (Commodore Pet). It was around 1987 that we got our
first IBM PC (which ran at an incredible 8 MHz).

I think the disk switches were in the mid-late 80s. But I remember the 3.5"
flopppies being really pricey then, and we'd have to order boxes at work and
guard them. Finally the shop at lab started carrying them, and we'd have so
much fun going to shop and grab some boxes. Then the thing was being able
to reformat them because they'd always get IBM formatted disks, so it would
be sitting with the Mac and reformatting them. Fortuanately, the Macs have
always been able to read the PC formatted ones but not vice versa. So, I'd
do work for me to keep on Mac disks, but keep others that were dual
formatted and save files to be PC compatible for others to use.

Such fun to remember. But much better than carrying mag tapes or boxes of
keypunched cards around.

ellice


Hee! Did you ever *drop* one of those boxes of keypunched cards? What a
horror that was!

My first task when I went to work for the Mac dealership was to sit and
remove the labels from a hundred used 3.5" floppies, format them and
apply new Apple labels. Apple disks cost $100 a box (!!!) and so they
were well worth cleaning and reusing. Nearly wore the nails off my
fingers, though!

--
Trish Brown {|:-}

Newcastle, NSW, Australia

On 3/1/09 7:31 PM, "Trish Brown" wrote:

ellice wrote:
On 2/22/09 4:25 PM, "Trish Brown" wrote:

lucille wrote:

With the peculiar spelling of so many English words, a dictionary is
useless for a really poor speller. How can you look up the word laugh
if you can't spell it?

Even if you can't exactly spell a word, you usually can come close and skim
a dictionary page- or use a thesaurus and look up a synonym.

Well, I guess that's the point of reading widely: so you can be exposed
to lots and lots of irregular words and have some idea of the spelling
to start with. Of course, the importance of correct spelling varies with
your intent. I'd die before I'd send an incorrectly spelled letter to
the Queen or the Prime Minister or for a job application. Here at rctn
and in letters to friends, I'm not quite so vigilant about it all.
Software spellcheckers are OK as far as it goes, but the one in MSWord
annoys me because it clearly has an American accent! ;-D

While reading certainly helps, I often wonder how many people actually will
look up the details of an unfamiliar word when coming upon it while reading.
Some years ago - wow - at least 25 - I remember reading a then new Saul
Bellow book called "The Dean's December." The blurbs had it as an NY Times
bestseller, etc. Excellent, and interesting story (Dean of a journalism
school in Chicago - thinly veiled Northwestern - married to an Eastern
European woman, IIRC a doctor, and they have to go back to her former home
in the Soviet block country to deal with her mother). Complicated plot of
life and politics. Beautifully written. But, here's the catch. I'm a
fairly literate person, with a good vocabulary - much more than the norm if
you go by things such as GRE scores, etc. I had to crack the dictionary
before I was through 20 pages. This was the first time in my life I ever
had to have a dictionary close-by for the entire time I was reading this
book. In then discussing the book with my friends at school (I was an
undergrad at the time), I had to ask - how is it possible that this book is
a bestseller? Do you think people just buy the book because of the famous
author, and then don't read it, or just don't understand it - because if I'm
really having to look up words - that what are all those others doing -
given the book has had such great sales? Or do they not care. The thing to
me is that as a writer, Saul Bellow's use of language was so precise,
particular to what he wished to convey, that if you didn't know the words
you would miss something. I just always have remembered having to use a
dictionary so regularly while reading this book. It just made me think.

FWIW- I do generally have a foreign language dictionary when reading in
other languages as I know that even being relatively fluent, there will
always be something I'm not quite sure of, or just don't know.


ellice


I think most of us discover the meanings of words in the contexts in
which we hear them. Sometimes, that backfires, but dictionaries are
there to help. Trial and error is useful too. Colloquialisms are the
hardest thing to learn when embarking on a new language.

I think the unwillingness of people to actually look up a word's meaning
leads to a lot of garbled communication and misunderstandings. I had a
deputy, well spoken, educated - going to grad school, who constantly would
either misuse or misunderstand some verbal nuance. Then we'd have a
discussion about what he thought something meant, which would of course be
what he'd sort of assumed it meant - and argue the meaning - I came to refer
to this as his "private dictionary." IME, the "private dictionary" is
pretty common, unfortunately. It is true you can glean some sense of
meaning from context as that's part of how we learn language. For me, when
in a conversation not in my native language, especially one in which I'm
only mid-fluent context is really important for me to understand - but I'll
be sure to ask anything that may be confusing. I'm regularly asking how to
say something or for a bit of explanation in the other language (generally
asking in that language how to say some English term).

WRT colloquial expressions that is so true. When I was first working in
France, after a few weeks on site, my next trip to Paris I bought 2 special
dictionaries - one Science/Technical English/French, and the other a
dictionary of idioms English/French (couldn't find American/French - but it
worked). Truly helped. Plus, I was lucky enough that the 2 head techs (who
sort of spoke English - or knew it from college days) & I would make time
every afternoon for a 30 min language lesson. Great break, and good for me,
them and whichever of the crew wanted to participate!

Ellice

On 3/1/09 7:40 PM, "Trish Brown" wrote:

ellice wrote:


Haven't you looked into uploading a different dictionary? I don't know
about the PC world of Word, but on the Mac side I can set my Word
preferences to other dictionaries. And I try to remember to check my custom
one regularly to remove words that are misspelled but were accidentally
added.

D'you know where I can get an Oz dictionary for Word? I'm not aware of
one, but would be happy to get hold of it if I could.

Don't get me wrong: Word's my all-time favourite program! It's so
stylish and intuitive and easy to use. I just wish we could get an
Oz-flavoured version, that's all.

I bet there is something out there. Word is definitely not my favorite
program, but it's certainly convenient. I use Quark when I can for setting
things that will be published - but it takes work to use Quark or the Adobe
graphics programs. However, once you learn them - what fun. I really,
really love Illustrator. Ah, well. Word has definitely improved over the
years - I did prefer WordPerfect back when, but now Word is fine for most
things.

Oh, I love Quark too! I started on Ready, Set Go! a zillion years ago
and have always loved the interface (very similar between the two). I
love the way you can 'wire' text boxes together and govern the way the
text 'flows' on your page.

I think Quark is pretty much the publishing industry standard, though some
people use InDesign. It's so much fun playing with layouts - but it's easy
to kind of obsess.

I'm also in love with Illustrator! I've done the odd bit of graphic
design work and the tracing facility of Illustrator is just yumptious!
Don't you just love working with beziers? It's so absorbing and
relaxing: hours pass while you tweak and smooth and the result is
usually spectacularly good!

I do love most of the Illustrator tools. It does let you really refine
designs. I don't know how new your version is, I'd been using 10, and then
went to CS (which is 2 versions ahead) and I was ecstatic. I hadn't
bothered buying the in-between upgrade - not enough of a difference. But
the newer tool collection, especially for making symbols and grids are
awesome.

I use CorelDraw these days, but your post has reminded me of the good
old days on the Mac with those superlative programs at hand! D'you
remember one called 'SuperPaint'? It was a real beaut: had a bit of
everything. You could use the usual paint tools on one layer and
ray-tracing etc on another. You could combine elements from layers at
will and then print it all out in colour... or not. That was 'way back
in the eighties! *Nothing* on the PC came anywhere near it. Sob! If only
a brand new Mac would tumble into my lap! Snif! I so miss them!

I had MacDraw and SuperPaint, When CorelDraw came out, got to test it. The
graphics dept at my lab switched to Macs in about 86, 87 because there were
a handful of us with them, and we did a lot of our own graphics - and they
were able to convince the powers that be to do it. Same thing, when I
changed agencies in 91 - the next year, helped the graphics group make the
upgrade. They had some Max, some PCs and needed a bit of an ally to
coompletely upgrade. It was great when they did, as it helped me and the
couple of guys from the program office to keep/upgrade our own. Even in
the 80s, I had Persuasion for doing presentations on the Mac - so much
better than Powerpoint at the time. Eventually, IIRC, Powerpoint subsumed
(bought) Persuasion. But for a good few years that they were both around,
Persuasion was well ahead in tools, capability. I enjoyed telling the guys
too bad, I'm not a secretary, when people would come to me to do their
briefings - cause they were in a queue with their secretary, or waiting on
graphics. But, of course, a couple of us from the Mac group would end up
doing "other duties" . We told the IT people we didn't care about them
supporting us, we'd take care of it, just make sure that we got software we
ordered. Had our own Apple (Mac) Users Group at the lab, affiliated with
the Federal Group, the huge (now) DC area group - Washington Apple Pi.

Now I use Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks/Flash. If I ever get a job
then I'm completing my upgrade with the Adobe suite.

Fun to think about.

ellice

On 3/1/09 7:43 PM, "Trish Brown" wrote:

ellice wrote:
On 2/23/09 8:10 AM, "Bruce Fletcher (remove dentures to reply)"
wrote:

anne wrote:
says...
Multi-Mate! All I remember is that in 1986 or thereabouts it came on an
incredible number (over 40?) of 3.5 inch floppy disks.
Are you sure it wasn't on the 5 1/4 disks? I'm pretty sure the littler not
so
floppy ones came around a bit later.

You could be right, I'm not sure when we upgraded from 5.25 to 3.5 inch
disks. I'm sure that it was about a year after we upgraded from tape to
5.25 inch disks (Commodore Pet). It was around 1987 that we got our
first IBM PC (which ran at an incredible 8 MHz).

I think the disk switches were in the mid-late 80s. But I remember the 3.5"
flopppies being really pricey then, and we'd have to order boxes at work and
guard them. Finally the shop at lab started carrying them, and we'd have so
much fun going to shop and grab some boxes. Then the thing was being able
to reformat them because they'd always get IBM formatted disks, so it would
be sitting with the Mac and reformatting them. Fortuanately, the Macs have
always been able to read the PC formatted ones but not vice versa. So, I'd
do work for me to keep on Mac disks, but keep others that were dual
formatted and save files to be PC compatible for others to use.

Such fun to remember. But much better than carrying mag tapes or boxes of
keypunched cards around.

ellice


Hee! Did you ever *drop* one of those boxes of keypunched cards? What a
horror that was!

Never had a big drop - but certainly dropped a stack of over 100 (hence why
it was important to put line numbers out in the end comment area when
writing code). But, I have witnessed a friend carrying several boxes, when
a lid flew open, and disaster came - dumping the contents in part of many!
Uck.

My first task when I went to work for the Mac dealership was to sit and
remove the labels from a hundred used 3.5" floppies, format them and
apply new Apple labels. Apple disks cost $100 a box (!!!) and so they
were well worth cleaning and reusing. Nearly wore the nails off my
fingers, though!

I think the regular boxes were about $45 here. I was alwys careful to label
- somehow. Which eventually became sharpie on floppy! We actually have a
floppy reader on USB with this machine for reading some old stuff that
hasn't been moved over, or for doing the move. Hey, the old disks make good
coasters.

Ellice

ellice wrote:



I think Quark is pretty much the publishing industry standard, though some
people use InDesign. It's so much fun playing with layouts - but it's easy
to kind of obsess.


It used to be Quark, but not any more....people have *flocked* to
InDesign. It's much cheaper, interfaces better with other programs, and
once you're over an initial hurdle, is easy to use. The most frustrating
thing about the changeover was that it calls things by different names
than Quark, and it was hard to look up something you didn't know the
name for in help! But that didn't last long.

InDesign is SO much better in text flow. I used to spend hours fiddling
with Quark files to get the text "just so" (good Virgo that I am, LOL!)
-- lining up columns, getting past bad line breaks, etc. etc. - that
InDesign does much better from the get-go.

Sue


--
Susan Hartman/Dirty Linen
The Magazine of Folk and World Music
www.dirtylinen.com

On 3/2/09 9:37 AM, "Susan Hartman" wrote:

ellice wrote:



I think Quark is pretty much the publishing industry standard, though some
people use InDesign. It's so much fun playing with layouts - but it's easy
to kind of obsess.


It used to be Quark, but not any more....people have *flocked* to
InDesign. It's much cheaper, interfaces better with other programs, and
once you're over an initial hurdle, is easy to use. The most frustrating
thing about the changeover was that it calls things by different names
than Quark, and it was hard to look up something you didn't know the
name for in help! But that didn't last long.

I was thinking that has a lot to do with being part of the Adobe Suite.
I've been deciding which suite to do my upgrade with - as I can get the
education pricing, they vary as to what comes with Illustrator - the full
web stuff or just little web stuff but InDesign.

InDesign is SO much better in text flow. I used to spend hours fiddling
with Quark files to get the text "just so" (good Virgo that I am, LOL!)
-- lining up columns, getting past bad line breaks, etc. etc. - that
InDesign does much better from the get-go.

Sue

Nice to know. A bunch of folks I know are still using Quark. But, I think
for small businesses it's about the $$ to make a change.

ellice

I feel like a dinosaur(!) I used Pagemaker from V3 to 6.something, for page
layout and all the word processing ever needed. It wouldn't alphabetize,
though. Retired just before Indesign.

"Susan Hartman" wrote in message
...
ellice wrote:



I think Quark is pretty much the publishing industry standard, though
some
people use InDesign. It's so much fun playing with layouts - but it's
easy
to kind of obsess.


It used to be Quark, but not any more....people have *flocked* to
InDesign. It's much cheaper, interfaces better with other programs, and
once you're over an initial hurdle, is easy to use. The most frustrating
thing about the changeover was that it calls things by different names
than Quark, and it was hard to look up something you didn't know the name
for in help! But that didn't last long.

InDesign is SO much better in text flow. I used to spend hours fiddling
with Quark files to get the text "just so" (good Virgo that I am, LOL!) --
lining up columns, getting past bad line breaks, etc. etc. - that InDesign
does much better from the get-go.

Sue


--
Susan Hartman/Dirty Linen
The Magazine of Folk and World Music
www.dirtylinen.com

On 3/2/09 9:14 PM, "Judy Bay" wrote:

I feel like a dinosaur(!) I used Pagemaker from V3 to 6.something, for page
layout and all the word processing ever needed. It wouldn't alphabetize,
though. Retired just before Indesign.

Ah, I used Pagemaker in the early stages, then went to Quark Express. Don't
feel like a Dinosaur. Pagemaker linked with Persuasion, both of which
become overtaken/bought IIRC.

Ellice
"Susan Hartman" wrote in message
...
ellice wrote:



I think Quark is pretty much the publishing industry standard, though
some
people use InDesign. It's so much fun playing with layouts - but it's
easy
to kind of obsess.


It used to be Quark, but not any more....people have *flocked* to
InDesign. It's much cheaper, interfaces better with other programs, and
once you're over an initial hurdle, is easy to use. The most frustrating
thing about the changeover was that it calls things by different names
than Quark, and it was hard to look up something you didn't know the name
for in help! But that didn't last long.

InDesign is SO much better in text flow. I used to spend hours fiddling
with Quark files to get the text "just so" (good Virgo that I am, LOL!) --
lining up columns, getting past bad line breaks, etc. etc. - that InDesign
does much better from the get-go.

Sue


--
Susan Hartman/Dirty Linen
The Magazine of Folk and World Music
www.dirtylinen.com

Thanks, Ellice. It's nice to hear that, in this Microsoft world, that I
wasn't alone.

"ellice" wrote in message
...
On 3/2/09 9:14 PM, "Judy Bay" wrote:

I feel like a dinosaur(!) I used Pagemaker from V3 to 6.something, for
page
layout and all the word processing ever needed. It wouldn't alphabetize,
though. Retired just before Indesign.

Ah, I used Pagemaker in the early stages, then went to Quark Express.
Don't
feel like a Dinosaur. Pagemaker linked with Persuasion, both of which
become overtaken/bought IIRC.

Ellice
"Susan Hartman" wrote in message
...
ellice wrote:



I think Quark is pretty much the publishing industry standard, though
some
people use InDesign. It's so much fun playing with layouts - but it's
easy
to kind of obsess.


It used to be Quark, but not any more....people have *flocked* to
InDesign. It's much cheaper, interfaces better with other programs, and
once you're over an initial hurdle, is easy to use. The most frustrating
thing about the changeover was that it calls things by different names
than Quark, and it was hard to look up something you didn't know the
name
for in help! But that didn't last long.

InDesign is SO much better in text flow. I used to spend hours fiddling
with Quark files to get the text "just so" (good Virgo that I am,
LOL!) --
lining up columns, getting past bad line breaks, etc. etc. - that
InDesign
does much better from the get-go.

Sue


--
Susan Hartman/Dirty Linen
The Magazine of Folk and World Music
www.dirtylinen.com