• • •
Regarding Thursday: When I was getting ready to head out to BYU for my first semester of college, I got my class schedule. I didn’t know:
A. What a credit hour was.
B. You only had class 3 times a week if you were on a MWF schedule or 2 times a week if you were on a TR schedule.
This all had to be explained to me.
But the most intriguing part of this schedule was the letter R. MTWRF. I’ve done this ever since and every time someone asks me what R is (in the context of MTWRF), I can’t control my facial features.
Why has this never become a thing?
• • •
Once upon a time when I was a wee lass, I got a vax. My mother explained to me the concept of a vax. I thought that was pretty cool, and I decided my new friend needed a vax also.
He died.
• • •
Now, I’ve talked about utilities before, but I forgot this one: FastStone, which does all sorts of interesting things with images in a batch and, since I do trade in formatting difficult-to-format nonfiction, which often has loads of images, has saved me more time than I can attest to.
• • •
Since we are on tech, this is a funny little habit I picked up thanks to WordPerfect F3 “reveal codes” in 1995.
But! You could not pry this MS feature out of my cold, dead hands.
In MS Wordspeak, this is “show all formatting marks” or “show hidden formatting symbols.”
(No, my ribbon and Quick Access bar do not look like yours.)
• • •
Which brings me to another utility: ImageGlass. The above WordPerfect image was in .AVIF format, which Image Glass opens and can save as any other file format you want.
• • •
I’m setting up a GoFundMe. Please contribute to this noble cause.
• • •
Not to take away from Beau/Shirley Knott’s GoFundMe, which is here, which should be contributed to (but I’m not your supervisor).
• • •
I keep a log of new-to-me music I want to go back and revisit before buying. I shall share with you:
Durand Jones & the Indications “Witchoo”
Tuxedo “Do It”
Moonchild “The List”
I guess you see a theme going on here (other than starting out all in the same key).
• • •
I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
—Nietzsche
Welcome to the party Mojeaux!
You afternoon linksters are a die hard bunch, aren’t you?
“Aspiring odalisque.”
The odalisque was the subject of some of the best art in history (IMHO).
Agreed!!! This one is my favorite.
🙂
I had more PETG filament left on the reel than I thought.
Oh, hey, Lynx.
Sorry about your inflatable friend’s vax reaction.
He died.
“It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.”
The breath of life is escaping his body.
You’re blowing this up way out of proportion.
That’s what happens when you have an inflated sense of ego.
This whole thing is turning into a circus.
If you prick him, does he not bleed air?
Got to maintain cabin pressure somehow.
“Become pneuma”
*humming TOOL*
Toooooooooooooooooooolllllll!
You cahn’t really dust for vomit…
Fun fact: At least at work, I virtually always view documents with the hidden formatting symbols showing. When I’m doing something like proofreading one of my boss’s memos, it drives me crazy when I see extraneous spaces at the end of paragraphs./OCD
As for the content of the examples you showed: my every-six-weeks-or-so trip to the hairdresser is a treat and an indulgence for me. (That shampoo/scalp massage feels SOOO good!) Also, the problem isn’t the fading – it’s the roots!)
I think your Bursar’s Office was just really into Talk Like a Pirate Day, Mojo…. “Arrrr… go to class now, ye hearties!”
I generally hated seeing all the symbols in MS Word. I turned them on occasionally because the formatting was fucked up and I couldn’t figure out why. But normally, I never used them.
I’m there with you kinnath. If I need to fix something, they’re useful, otherwise just give me plain text.
/still generally prefers to open CSV files with a text editor and JUST a text editor
I love them. I call it “turn in the cockroaches” when I train people to spot formatting problems with it.
My 2 year old niece is over today. She’s watching the original Disney Snow White for the first time, and she loves it. She is my youngest kid’s half sister (my family is complicated). My youngest used to love that movie and watched it every day. It’s a nice extra Daily Ray of Sunshine.
That’s the one thing the Zegler/Gadot fest has done for me… I don’t know if I’ve ever actually watched the Disney classic and I’m tempted to now. Balanced against that is not wanting to give one red cent to that organization (knowingly anyway… I lose track of what all they’ve amalgamated at this point).
I know I’ve watched Sleeping Beauty — I think a reissue in the theater when I was a kid.. the black dragon sticks with you.
Snow White is a beautiful movie. Disney and his studio risked everything they had and went all in. The movie was hand crafted from the animation to the sound to the music. The physics even looks amazing – the flow of a dress, the weight of a dwarf as he walks, etc.
But the most intriguing part of this schedule was the letter R. MTWRF. I’ve done this ever since and every time someone asks me what R is (in the context of MTWRF), I can’t control my facial features.
#metoo
I had actually completely forgotten the college R.
Today I use clumsy workarounds like MTuWThF
“MTuWThF”
What someone screams when a front tooth has just been knocked out.
H makes more sense
You would tink so, but, alas…
One boss loved WordPerfect so much that we had to use it for years. I didn’t like it.
We started with WordStar. Then went to WordPerfect. I liked early versions of MS Word. I can’t say there has been any real value added as MS has fucked with Word over the years.
C/PM!
I don’t even remember what I used in high school… it was on the TRS-80 Model III (and let me tell you… that was a fun term paper to write… oy…) and wasn’t mainstream that I recall.
Most of my writing since then has been in Wordpad more than anything else. I was working in a computer lab (as all CS majors probably do) at UGA and distinctly remember several times enabling codes in WordPerfect saved folks who couldn’t figure out from the GUI what had happened to their writing. For Word, it was more often a “why the hell is it page breaking here?!?!”, but still useful.
Collaborative documents is a godsend. Most of the big vendors have added that.
First WYSIWYG word processor I used was Word Perfect for OS/2.
DOS WP had a graphic mode you could toggle to view the document, but not edit.
Started with something I can’t remember on my huge IBM in the mid-late 80s.
Started with Word Perfect in college, then to Word. In late college I used a program called Gobe Productive for BeOS. By grad school I was using very small, niche word processors for research like Mellel. Now I use Apple Notes or Pages if I need to do anything substantive with formatting, which is rare these days.
@Meauxj:
I too hate the WordPress UI, but I’ve used it so much for my own blog that I’m used to its horribleness.
I have the Classic Editor plugin on my blogs. I’m not putting up with that shit on my own time.
I still use WordPerfect because I like the Reveal Codes feature.
I’m pretty much doxxing myself here because there are like 11 of us who use it.
apropos of nothing . . . . .
Last summer, I hurt my foot. I thought I had actually broken something and went to ER to get xrays. They showed nothing, so my local MD sent me to the podiatrist.
Another set of xrays. Then doc walks in and says, you have structural problems in your feet (high arches). This is causing your pain. We can fix this. But first we have to make things worse to make them better. And he did make it worse, and then it got better.
Shpip has spoiled us — I was expecting that story to build up to your podiatrist becoming your arch villain or something.
But instead you toed the line.
I’m not into that version anarchy
According to some, those that pun have no sole.
The question is: did insurance foot the bill?
His toe was jammed in it.
Thank you for the kindness of mentioning, and linking to, my GoFundMe!
Blessings on all who’ve contributed, and to all who would but for their circumstances. Glibs are the best!
Also, welcome as the new Thursday PM links goddess!
You’re welcome!
I’m alternating with Raven Nation.
Cool! Good on ya both 👍👍
Apparently someone woke David Strom up from his 2010 nap and he just found out… Ars Technica is damned political.
Shock!
Gasp!
Next he’ll find out that /. turned into a liberal cesspit long ago and Google didn’t really mean the whole “Don’t Be Evil” thing…. News at 11.
*sigh*
I miss the old good faith arguments on /. (rare as they were). I lurked for years before finally registering. Now I can’t remember the last time I even visited the site.
It’s rather funny it’s the same article I was discussing in the AM links.
I still find Arse useful for insight into things, but the bias is evident.
Just stopped in to say hello to everyone and welcome and thank our new linkster.
WordPerfect was basically kept alive by the legal profession because that’s what the federal courts used. Nobody wanted to give up the reveal codes feature.
WordPerfect was my word processor of choice for years. I still kind of miss it, but I don’t really do any long form writing any more ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I love it when you all talk techie. I have no idea what any of that stuff means nor do I care.
The generational gap is real. And deep. And wide.
I have been on Word since I stopped slacking in the late 90s and wrote my first resume and that’s what Kinko’s had available.
Flirted with Macs over the years but Pages just isn’t in the same league, though free.
I started using openoffice because I was poor, them moved to LibreOffice when the OpenOffice folks did something that was stupid. I’m still using LibreOffice.
I might check that out but I’m lazy so I generally just let MS spy on my trivial files.
You’re supposed to be getting laid.
#metoo
Some band I like is on a label that got me to download their free sampler. Five years later I listened to it a couple weeks ago and it, and the next four yearly samples, are just chock full of great stuff.
Obscure darkwave/electronic and/or cookie monster metal for anyone interested. I came for the former and suffer the latter.
Wait, what?
In February, Rollins announced a $1 billion action plan for bringing egg costs under control, which largely consisted of longer-term policy initiatives aimed at combating the avian flu that has decimated hen flocks. Those included new biosecurity measures, such as sending out epidemiologists to advise farmers on disease risks at their farms; exploring new bird vaccines; and removing regulatory burdens that hinder egg production.
Rollins’ main short-term move, however, was to begin importing more eggs on a temporary basis. In late March, Rollins announced that the administration would begin purchases from South Korea and Turkey. Polish and Lithuanian officials also said they had been approached by the administration.
“We are talking in the hundreds of millions of eggs for the short term,” Rollins said. “And then when our chicken populations are repopulated, and we’ve got a full egg-laying industry going again — hopefully in a couple of months — we then shift back to our internal egg layers and moving those eggs out onto the shelf.”
The government has a Strategic Egg Reserve?
If you told me they had removed restrictions on private importation, I’d find it more believable. But who knows?
South Korea and Turkey sees tariffs and dollars on the horizon. Probably hatching up some plan right now to rip us off.
Shush, I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.
The government has a strategic reserve of EVERYTHING.
“Our Strategic Reserve of Strategic Reserves is running low!”
I remember long ago reading about a current federal warehouse somewhere with a strategic reserve of a bazillion tons of tannin for tanning saddles for the cavalry.
Yes, Suthenboy. I remember reading about a “find” post WWII of a warehouse crammed with leather harness and lines for horses to pull Civil War era cannons. Weapons themselves, not so much: most of the Spencer 7 shot repeating rifles were sold off after the Civil War resulting in the Northern Cheyenne and Sioux being better armed than the 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn in 1876.
Given that eggs are a bigger staple for me than ever because reasons, anything helps.
I am still suspicious of any official reasons given for the price increases. Ten+ years of obvious lies from recent administrations kind of does that.
Yes. I am fairly certain the egg crisis was manufactured because Trump.
Seems like just another shell game to me.
You yoke, but this whole matter won’t be over easy!
Another proof that Trump is a Democrat from the 90s.
https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1907836058005295612
Prez Hoover agrees, calls his Congressional friends to solve the problem
I went looking on reading material for using CP/M, as I have no familiarity with it. I did find a book on Archive.org. The content is older than I am.
I’m having a tech crisis right now. I want to export my Word autocorrects to XML or CSV. Fine. I can do that.
However, the program I want to IMPORT them to says they’re badly formatted. I followed the fucking instructions. Your software just sucks.
The OTHER TWO programs I want to IMPORT them to SAYS they CAN do it, but there is nowhere to do that and their websites and googling are singularly unhelpful, so… $$$ wasted.
I can commiserate. I have fought that scenario many, many times. I avoid XML like the plague but even CSV can get quite finicky.
(Moving data around is my bag.)
I’m just so irritated. My MT gig changed a thing (type directly into the web-based chart instead of in Word where all our text expanders and macros are). The company I work for is no more pleased than I and the rest of the MTs are, but the contract is probably ending June 1 anyway, so this isn’t to crisis levels.
But it IS annoying and it’s a good damned thing I’m not paid on production.
I think in another life Mojeaux is a Latex fanatic (prounced “laa tech”, I’m told)
But can LaTex do this?
I have only a passing familiarity with Latex but I believe the answer is yes
Nice!
I always struggled with columns in Word.
LaTeX seemed to get its biggest fame from being able to print complicated mathematical formulas.
I think there are newer options that don’t make you want to bang your head against a wall.
I called 5% SP500 at work along with another coworker. I may be a “winner”, but none of my savings are.
And this time next year?
Treating the stock market like a casino is a mistake.
Suthen this is my job. I understand that.
Buy on the dip!
I’m thinking of buying a lot of VTI tomorrow. We will probably see more drops, but I like it when stocks go on sale.
Mojeaux, you might like green tourmaline as a budget friendly alternative to emerald…
My wife’s ring: https://ibb.co/vxxCsJPt
Nice!
I like watermelon tourmaline.
Those are cool.
She was originally interested in aquamarine but it’s so light it didn’t really pop. Pretty, though.
Treating the stock market like a casino makes more sense than pretending it’s rational.
From a CBS story I’m too lazy to link:
As a result, experts say, inflation is likely to reignite, which could cause some U.S. households to back on spending. Because consumer spending accounts for about 70 cents of every $1 in GDP, economic growth could slow.
1) Not all price increases are inflation.
2) Frantic consumerism-based economic churn might not be the best long term path.
Yeah, the tariffs will benefit certain favored industries, at the expense of other industries and of (especially) consumers.
This…is disappointing:
Trump gets it, and now I do, too. ‘Globalism’ is much simpler than we thought—and even uglier, if that’s possible. It’s all about money. It’s a global grift. Its entire goal is to preserve a rigged trade system, where the United States charges no tariffs, but every other country can slap tariffs, VAT taxes, currency manipulation, and non-tariff barriers on American goods. That’s it. That’s the whole scam. It’s not about international harmony.
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/morning-in-america-thursday-april?r=d0r3d&utm_medium=ios
It’s also a brilliant example of economic ignorance.
Whatever Trump is doing, and says he is doing, it isn’t for economic reasons. He’s doing political stuff, and slapping an economic tag on the box.
Other nations aren’t taking advantage of Americans through trade. If Trump truly wanted to bring back manufacturing in a real sense, then he would work to end whatever regulations and taxes that the US FedGov inflicts on US companies that the other countries don’t impose on their manufacturing firms.
I suspect there are also tax incentives granted by the FedGov for Us companies to relocate overseas, but I can’t prove that at this time.
Yeah, several companies have announced that they are moving operations to the US to avoid the new tariffs, but eliminating the income tax would be a better way to lure those companies back to the US than imposing protective tariffs.
Tariffs reduce competition in the marketplace. Competition is necessary for driving up quality and driving down prices.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/trumps-liberation-day-tariffs-are-mistake
In short—like all other taxes—tariffs impart a new cost on producers. That new cost does not impact the price of whatever is being produced with the taxed good directly because prices are determined by how much people value the good or service in question, not the cost of production.
But that new cost is a problem for the companies operating right at the margin—meaning the price they can sell their good or service at is only a little higher than the cost of production. To companies operating right on that edge, anything that raises the cost of production could tip them over into the position where they cannot stay in business without taking economic losses. If they raise prices, they lose customers because people aren’t willing or able to pay more. But if they keep charging the market price, they lose money because their costs are now higher than their revenue.
Eventually these companies—be they foreign companies or, more commonly, American companies using taxed foreign capital and resources to produce things here—will have to stop offering whatever product or service they are losing money on. When that happens, supply falls. But Americans want whatever they had been consuming just as much as before, so a drop in supply without a drop in demand means that prices will rise.
I am a Mises fan but they ignore a full continuum of outcomes for any given tariff situations and present a binary outcome. They are correct about price elasticity.
As for Trump – he, Bessent, Mnuchin (present-day and historically) have been clear that they want to reset the economy via government spending, lowering interest rates, stopping the US piggy-bank, and bringing back American manufacturing.
My personal finances have suffered significantly due to market losses – I am more than happy to give back as a beneficiary of long-term government juicing of those markets.
eliminating the income tax would be a better way to lure those companies back to the US than imposing protective tariffs.
That comes next. That’s what my insider friends are all saying.
Tariffs early, establish revenue from them, cut fedgov by 30-40%, run on eliminating the income tax in the midterm.
I’ve heard the same. I don’t believe Congress will cooperate.
That would be incredible if it were to happen. I’d say tariffs and consumption taxes in general are an improvement over income taxes.
Whatever deliverance we’re promised was postponed by a day, so Americans wouldn’t think the jokers in charge were playing them for fools.
But this afternoon, at long last, our president will unshackle us from foreign “unfairness”… by building a bigger blockade around ourselves.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/04/no_author/liberation-day/
If we’re talking really “meaningful” reshoring, we might mimic the conditions that drove most of the offshoring in the first place – pittance wages, zero environmental regs, and so forth.
Saw a statue of a sasquatch holding an American flag and with a bear on a leash. That’s Florida for you. I should have taken a picture.
I’d snort meth off that statue. 🤪
Every couple years I flirt with moving over from Word to some LaTeX compiler for my contracts/documents.
The ideal would be checking a raw text file into git, negotiate via pushing changes to a branch, compile into a beautiful pdf when done.
Even the less ideal version of dickering over an unformatted document in Word and then copying the text into a plaintext file is attractive when I’m digging through the layers of style menus to figure out how the hell the other side got the background behind the text green without using highlight or color fill.
Fussing with styles is a necessary evil, sadly. If you know how to manage your normal.dot, it can be easier if you create your own styles and load them up in that. Import styles from other docs is also fairly easy. There’s just a lot of upfront labor involved.
That said, I format documents for a living, so I have a process, procedures, and standard styles. I also have a good memory for which client I used X style on and where to find it.
I’ve also gotten pretty good at writing and editing macros in Visual Basic.
That’s not a style thing, tho. It’s a <body> function. Page Layout → Page Color → No Color
Also, if I can’t figure out what’s going on or how to fix it, I save as HTML and look under the hood.
For instance, I have a client in France. He runs a rag that people of various languages contribute to, so he sends me docs that are all over the place with language settings. I can tell because normal American English words will be spellchecked. Just clicking the proofing in English button doesn’t fix that. So I have to save as HTML, go through that file and manually find/replace language markup, then go back to Word when I’m done (open HTML in Word, save as Word). Voila.
Another thing I have done is remapped my keyboard hotkeys. I can’t advise any of my clients on how to do something in Word the usual way because I’ve completely rearranged everything YEARS ago and don’t remember the default settings.
Welcome, Mojeaux! Even MORE WordPress!
WHELL. *I* use the Classic Editor plugin for MY sites. Hrmph.
Also, I’m thinking about switching to ClassicPress.
Tariffs early, establish revenue from them, cut fedgov by 30-40%, run on eliminating the income tax in the midterm.
That would be fiscally irresponsible, and we can’t have that.