Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:57:00 GMT
I recently purchased a Kindle DX, mainly to read PDF documents that contain math and comp-sci formulas. Still, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try out the instant gratification of purchasing a “Kindle edition” ebook, so I ordered a sci-fi novel I had read as a child, Alan Dean Foster’s The Tar-aiym Krang.
The Good
The purchase and download via the ever-so-branded “Whispernet” wireless network went without a hitch. The Kindle DX, itself, was great and made reading easy. The text looked good, the navigation seemed intuitive. There was just one problem.
The Bad
The production standards of the content destroyed any chance of convincing me that I was reading something akin to a real book. I found numerous typographical errors, something that just doesn’t occur in real mass-market books, which have been subjected to professional review after typesetting. By far, the most common error was the substitution of a left open single quote for what should have been an apostrophe, an error that I don’t think Amazon missed an opportunity to make. For example, when shortening computer to ’puter:
The brilliant fix (no need to thank me, Mr. Bezos)
So, if you’re Jeff Bezos, you’re probably wondering what you can do to improve the quality of Kindle edition books. After all, you spent all that time, effort, and money on the Kindle itself, getting the look and feel just right, crafting the perfect book-reading experience, even insisting upon seamless “Whispernet” downloads to encourage impulse purchases of Kindle editions. You certainly wouldn’t want the content owners, the lovely folks who supply you with typo-ridden source documents, to undo all that you have worked so hard to achieve with the Kindle, to destroy the immersive, luxurious reading experience that you are so close to delivering, to unweave the spell that convinces readers that the Kindle is just as good as – if not better than! – a real book. Somehow, you must fix the content problem, but you know, you just know, the content owners are going to screw it up for you.
So, here’s what you do, Jeff. Let the content owners screw it up – you know that’s what they’re going to do, anyway – and fix the errors yourself. How? With an army of focused, motivated proofreaders: your customers!
Seriously, this idea would work miracles for you, Jeff. You know how the Kindle lets you make annotations to the Kindle editions you read? Just extend those annotations to include corrections. Then when those annotations are saved to Amazon’s servers, extract the corrections, combine them with the corrections from other readers, maybe verify them with a quick third-party review (a perfect job for the Mechanical Turk, wouldn’t you say?), and then automagically distribute the relevant, approved corrections to every Kindle reader who could benefit from them. Further, to make your readers happy that they found mistakes in the Kindle editions that they purchased, offer them a bounty, say 25 cents, for the first report of each correction found.
In one fell swoop, all your problems with production quality are fixed:
- customers who find errors are no longer angry but happy
- most Kindle editions will be corrected quickly, ensuring a blemish-free reading experience for the bulk of your customers
- even if the content owners give you garbage for source documents, and even if they won’t allow you to change those documents one iota (they are pretty controlling, after all), you can still deliver perfection to your customers: apply corrections on the “client side,” correcting the pristine, yet error-filled source material, on the fly, right in the Kindle itself
And there’s one big bonus I didn’t mention. This capability would make Kindle editions better than real books. Not just marketing-copy, in-theory better, but really better. As in, now we have a compelling reason to switch from paper: to get the benefits of collaborative, peer-augmented reading and correction, in which each reader’s contributions enrich the reading experience for all who follow. Think about it, Jeff, it’s a big deal.
No need to thank me.
Posted in reviews
Tags amazon, bezos, books, kindle, peer, reading, review
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Sat, 07 Apr 2007 16:20:00 GMT
When Amazon.com announced its its Unbox video-download service, I was skeptical. Compared to the reigning champion – the DVD – Unbox looked like a loser:
- Unbox burdened its customers with DRM and the annoyances that come with DRM
- Unbox required the use of a Windows-only player application
- Unbox movies lacked “standard” DVD features such as surround sound, alternative audio tracks, commentaries, and bloopers
The first two points were deal-breakers, so I wrote off Unbox and did my
best to ignore it.
And then Amazon hooked up with TiVo. Beaming movies directly into my
TiVo box eliminates the need to deal with DRM and Windows annoyances.
My two big concerns sidestepped, I decided to give Unbox another
look. I still wouldn’t want to buy Unbox-to-TiVo movies because
they lack the typical DVD extras and would tie up storage
space on my TiVo, but Unbox might be a decent way to rent the
occasional movie – if the price were right.
Is the price right?
That depends on how the price of Unbox compares with the price
of my current rental option of choice, Netflix. Both services offer immediate
access to good movies: Unbox by on-demand downloads, Netflix by
ensuring that I almost always have a DVD or two in the house.
To compare Unbox with Netflix, I had to figure out how much a
rental costs me with each service. With Unbox the figuring was easy
because each rental has its own price tag, typically $3.99.
With Netflix, it’s a bit trickier because the rental price depends
upon how many DVDs I rent in a month. I pay a monthly fee of $17.99
and can rent as many DVDs as I want, at least until the infamous
Netflix rate
throttle
kicks in.
To determine how
many DVDs I rent during the typical month, I had to download my
rental history. (If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can get your
history from the Returned
Rentals page.)
After downloading my history, massaging it into the desired form, and
loading it into R, I generated a
stem-and-leaf plot to visualize the number of DVDs I have rented
during each of the 76 months I have been a Netflix subscriber:
> stem(monthly.rental.counts, scale=2)
The decimal point is at the |
1 | 0
2 | 000
3 | 0000000
4 | 00000000000
5 | 000000000000
6 | 000000000000000
7 | 0000
8 | 000000
9 | 00000
10 | 0000
11 | 0
12 | 00
13 | 00
14 | 00
15 | 0
It looks like I have rented as few as one and as many as fifteen DVDs in a
month. Most months, however, I rent between three and ten DVDs. On
average, I rent about 6.4 DVDs per month:
> summary(monthly.rental.counts)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
1.000 4.000 6.000 6.408 8.000 15.000
Thus my average rental price is about $2.80 per DVD:
> 17.99 / 6.4
[1] 2.810937
Now I can make my Unbox-vs-Netflix price comparison. For me, it
looks like Unbox is about 40 percent more expensive than
Netflix:
> 3.99 / 2.81
[1] 1.419929
So the price of Unbox is not right, at least for me.
Testing Unbox-to-TiVo rentals
Because Amazon is offering free $15 credits to TiVo owners, I decided
to give Unbox a test drive. My test rental was The Illusionist. Renting the movie was
easy (just one click), and shortly thereafter Unbox automatically
downloaded the movie to my TiVo box. When I played the movie,
however, I was disappointed with the video quality. I easily
noticed banding artifacts, which were distracting
at times. On the whole, the viewing experience was inferior to watching a
DVD.
Netflix still beats Unbox
For me, then, Unbox is still a loser. It costs more and delivers
less than DVD rentals via Netflix.
A note to my friends at Amazon.com
I would be happy to give you my business, but right now you’re not
earning it. If you
want me as an Unbox customer, here is the recipe for winning me over:
- Let me easily download movie rentals to my TiVo. (Check.)
- Offer true DVD quality or better. (You’re not there yet.)
- Sell the rentals for less than $2.80. (You’re not there yet.)
Until then, I’ll have to give my money to Netflix.
Cheers,
Tom
Update: edits for clarity; added tags.
Posted in reviews
Tags amazon, dvds, movies, netflix, rentals, reviews, tivo, unbox
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Sat, 16 Sep 2006 06:11:00 GMT
I like to bake, and I work in a professional kitchen from time to time,
so I picked up The Baker’s Manual, 5th
ed., hoping to carry it in my kitchen bag as a quick reference for
large-scale recipes.
Before going further, you need to know two things about professional
bakers. First, they measure dry ingredients not by volume, the way
home bakers do, but by weight, which is both faster and more precise
for the large quantities frequently used in professional kitchens.
Second, when the pros write bread recipes, they express quantities in
relative terms called “baker’s percentages.” Each ingredient’s
quantity is given as a percentage of the recipe’s total flour weight.
For example, the book provides the following recipe, referred to as a
“formula,” in the section on baker’s percentages:
| 80.0% | bread flour |
| 20.0% | whole wheat flour |
| 66.0% | water |
| 2.0% | salt |
| 1.2% | yeast |
As you would expect, the percentages for bread flour and whole wheat
flour add to 100 percent.
Now, here’s where the book goes down in flames. It attempts to
explain how baker’s percentages let you easily scale recipes
to any desired batch size, but it fails. Utterly. Here’s
the book’s explanation for how to scale the above recipe to 300
pounds:
[T]o calculate the weight of each ingredient in the [300-pound]
recipe, you add up all of the percentages in the above formula. This
total percentage value is 169.2. Divide this number by the desired
dough weight, 300 pounds, to get .564. Round this number up to get
.6. Then multiply the percentage amount for each ingredient in the
above recipe by .6 to obtain the larger weight required by the larger
recipe. (Emphasis mine.)
When I read that explanation, I thought, Multiply? That’s the
exact opposite of what you ought to do. And, sure enough, the
book went on to prove its own explanation completely wrong:
| 80% bread flour * .6 | = 48 pounds |
| 20% whole wheat flour * .6 | = 12 pounds |
| 66% water * .6 | = 39.6 pounds |
| 2% salt * .6 | = 1.2 pounds |
| 1.2% yeast * .6 | = .7 pound |
Note: the above is quoted verbatim from the book.
Does the “scaled-up” recipe yield 300 pounds? Nope. Add up the resulting
weights and you get 101.5 pounds. Oops.
Is it really that hard to see that the correct method is simply to
multiply each percentage by desired batch size and then divide by the
sum of percentages? In the case of the book’s 300-pound example, we
would multiply each percentage in the recipe by the following factor:
300 pounds / 169 percent = 177.5 pounds
Let’s try it out:
| 80% bread flour * 177.5 pounds | = 142 pounds |
| 20% whole wheat flour * 177.5 pounds | = 35.5 pounds |
| 66% water * 177.5 pounds | = 117.2 pounds |
| 2% salt * 177.5 pounds | = 3.55 pounds |
| 1.2% yeast * 177.5 pounds | = 2.13 pounds |
Now if you add up the resulting weights, you get the desired
total of 300 pounds.
That the book not only gets the scaling method completely backward but
then goes on to prove itself wrong is amazing. Didn’t anybody at
John Wiley & Sons proofread the math?
Not exactly a confidence-builder for the rest of the book.
Posted in reviews, books, math
Tags baking, math, oops
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Mon, 14 Aug 2006 17:50:00 GMT
John Goerzen recently compared a
bunch of distributed source-code-management systems in Whose
Distributed VCS Is The Most
Distributed?
His comparison includes all of the major contenders except for
SVK and monotone.
He ends up favoring Darcs, which I also prefer and
use to manage my projects’ code.
If you’re looking for a quick overview of distributed SCM options,
check out John’s comparison.
Also check out Bryce “Zooko” Wilcox-O’Hearn’s Quick Reference Guide to Free Software Decentralized Revision Control Systems, which is updated regularly. (He also likes Darcs.)
Update: fixed small typo.
Posted in programming, reviews
Tags darcs, scm, vcs
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 03 Aug 2006 05:34:00 GMT
Amazon.com recently launched Amazon Grocery by offering a $10 discount on purchases of $49 or more. I took the bait.
Amazon’s plan
Judging from Amazon’s initial grocery offerings, I suspect their
plan goes something like this:
- offer only goods that can be warehoused (no perishables)
- undercut traditional retailers on high-margin goods such as organics, naturals, and upscale brands (e.g., Annie’s Homegrown, Bob’s Red Mill, Newman’s Own, and Tom’s of Maine)
- offer a greater breadth of products than traditional retailers can stock (the long-tail play)
- offer customers free “super-saver” shipping to eliminate shipping as a customer concern
- sell products in bulk-quantity packs to reduce Amazon’s internal shipping costs
Prices and bulk packs
For pricing perspective, I grabbed the receipt from my most-recent
trip to Giant Eagle, the local grocery store.
Generally, when both Amazon and Giant Eagle offered the same product,
Giant Eagle priced it significantly higher, in one case more than
twice as high. For example, here are four items from the receipt:
Amazon sells the first three products in packs of 12; the last
product, in packs of 6. For the Mac & Cheese and Red Hot Blues chips,
I don’t mind the bulk packaging at all: my family goes through this
stuff quickly. The last two
items, however, I probably won’t buy from Amazon. We don’t
eat them fast enough to make storage practical.
Test run reveals flaws
Tempted by the $10 discount offer, I placed an order with Amazon
Grocery. Here are the products I ordered:
- Bob’s Red Mill Large Flake Nutritional Food Yeast, 8-Ounce Packages, Pack of 4 – Yes, I actually like this stuff.
- Coomb’s Maple Syrup, Premium Grade B, Organic, 32-Ounce Jug – Grade B refers to darkness, not quality, and Grade B rules: its mightier maple flavor blows away the comparatively wimpy Grade A. (Amazon’s price was $13 per quarter-gallon, which is actually a better deal than the $28.55 I paid for a half gallon of organic Grade B when I last ordered from an online supplier.)
- Annie’s Homegrown Organic Shells with White Cheddar Mac & Cheese, 6-Ounce Boxes, Pack of 12 – My wife loves this mac & cheese, and the boxes are small, so a 12 pack is just about perfect.
Today, the order arrived.
There was one mistake. Amazon sent me the whole-wheat version of the mac & cheese, when I had ordered the regular version. Oops.
It was easy to see how the mix-up happened. The box that contained the 12 pack was clearly labeled by the manufacturer as “organic whole wheat shells & cheddar.” Here’s a photo:
But somebody at Amazon had applied the wrong bar code to the box:
(The & that escaped from the Land Of XML is a nice touch, too.)
Mislabeled as it was, the whole-wheat 12 pack was just waiting to cause
problems for a customer like me.
Is Amazon taking Grocery seriously?
When I called Amazon about the order mix-up, I was curious about how
they would handle it. Amazon Grocery is a complex new offering, and
there were bound to be mistakes. The only question was whether Amazon
was prepared to correct the mistakes in a way that made me feel
confident in getting what I ordered if I were to purchase groceries
from them again.
In this case, they did. When I told the customer representative that
I had been shipped the wrong box, he said that he would put in a “reorder”
for the correct mac & cheese and send it to me via next-day shipping.
As a bonus I could keep the 12-pack of whole-wheat mac & cheese
that had been mistakenly sent to me. I doubt a typical grocery
store would be so willing to eat the cost of its mistakes.
When I told the rep that the box I had received had been mislabeled at
the warehouse and cautioned him against repeating the mix-up by
sending me another mislabeled box, he said he would make a note of my
concern. He also said – and I found this very interesting – that
Amazon’s policy is not to take action until they receive two complaints
about an item being mislabeled. (I hope there is some math behind
that policy.)
Will I receive another mislabeled box? Time will tell.
Update 2006-08-04:
As promised, Amazon sent me a replacement
package, which arrived the next day and contained the correct product.
Cautious optimism
All in all, I’m upbeat about Amazon Grocery. Amazon stocks many
products I can’t find at the local grocery store, and where there is
product overlap, Amazon seems to offer a compelling price advantage. No,
Amazon won’t replace regular trips to the grocery store, but it
probably will change my buying habits for the products that
grocery stores routinely mark-up through the roof. I can’t
see that as anything but good.
Posted in reviews, food
Tags amazon, eagle, giant, groceries, shopping
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:55:00 GMT
Note for coders: If you’re one of the fine folks who reads my blog for the
coding content, I’ll be up-front with you: this article represents
about 2,500 words of non-coding text. Nevertheless, you ought to
read it because I am writing about something that’s important to
you.
We coders, if you stop to think about it, spend our lives doing some
insanely complex and seemingly bizarre stuff. If we want the rest of
humanity to understand us and what we do, we must be prepared to
explain our world to them; they are not going to figure us out on
their own.
Thus the burden of making our world understandable and relevant to
others rests upon our own shoulders. To carry the burden, we must be
able to communicate complex ideas, share the full depth and beauty of
our creations, and help others to see that the things we devote our lives
to are worthy and fascinating. In sum, we need to invest in our
writing skills. Writing is still the most effective, scalable means
we humans have for capturing and sharing complex knowledge. If we
want to reach the rest of the world, we must become good writers.
Unfortunately, writing well is difficult. Like programming,
writing is a struggle. If you want to improve, you must struggle
often. (That’s why I blog.) And while I cannot struggle for you, I
can tell you about an unappreciated writing tool that has become my
go-to reference when writing. It has made my struggles a bit less
difficult and a bit more fun. That reference is not the ever-popular
dictionary.1
Rather, it is the usage guide.
Usage guides are designed to explain the finer points of using our
language and, if they’re good, they offer sensible advice. Have you
ever wondered whether to use affect or effect, compliment or
complement, farther or further, compose or comprise, less
or fewer, precede or proceed? Do you know why you shouldn’t
confuse enormity for enormousness, masterful for masterly, or
purposely for purposefully? How should you approach who and
whom? And how should you address the thorny issue of sexist
language? These are the kinds of questions that usage guides were
created to answer.
A good usage guide isn’t afraid to prescribe advice. Some more-recent
guides, however, are less prescriptive and more descriptive,
following the lead of modern dictionaries. Instead of offering advice
on tricky writing issues, these guides describe the many viewpoints in
play and let you choose among them. I think this weakens a guide, and
so my recommendations below are biased toward prescriptive guides.
Unlike dictionaries, usage guides are not plentifully stocked in book
stores. On a recent visit to my local Barnes & Noble, I was
disappointed to learn that the reference section contained no usage
guides at all. For this reason, I will provide Amazon links to the
guides I like.
Let us begin our tour of usage guides at the beginning, with Fowler.
Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage
Of the authors of usage guides, no one is more revered than Henry Watson Fowler. He and his brother Francis wrote
The
King’s English, a reference published in 1906 that provided lengthy advice on issues of style and grammar. Afterward, the brothers Fowler collaborated on their next major work, but in 1918, after eight years of planning, Francis died, leaving Henry alone with the daunting task of writing the book, which ultimately required another eight years. Published in 1926, this book was to become the influential masterwork,
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, most often called Fowler’s Modern English Usage or simply Fowler.
Since its publication, Fowler has become the
quintessential prescriptive guide to English usage and is still
beloved among picky writers. One can’t help but respect the author,
who doesn’t cower behind dry, academic language but instead throws
himself vividly onto every page and seems to go out of his way to
fight pedantry.
The followers of Fowler prize his precision but love him for his
quirky voice. When you read Fowler, you get Fowler.
Consider the first edition’s entry on superiority (remember, this
was written almost a century ago):
Superiority. Surprise a person of the
class that is supposed to keep servants cleaning his own boots, &
either he will go on with the job while he talks to you, as if it were
the most natural thing in the world, or else he will explain that the
bootboy or scullery-maid is ill & give you to understand that he is,
despite appearances, superior to boot-cleaning. If he takes the
second course, you conclude that he is not superior to it; if the
first, that perhaps he is. So it is with the various apologies (to
use an expressive colloquialism – if we may adopt the current
slang – . . . ) to which recourse is had by writers who wish to
safeguard their dignity & yet be vivacious, to combine comfort with
elegance, to touch pitch & not be defiled. They should make up their
minds whether their reputation or their style is such as to allow of their
dismounting from the high horse now & again without compromising
themselves; if they can do that at all, they can dispense with
apologies; if the apology is needed, the thing apologized for would be
better anyway. . . . (Fowler, 1st ed., 1926.)
The editors of Fowler’s later editions, to the
disappointment of Fowlerians everywhere, have muted Fowler’s voice
while undertaking the necessary work of making the reference more
accessible to contemporary readers and writers. For example, the
superiority entry from the 2nd edition, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers,
reads as follows:
Superiority. Much misplaced ingenuity in
finding forms of apology is shown by writers with a sense of their own
superiority who wish to safeguard their dignity and yet be vivacious,
to combine comfort with elegance, to touch pitch and not be defiled.
Among them are: To use and expressive colloquialism – in the
vernacular phrase – . . . . (Fowler, 2nd ed., 1965)
Most writers consider Gowers’s stewardship of Fowler completely
respectable. The second edition still speaks with Fowler’s voice, and
Gowers’s revisions make the work more practical for modern writers.
The second edition is seen in much the same light as the screenplay
adaption of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: the original was changed,
but the changes were understandably necessary and, most important, the
integrity of the original was largely preserved.
The third edition of Fowler, however, is the subject of controversy.
Edited by Robert W. Burchfield and published in 1996, The New
Fowler’s Modern English Usage differs from the previous editions
in two important respects. First, it no longer speaks with a
distinctly Fowlerian voice. Second, Burchfield allows descriptivism
to creep into the celebratedly prescriptive reference.
Nevertheless, it is a useful reference work. Even the third
edition’s detractors admit that it is a perfectly respectable, modern
usage guide. Their main complaint is that the work is no longer
Fowler, and I am inclined to agree. Burchfield distances
himself from Fowler, as the third edition’s entry on superiority
demonstrates:
Superiority. Fowler’s term for the use of a slang
expression or a socially divisive remark preceded by a distancing or
defensive comment implying that in normal circumstances the speaker
would not deign to use such an expression himself or herself. Such
distancing remarks include as they say;
if the word may be permitted; . . . .
(Fowler, 3rd ed., 1996)
Burchfield writes that superiority is “Fowler’s term,” putting
Fowler in the third person instead of adopting Fowler’s voice.
Instead of recommending a position – taking a stand – he tells you
what positions others have taken (in this case Fowler himself). He
observes and describes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this
approach, but in a usage guide, I prefer to know what the author
himself thinks.
I suspect that many of the third edition’s critics would have welcomed
the book had the Oxford University Press not used Fowler’s name in its
title. But the OUP did call it Fowler, and the reviewers judged it
accordingly. Nevertheless, the third edition is a worthy reference,
and I use it second only to Garner, which I will get to in a moment.
Because all three editions of Fowler have their proponents, all
three editions are still available today. The first edition was out
of print for some time (I found my copy, the original 1926
letterpress edition, at a book sale), but the third edition’s
awakening of the Fowlerian hordes led to renewed interest
in republishing the earlier versions. Now all three are
readily available:
Which version is for you? If you want an up-to-date, practical
reference, get the 3rd edition (or, better yet, get Garner,
discussed next). If you want less descriptivism and more of the
original Fowler flavor, get the 2nd edition instead. You probably
should not get the first edition unless you are fascinated by the
English language or want to experience the unadulterated, original
Fowler, in which case you are the kind of person who probably has
all three editions already.
Garner’s Modern American Usage
My favorite book on usage is Garner’s
Modern American Usage. Bryan Garner, a pragmatic
prescriptivist, has crafted an excellent usage guide of a distinctly
Fowlerian flavor. (That he also founded the H.W. Fowler Society
ought to tell you something about the way he approaches usage.)
In Garner, the detractors of the third edition of Fowler have found a
successor to Fowler in spirit. Where Burchfield describes, Garner
prescribes. Consider how the authors approach the subject of sexist
language. Burchfield writes:
sexist language. 1. As indicated in
numerous articles in this book . . ., feminists and others sympathetic
to their views, from about the 1970s onwards, have attacked what they
take to be male-favouring terminology of every kind and have scoured
the language for suitable evidence and for gender-free
substitutes. Their argument hinges on the belief that many traditional
uses of the language discriminate against women or render them
‘invisible’ and for these reasons are unacceptable. The various types
of alleged linguistic discrimination need not be repeated here.
Perhaps the most obvious reference works on the subject are
. . . . 2. Some landmarks. As rough indicators of the
development of feministic views on gender-free language it might be
useful to set down in chronological order details of some decisions
and discussions that have taken place in various English-speaking
countries since 1988: . . . .
(Fowler, 3rd ed., 1996)
Burchfield then devotes the next two subsections (3 and 4),
representing the balance of the full-page entry, to examples from both
sides of the debate and to describing the academic viewpoint on the
subject.
In contrast, Garner distills the problem to its essence
and offers practical advice:
SEXISM. A. Generally. If you start
with the pragmatic premise that you want to avoid misleading or
distracting your readers, then you’ll almost certainly conclude that
it’s best to avoid sexist language. Regardless of your political
persuasion, that conclusion seems inevitable – if you’re a
pragmatist.
But does avoiding sexism mean resorting to awkward
devices such as he/she? Surely not, because that too would distract
many readers. What you should strive for instead – if you want readers
to focus on your ideas and not on the political subtext – is a style
that doesn’t even hint at the issue. So unless you’re involved in a
debate about sexism, you’ll probably want a style, on the one hand,
that no reasonable person could call sexist, and on the other hand,
that never suggests you’re contorting your language to be
nonsexist.
(Garner, 2nd ed., 2003)
Garner then goes on to provide two pages of practical suggestions:
B. The Pronoun Problem. . . .
C. Words with man- and -man. . . .
D. Differentiated Feminine Forms. . . .
E. Equivalences. . . .
F. Statute of Limitations. . . .
(Garner, 2nd ed., 2003)
Garner also provides a bibliography (subsection G) should you
wish “to inquire further into this interesting subject.”
Most of the differences between Garner and Fowler 3 are
not so pronounced. Either reference would serve the needs of
most writers. Nevertheless, I find myself reaching
for Garner first and then, if I want a second opinion, for Fowler 3.
So my top choice is Garner.
This ends my brief tour of usage guides. I have overlooked
many useful guides, such as Merriam Webster’s, but
I don’t find them as useful as Garner or Fowler.
If you happen to be in a good library, prowl the reference
section and draw your own conclusions.
My advice: if you don’t have a usage guide, get one and use it
If you care about writing enough to own and use a dictionary, you
probably ought to have a good usage guide, too. While there are many
usage guides available, if you can have only one, my recommendation
would be for Garner’s
Modern American Usage. If you are the kind of person who likes
the luxury of a second opinion, complement Garner with The
New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd ed. (Paperback) (or 3rd
revised ed. in Hardcover). Finally, if you want to experience
Fowler unaltered, pick up a copy of the first
edition of Fowler. If you find it at a book sale, you might
be able to score a copy of the original 1926 printing.
Even if you don’t want to buy a usage guide, you ought to sign up for
Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day. Every day you’ll receive an emailed
tip from Garner and maybe a quotation or two on writing. Sign up
at the
OUP’s email-subscription
page.
I prefer printed reference books, but if you would rather get your
usage information online, here are a couple of starting points:
There you have it: the usage guide – my favorite writing tool. If I
haven’t convinced you to add one to your own writing toolkit, at least
flip through Garner or Fowler the next time you’re in the
library. Maybe then you’ll reconsider. For me, usage guides are a
no-brainer: anything that makes writing a bit more fun and a bit less
of a struggle is worth having on my bookshelf.
Because dictionary publishers have made the
dictionary-and-thesaurus duo a part of every college
freshman’s standard gear, I will assume that you already have a
good dictionary and so focus my attention exclusively on
usage guides. If I’m wrong about this, I can recommend my favorite dictionary, The New Oxford American Dictionary. (Please do not bother to inform me that the NOAD is inferior to The Shorter OED because if that’s the way you roll, you clearly don’t need my advice.) Another good choice is Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition.
Posted in reviews, good stuff, writing
Tags fowler, meu, usage, writing
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 06 Jul 2006 03:48:00 GMT
As you may recall from a previous
post,
I set up a CafePress store to
sell LectroTest Robot–branded stuff such as t-shirts, hats, mouse
pads, magnets, and so on. CafePress does a good job of making their
products appear to be of the highest quality, but I am naturally
skeptical about such claims.
In particular, I wondered about their t-shirts.
The results of their heat-transfer printing process – previously the
only option – did not make me happy. Images with transparent
areas revealed the transfer background, which over time yellowed
and made the image seem to float on a sea of urine.
So when I set up The LectroTest
Emporium, I specified the use of
CafePress’s newer “direct-printing” process for t-shirts, hats, and
every other product for which it was offered. Still, I wondered about
the quality.
So I ordered up a LectroTest Robot t-shirt and put it to the test.
Test one: the eyeball and the scanner
When the t-shirt arrived, my initial impression was that it
looked pretty darn good. The Robot came out perfectly, and even the
pointy parts of the LectroTest lightning rendered without problems.
The colors were true, if a little less saturated than I would have
preferred.
Compared to silkscreen, the direct-printing process seems to produce
results that are a bit less saturated and a bit less crisp. It’s like
an airbrush artist rendered the Robot onto a billboard-sized shirt
that was carefully shrunken to normal size.
Next, I threw the t-shirt on a flatbed scanner. The results are
below. The first image is an overall view of the Robot logo. The
second is a 300-dpi close-up of the lettering, where you can see the
air-brush effect.
Test two: the iron
To check for color offsetting, I turned the shirt inside out and
ironed it on a full-steam, cotton setting. Throughout the ironing,
the face of the front-side image was pressed into the white cotton of
the back side of the shirt. Nevertheless, none of the ink migrated.
The pure white remained pure white.
Test three: the washer
For the final test, I washed the shirt on a normal warm/cold cycle
with a small load of other clothes. I then dried the clothing on a
medium cycle. (CafePress recommends washing in cold water and drying on
low, but nobody pampers their t-shirts like that, and so I tested under
more typical conditions.)
When I took the shirt from the dryer, I didn’t see any signs of
shrinkage or fading. To double-check, I ironed the shirt and threw it
back on the flatbed scanner.
Doing a before-and-after comparison of the
scans in the Gimp, I was able to see some
shrinkage and fading (see image below). Top to bottom, the shirt
shrank by about 4.5 percent; left to right, the shirt actually grew
by about 1.8 percent. Minor fading was apparent, especially in the
solid black areas. Neither the shrinkage nor the fading were
concerning, however; both are typical for t-shirts, especially on the
initial washing. The bottom line is that the shirt’s coolness
was untarnished.
Summary
It’s a good t-shirt. It looked cool out of the box and fully captured
the metallic fierceness of the beloved LectroTest Robot. The shirt
handled a hot-steam ironing without any ink offsetting. It shrank and
faded a bit on its initial wash, but neither change detracted
meaningfully from the shirt. In sum, CafePress’s direct-printed
t-shirts seem like the real deal: they look good and stand up to
typical wear and washing.
Posted in reviews, perl, marketing
Tags cafepress, lectrotest, reviews, shirts, t
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:23:00 GMT
Recently I had Verizon’s fiber-optic service “FiOS” installed
at my home. The installation process took about a half day
and involved placing the following boxes around my house:
- optical network terminal (ONT, installed outside of house)
- battery backup unit (BBU, installed in basement)
- power adapter (plugged into household electrical outlet)
The ONT was installed next to my old POTS
junction box:
The ONT acts like a miniature central office. To my house it provides
four POTS lines for voice service and one 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port for
data service. The ONT accepts a single fiber-optic cable that
connects all of these services back to Verizon’s central office.
As part of the installation process, Verizon moved my POTS lines from
copper over to the ONT’s POTS interfaces. Verizon wanted to remove my
copper-based service altogether, but I forbade them from doing so
because I have non-Verizon business lines that I want to keep on
copper, which competitive carriers can use to offer me service.
(Verizon is not required to share its fiber cables with competitive
carriers.)
If you look closely at the ONT, you’ll see that it also is capable of
handling video service:
(At present Pennsylvania’s cable-franchise laws prevent Verizon
from offering video service, but I’m sure Verizon’s lobbyists are
working to change that situation.)
Unlike copper wires, fiber-optic cables do not carry power. The ONT,
therefore, must be powered from my home’s electrical service. If the
power goes out, the battery backup unit (BBU) will supply power for
the ONT’s voice services for about four hours.
VoIP users beware: When the household power fails, the ONT’s data
services will be dropped immediately in order to conserve the BBU’s
battery. This seems pretty lame to me, but Verizon confirmed this
behavior when I called them to ask about it. If you need data service
during a power failure, make sure your ONT is powered via a UPS
under your control.
To provide data service to my house, the installer ran a CAT-5 cable
from the ONT’s 10/100 Ethernet port into my house, where it plugs into
a D-Link 4-port “Ethernet Broadband Router,” provided by Verizon for
free. Although the provided router has NAT and firewall features, I
placed a Linux-based firewall between it and the rest of my home
network as an added precaution.
I have been using the service for several days now, and here is my
verdict:
It’s just broadband.
Practically speaking, I can’t tell any difference between FiOS and my
Adelphia cable-modem service. I ordered 5-Mbps service from both
providers, and both services provide about 5 Mbps down, which is
faster than fast enough for me. The FiOS service has slightly lower latency – I
can ping www.google.com in about 9 ms – and that’s a nice plus.
The big benefit of FiOS is competition: Verizon’s price is about $10/month
less than Adelphia’s. When I called Adelphia to cancel my service,
their representative attempted to change my mind by offering me a
3-month promotional discount and trying to sell me extra television
channels.
I passed.
Posted in reviews, hardware, networking
Tags fios, networking
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:20:00 GMT
“Reality” shows have plunged mainstream television into an entirely
new depth of stupidity – and for television, that’s saying something.
Fortunately for us, some programs defy the downward trend, and Masterpiece Theatre’s Foyle’s War is one of the
best.
Read more...
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