Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Last night, I had my first serious Mac problem in my three and a quarter years with the Powerbook. It was entirely my fault for clicking on DNSTrans when they said it was supposed to be a command-line application. The Mac asked me what program I wanted to open the program with, and I chose the Terminal app. That coaxed the command-line help information out of DNSTrans, giving me enough clues that I could run it from the command line myself.

For a while, everything seemed ok. Then I closed some apps and came home, and when I tried to open iTunes and listen to Filk Radio, the Terminal app opened instead. I tried some other programs, and all the icons opened Terminal. I could still open apps by roundabout methods, such as clicking on an html file to open the browser, and then clicking on a mailto link in the browser to open Mail. A few programs still ran from their icons, possibly because they didn’t have the .app extension.

So I searched Google for the solution to my application woes. I found one guy on Google Groups who’d had the same problem (with TextEdit instead of Terminal), but no one had answered his post. I found out about the three files you can delete on OS X to do what rebuilding your desktop database will do for pre-X macs. The files were LSApplications, LSClaimedTypes, and LSSchemes, which are all in the ~/Library/Preferences directory. (The ~ means under your Home directory.) I deleted them, but my problem didn’t go away. It did mutate slightly - instead of everything opening Terminal, my icons all opened Sherlock.

That’s when I started worrying, but it was late so I went to bed. At work today I searched some more - finding the proper search term for my apps are all trying to open themselves with Terminal.app was hard. I’m not sure how I finally found these troubleshooting tips, which mentioned the three files above and also the real culprit, com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. I deleted that one, and my Mac is all better now.

While I was puttering around Mac sites looking for help, I found an application I used to run under OS 8.6: DragThing. Many’s the hour I wasted configuring DragThing with snazzy colors and exhaustive app icons back then. Now, the OS X Dock does some of the same things. I downloaded DragThing, but there were too many buttons I couldn’t click without registering first, and I have no patience for picking the perfect Bondi colors and backgrounds anymore. I decided the Dock was good enough for me, but not before I read up on how to disable the Dock in order to use DragThing’s process dock instead.

So here it is, Death to the Dock (from Google Groups):

• Open a terminal window (that’s Terminal.app, in Utilities).

• Type: sudo mv /system/library/CoreServices/Dock.app
  /system/library/CoreServices/oldDock.app
  The password it wants is probably your own password for the Mac.

• Logout and log back in.

I’ve been trying to goof off, really I have. I had to try from work, though, and that made it harder. I did manage to download a new version of Analog, the world’s most popular web log analyzer. (That’s web server logs, not blogs.) Along the way I picked up DNSTrans to speed up the DNS lookups, and then I did them all over the DSL at work. Working on Sunday isn’t all bad.

I also downloaded JAXP, the Java XML Processing tools and Xeena, a Java-based DTD editor, so that I can play with my FicML DTD for fanfic. First, however, I must run the web logs. It’s been four months.

Word count: 52,000

Well, it’s over. I lost a lot of sleep, and I wrote a lot of garbage. I had to write 2,500 words today because of a major disagreement between my word count algorithm and the official one. The extra 2,000 were the hardest words of all - I was all set to goof off and play with Java, catch up on my blogging, and generally have a life again, and instead I had to go back and crank out more intermediate scene material.

It’s a very rough draft. The word count is, technically, enough for a novel but it’s too low to get published. It’s not an issue of insufficient plot - my work of NaNo is more outline than novel. There’s still almost no description in there. It could practically be a screenplay, there’s so much dialogue and so little of anything else, but that’s a good for a draft since the plot is all down on virtual paper.

I have one POV character, so I thought early on that I should switch to first person. I didn’t at the time because of the extra work and the tight timeframe. That gives me a direction to go in for the first revision.

But first, fanfic!

Word count: 49,475

I can’t believe I wrote so many bad words today. I’ll have to finish tomorrow, though. One can excuse only so much continuous anti-social NaNoing over one holiday weekend.

Word count: no comment

Cranberries are local, native, and semi-inedible. They’re an acquired taste—a bit pointless, unless you’ve learned to appreciate them. Most cranberries come from the Ocean Spray cranberry growers cooperative. On this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for cranberries.

Jay Leno was just saying that Thanksgiving is an ideal holiday—you eat, you watch TV, you fall asleep. There’s no controversial content to Turkey Day—no presents, no guilt, no fasting, and, to quote Douglas Adams, nobody had to get nailed to anything.

I’ve been thinking, as the lights come on and the SUV’s drive by with dead evergreens tied to their tops, about how little the trappings of Christmas have to do with Christ. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, has such a low content level that it’s hard to miss it. You eat the appropriate harvest foods and be thankful about it. If you know anything about Pilgrims, you know they didn’t believe in freedom of religion. They tossed people out of the Massachusetts Bay colony just for suggesting that freedom of religion might be a nice thing. So there’s no need to feel either patriotic about our freedoms, or doubtful about our patriotism. Thanksgiving is just about having survived the year to date, and all my readers can feel grateful for that much. It’s a very accessible holiday.

And nobody had to get nailed to anything.

Word count: 41,000

It was white in Boston today, not good weather for the biggest travel day of the year. I skipped out of work early to catch the bus to Fall River. Now I’m dialing up from a rotary line, of all things - but the trusty mac can do it. The mac can do anything. Neither snow nor sleet nor whatever the other stuff was…

Thanksgiving is when the Christmas decorations start coming out, and in honor of Sylvia’s J/C Christmas Contest, Jade’s story Hope has been dressed up in snowflakes. I’d dress up my old J/C non-Christmas story, but I’ve spent too much time hacking the CSS for one day. Snowflakes are compliments of Pat’s Web Graphics.

Liz immortalized me in a LiveJournal icon:

New at Zendom: A Fandom Thanksgiving.

New at Jemima’s Trek: Jade’s new Awesome Artist Award for a lovely Janeway sketch is up. She also has a story forthcoming for Sylvia’s J/C Christmas contest.

Word count: 38,000

I know it’s two weeks late, but because it’s still November and sinat hinam never goes out of style, here are some links about Kristallnacht and related topics:

• A historical overview of Kristallnacht
• A map of the destruction
• More Kristallnacht links
• Goebbels accuses Churchill of using the big lie technique

Word count: 33,390 (two-thirds done!)

I forgot to mention one bit of weird cognitive science I ran across in The Einstein Syndrome - Williams syndrome. The author mentioned it as an example of his theory of brain resources getting unequally used, which would allow his Einstein syndrome children to read with an overstocked area of the brain, but not speak because that area had been temporarily shortchanged.

In Williams syndrome the symptoms are opposite, and the shortchanging is permanent. Children with the syndrome display precocious linguistic and social skills, being able to work a room like a miniature politician. However, such children have very low IQ’s (the example Sowell gave was 49), and often cannot read above the first-grade level or live independently.

Sowell quotes a Dr. Ursula Bellugi: “What makes Williams syndrome so fascinating is it shows that the domains of cognition and language are quite separate.” You wouldn’t quite know that from Einstein syndrome because those children eventually do learn to speak normally. It’s a cool brain fact, isn’t it?

Word count: aaarrrrrgh!

It turned out that someone I know was mentioned in The Einstein Syndrome - no one you’d ever think had a “syndrome” in his youth. For all I know, I could have had it. My mother doesn’t even remember when I started talking, and I doubt she had her eyes on the toddler development chart at the time. Who noticed, until very recently, whether their children progressed from single words, to phrases, to full sentences exactly on schedule?

Sowell’s book made me glad to have grown up before Ritalin and peanut allergies and the autism epidemic, when they left us more or less alone. Now there are experts waiting to drag your children away into classes for the autistic, when the only problem is that they read English better than they speak it. The experts mentioned in the book were usually unwilling to take the parents’ first-hand experiences of their own children into account. The Vision of the Anointed was about that sort of thing, but on a wider scale than just one frequently-misdiagnosed childhood syndrome.

One endearing (to me) quality of the children with Einstein syndrome was their frequent refusal to obey the experts. They would refuse to answer questions or jump through hoops, and the semi-professional evaluators would mark down that they didn’t know the answer, or couldn’t jump through the hoop. In fact, Sowell never makes it entirely clear whether late-talking children cannot talk at an earlier age, or simply will not talk until they’re good and ready to. He gave examples of children who were overheard practicing words in secret before they would speak them in public - toddler perfectionists, as it were.