Don't want to be no martyr

[austin_dern]

No, it's not back yet. The repair shop is getting to know me; I barely have to identify myself and they promise to call me back later with a status report. They're waiting for a new hard drive (and keyboard) to arrive; allegedly they had to order it. I don't know how the country's central Apple repair shop runs out of hard drives, but I can probably last another day before going mad.

Maybe. Windows 2000 is a wholly new experience of things popping up without obvious cause or explanation. I'm not talking pop-up windows from the web browser (I turned them off); I mean updaters and scanners and networking things and miscellaneous other tools that just start running, go for a while, and eventually either crash or go away on their own. It's frazzling my nerves. That's on top of the keyboard putting a delete key adjacent to left-arrow, and ``Home'' next to backspace, making editing an adventure of soaring unpredictably through documents.

The most surprising thing of all this is how quiet my office seems. Given how few CDs and how narrow a range of musical experience I have I thought I ran a quiet place, but I've had no iTunes and no Internet radio for a week plus now and it's just weird not having something -- Fibber McGee and Molly, Inner Sanctum, Beatles-a-rama, anything -- in the background.

Trivia: Erasmus Darwin grew sufficiently fat he had a semi-circle cut in his table to fit at dinner. Source: The Lunar Men, Jenny Uglow.

Currently Reading: The Punic Wars, Brian Caven. I'd probably take this more seriously if all the players in that era didn't have Marx Brothers Movie Character names. I mean, ``P. Cornelius Scipio''? (If I'm not grossly mistaken the name would be pronounced ``skippy-o'', mind.) How can you not see Groucho playing him?

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

P. Cornelius Scipio''? (If I'm not grossly mistaken the name would be pronounced ``skippy-o'', mind.)

It is, yes. Whole other problems arise if one wishes to discuss T. Petronius Niger...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

There we go, then. I'm just up to the part where Mago and Attalus appoint themselves bodyguards and try to break up P. Cornelius Scipio's dinner date with Mrs. Rittenhouse.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Depends, of course, on one's preferred Latin pronunciation - the rather stiff Oxford style's never appealed to me, as it feels so wretchedly inauthentic. It's the root of modern Italian!

On the other paw, when my regular Latin tutor was away for a few weeks, my form tutor, whose specialty was Russian, took over.. oh, my. Latin with a Muscovite accent.. it's just as well I didn't really understand even the underlying concepts of a crush at the time. (Viz: A Fish Called Wanda)

making editing an adventure of soaring unpredictably through documents

What, is Microsoft paying royalties to the Emacs developers now?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, it's just ``Scipio'' looks like it has to be a hard `c'; if a soft `c' were wanted you wouldn't need the letter at all. ``Sipio'' would fit. Anyway.

I'd regard Emacs' quirkiness as a step up; unfortunately the keyboard is the real culprit here. It's a bit differently sized and that accursed delete key where left-arrow should be is going to drive me crazy yet. That's if the Windows mixing up of where control, flower, and option should be doesn't get me first.