RANT Deliverance! (with apologies to Cornel West)

Oh, the twisted road of word processing.

When I began working as an editor in 1984, only one person out of about 15 or so in my employer's curriculum and examinations department had their own computer. That person, still among my dearest friends, was writing one of the primary moneymaking textbooks for the company, so he rated the special treatment. The rest of us, as far as I remember, either typed or handwrote whatever we were working on and passed it off to the recently rebranded "administrative assistant" to key in the text on an IBM Selectric with an OCR ball so that the product could then be sent along to the data processing department for scanning. And they later became "information processing." The dark days.

Eventually we received our own computers, which were put to best use with the introduction around 1985/6 of interoffice email, which was great for running football pools and writing song lyrics for our house band, including the prophetic "Working at Home," which an enlightened manager allowed his writers and editors to do in the mid-1980s, thus these lyrics, 34 years before COVID:

We're all working at home.
Don't call us on the telephone.
You don't deserve us, so don't disturb us,
While we're working at home. (Paisan/Czar)

That's 1986, folks. Talk about prophesy deliverance (!).

When word processing truly hit, we worked in Lotus AmiPro, and I was still laboring in that program as of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I have some invoices from back then I can't access because it's kinda hard to find AmiPro-to-Word conversion software. I guess it existed at some point.

Then came the glorious Word 2003. I still receive files from publishers that have been created in that program. With the updates that came down the pike, it did everything I needed it to do, and I could find all the commands easily. Anyone who thinks Apple/Mac products are intuitive have a different neurological operating system than I do. When mi esposa hands me one of her infernal devices to figure out, I just want to throw up (my hands).

Word 2007 was hardly a step forward. They took all the functionality of Word 2003 with updates and placed it where it didn't belong. So for years I toggled between the two programs as circumstances required.

Everything was fine until sometime in the mid-2010s, when one of my favorite authors, an Aussie who found this blog back before Google developed its ever-evolving algorithms and has used me ever since, roped me into editing the papers and related materials for a conference he was heading up on, I believe, the digital humanities -- the first time that conference was ever held in the southern hemisphere. He was very proud, and should have been. However, it turned into one of the most hellish projects I've ever worked on.

I ended up receiving manuscripts from all over the world, many written by nonnative-English authors, which was bad enough. But because about half of these folks were leading-edge technophiles I also started receiving emails giving me shit for requiring that manuscripts be written in Word. That I didn't use Linux or some other noncommercial program branded me as a Luddite worthy of all the derision they could heap on me. And they did.

My Aussie pal had entrusted much of the project management to one of his colleagues, who was too busy running the conference, so that task also fell to me—as did things like properly positioning art within the Word documents, a job that I'd never even attempted. It was hell times four, at least. My requested rate skyrocketed, though, but no amount of money could have made it worth it, especially given . . . 

That because I was dealing with so many different sources of input, I had my first experience with Office 365, or whatever Microsoft was calling their online suite at the time. So I had to download  this program onto a new laptop I'd purchased in case my old one ever failed. That was after the three days of updates required when I first plugged the machine in, since I'd never even opened the box. To date, in 25 years of freelancing, I'm on just my third computer, as far as I recall.

So, here I am, dealing with a worldwide collection of goddamn malcontents on a laptop with word processing software with which I'm unfamiliar, doing tasks I've never attempted. I finally got the grasp of the whole thing by the time my work was wrapping up. 

My next move, naturally, was to uninstall Office 365, hoping to never see it again.

Big mistake.

Bill Gates might be out to save the world, but his small type ruined my life. Buried in the agreement to install Office 365 was that if it was ever uninstalled, said uninstallation would take with it all updates to previous versions of Word. I could almost handle dealing with an unadulterated Word 2007, for which updates could still be had. But being left with a virgin version of Word 2003, when they'd stopped supporting the product a year or two earlier? That realization caused a pit in my stomach that could very well have been one of the proximate causes of my guts exploding sometime in May 2020: a perforated colon (a semicolon in my vernacular), emergency surgery (positive for COVID on the operating table, which later turned out to be false; no doubt a joy for the surgeons), four months with an ostomy bag, and now a gut with multiple large hernias requiring very complicated surgery to get me looking at all normal again. (Surgery pending, but that's another battle and a major rant.) Imagine the moguls on a freestyle ski slope, and you'll have an idea of what my midsection looks like -- on top of a rather emaciated 152-pound frame. And I struggle to keep that weight.

Fast-forward to March 2021, as my life is crumbling on a number of different fronts (although there are the occasional joys over the years, such as sons marrying wonderful women and the onset of grandparenthood). Because I'd been using laptops for years, I'd also been using external keyboards, for both the size of the keys and the number keypad to the right. I've also never used a touchpad. Ever, ever, ever. First thing I do is find out how to disable the fucking thing.

Late March 2021, the keyboard functionality fails, somehow also on the external keyboard, which my laptop will no longer recognize. Story of my life, along with many family members being medical mysteries (unfortunately my medical history is rather obvious) . . . even the Geek Squad is baffled. They asked, "Have you tried an external keyboard?" I'm sure the obvious Do you think I'm a goddamn idiot came through in my voice. They pushed as many buttons as they could and did whatever their geekdom could pull out, but no keyboard response. At least my data was still accessible, not that I need 95 percent of it. After my publishers get my work, I could delete it from my system and no one would care.

So, cheapskate that I am, I wander over to the laptop aisle at Best Buy and purchase the second-cheapest laptop on the shelf, figuring that I do no gaming, I'm not making any videos, I'm not streaming porn. My computer usage is entirely limited to word processing, email, internet searches for work, and YouTube. The greatest gift I've ever received was for Father's Day about four years ago when my sons signed me up with YouTube Premium, which I'd never do on my own. I told them to keep that up and they never needed to buy me another Father's Day present. We've all held to that agreement. All for the music, and plenty that's not available on any other streaming service.

Also, idiot that I am, I didn't realize that I was purchasing a glorified tablet. No storage space for software and certainly not for my 20 years of unnecessary work files. So while I'm still with the external keyboard and an old TV monitor for my screen, which I don't mind at all, I'm thrown into the world of external hard drives and, later, cloud storage. Am I done yet? By no means.

I did buy an external hard drive about 15 years ago, but of course would do backups about once every six years. The only thing worthwhile on there is a bunch of my wife's old recipes, from the days when she could still negotiate a Mac computer. So I had that. A friend who's worked for Oracle for decades sent me a solid state drive that he was no longer using that I now use as my primary storage, which was great until it no longer would recognize my new rig. A six-dollar cable from Amazon fixed that problem. (As he says, "Trust the Buddha and buy good cables.") Then I had to figure out, a state that  comes and goes, how to back that up to my old external hard drive. 

And then comes a new client a month ago that insists that everything be backed up to the cloud, a place I'd never been. Why I all of a sudden wanted to listen to a new client about something they'd have no way to verify is a mystery to me, except that my client base is shriveling up these days and I want to make folks happy. This whole "Land on Demand" thing was out of control years ago. I aim to please.

So, Google One. My Oracle pal assures me that it's easy with good support. Uh-huh. After installation, nothing seems to be working the way it's supposed to, and I spent two hours computer-chatting with Cynthia or Diane or Elmo or someone, with no resolution. Then they start emailing me asking for my opinion on their support. I let them know I was having many troubles and their chatline was worthless. So what do they ask me for? Not only screenshots, but I'm supposed to capture the movements in progress of what's happening on my screen when I do certain things and send that to them. I can do that about as well as I can touch my right hand to my right elbow. I finally cancelled the subscription, which I'd had for less than 24 hours. I asked them what would happen to the 30GB of files or so I'd uploaded. Could I still access them with my free 15GB that comes with my Google account? Yes, of course, but nothing would be updated.

While I was pondering my next step (Dropbox is far, far more expensive, but at least I'd sort of used it before), Google One fixed itself overnight. All of a sudden, icons I didn't see before were where they should have been the previous day, I can do backups, etc. A few mysteries remain, but I'm still in the game . . . for my new client who's now gone silent on me when I have many questions to be answered on a book of Catholic litcrit. I was told years ago by one of my university presses not to even bother with a medium edit on literary criticism, because the authors usually suck and are resistant to editing. 

Does anything make any sense?

Copyediting: Response to Instructions

D—: I should have this wrapped up in the next day or so. The writing is pretty clean, so thanks for that. I'll use Track Changes and also provide a clean copy if you and the editor would rather work from that as opposed to vetting each of the changes. If not, I'll skip that step.

I'd like to use Word's Comments feature for queries, as opposed to in-line queries [QY: like this], as they're simpler and have less chance of messing up the text.

Regarding the notes, I'll use the basic available information in a style that's pretty close to Chicago that I've established with a few of my nonprofits that traffic heavily in these types of medical/social science citations. The notes provide the usual information, with a standardized form or forms for the URLs/DOIs. It's a simple approach and gives the readers everything they need to find the citations online -- or not, if they'd rather not. Something for everyone, and not too complicated. My main question for you, though, is do you want the notes numbered consecutively through the book? Since there are relatively few of them for a book of this length, that may not be a bad approach, and it also saves the book from having a bunch of notes numbered 1 or 2, which sometimes seems a little goofy to me. Your call. It's easy to do either way, mostly a function of setting up page breaks with section breaks rather than page breaks.

And I'll assume, unless you tell me otherwise, that you want page breaks before each new chapter. Even without coding added at this stage, I think it would be easier for your designers.

So many people are working on weekends these days, even the salaried folks, so if I hear from you today, that's great. If Monday, that's fine, too. But I'll probably be able to start keying today.

Thanks.

Bob

Google Docs: Damn

 Working in a Google Doc now for a national nonprofit.

1. Commenting in auto-notes allowed!

2. For the footnotes, when URL is present, a pop-up appears asking if Google Doc should replace it with the title of the site! Of course, the pop-up is a pain in the ass for my purposes, but damn.

Will AI replace copyeditors and proofreaders? Dunno. Will it replace cockroaches?

Haven't Been Here in a While

In the words of Warren Zevon in his own version of "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," "I don't wanna talk about it." I will say that things are a whole lot different now than they were just prior to my 59th birthday, the dateline of the prior post. Yow.

The hands-down best part of the changes is that I recently became a first-time grandfather, so wonderful things do happen. Our son and daughter-in-law have decided that once our granddaughter has a recognizable face, she will also have no social media presence. They won't be posting pictures for public viewing, and I'm sure it'll be a long time before their child does. And my kids are not Luddites by any means, DIL included. Nor do they particularly put themselves out there, at least via the only medium that I very, very occasionally access: the much-dreaded Rat's Nest; both sons have abandoned it, and our daughter-in-law might post twice or thrice a year. I think they do Instagram stuff, but I don't really know (or know what that is) nor do I care. All three can stare into their phones for hours with the best of them, although the new parents now have a better way to spend their time.

And no photo of my most brilliant and beautiful granddaughter will appear here, because it wouldn't last long anyway. Scroll down a little and you'll see that Blogger has scrubbed the picture of the mascot and me, for godsake. I'm not sure which of us triggered the facial recognition bots. Google years ago wiped out from this blog the photo of the czarina and me with John Cale . . . and also wiped out, at least on my side, the same photo as an attachment to an email to an author in Israel, for whom I was writing an index. Thankfully the author did receive the email and the photo deletion didn't until occur until sometime down the line. But it still makes you go hmmm, as some long-forgotten sort-of comic would say.

Just got through the leanest month in the modern history of LandonDemand. September's already looking better, which isn't saying much, unless folks bail on me. It's happened before. Or something is moved to next season. Or a well-known university press gets a job back three weeks early—a true sign of my lack of stuff to do—but the Holy Grail known as the Purchase Order Number has not yet been assigned. And I start what becomes a string of worldwide emails to get one. I mean, talk about no good deed goes unpunished.

On the other hand, with this same press, I once filed an invoice on Thursday morning and was paid late that afternoon, direct depozick [sic]. So I can't really complain.

I just realized that the insomnia I've been battling for much of this year could have been spent right here. Anyone out there reading this is very, very lucky that I've not happened upon that notion before now. I've been unleashing the word horde (thanks, Wm. S. Burroughs) upon any poor soul who'll stand still long enough. (See paragraph 1.)

And no more comments. Sorry. The spammers are getting past the meager defense that Blogger provides. I'm always available via landondemand@gmail.com, often too much so. Write me, especially if I don't know you.

Technology Update

It's a twisted string of events, but I am now the owner of two smartphones, desiring two fewer. At least this latest one has the benefit of providing me telephone and internet service, something the former model seemed to find troublesome more often than not.

Make Your Donation to Wikimedia

I just did. Any editorial professional who doesn't give at least something to these folks should be ashamed. You know you use it.

As Damon Runyon might have written, "Do not be a welch."

The Exigencies of Morality

We have a friend staying with us for a few days. She needed a new cord for her iPhone charger. I was going up to Le Petit Office Depot (it's Bristol, baby) to drop off something for FedEx Ground, and she came into the store to look for cords. Of course, they were about twice as expensive as she was expecting . . . and Sam Walton's baby was right across the street.

So, naturally, we drive over to Walmart. Our friend has never entered a Walmart. So our friend maintains her illusion of cleanliness and I go in and buy the cord for her. Good thing I went in, though, because in my essential 1974 way, I needed a longer handset cord for my landline phone anyway—because without extenders, rerouters, and physical contortion, my 2017 cell phone barely gets service thirty feet from the wireless router in my home because of brick walls built almost ninety years ago.

Technology Rant

You longtime readers know I don't have good luck with this stuff. I complain about technology and I slice my hand open or the czarina gets me a smartphone. Horrible things happen when I cross the great magnet.

But toner. For chrissakes': Toner. Don't give me this bullshit (you can say that now, can't you?) about Toner Low, Toner Low, Replace Toner. Page 100 looks perfectly dark to me. You can't crank out page 101?

I yearn for the old days of reading fading printouts by candlelight while the coolies fetched my mint juleps and the serving wenches kept a check on my opioid addiction.

Telephones: Hate 'Em

"People with nothing to do resent any imposition on their time." --William S. Burroughs.

And people with too damn much to do resent not when something else is put on their plate but being kept waiting to do whatever it is has to be done.

I'm sitting here waiting for a 10am phone call. It's 10:40a. Sitting here with my thumb up my butt is billable time in my mind, but that's not important. I'm not going to try to get my head back into a project -- and I've already shifted gears from catastrophe -- only to have to put it down again. It's turning into a different catastrophe.

Seething. Bigly. 

End of an Era Parting Shot

Confluence of three events in this time in Land on Demand technology history:


1. Putting the brakes on this blog a few weeks ago.


2. Facebook notified me today that I joined six years ago. Ugh.


3. The czarina got me a smart phone. I'm sure the unintentional consequences will start soon enough. I suppose I'm just glad to have a flashlight and a stopwatch that runs into the double-digit hours. It's like a Swiss Army knife for someone with no useful skills.

Demoticons

A client I've had since Atlanta days is a fabulously successful businessman who came here from South Korea in 1976 with $200 and barely passable English. He got off his flight at Indianapolis and wondered, "What do I do now?" Forty years later, he's an institution in Atlanta, in his chosen industries nationwide, and in his family's hometown in Korea.

Very dignified gentleman, I guess now in his mid-70s.

Just received an email from him with a :-) . I'm horrified, but at least when it comes to cutesy keyboard stuff, he's a few years behind the times. Of course, not as far behind the times as I am. My idea of an emoticon is "[insert emoticon here.]."

People read what they want to anyway.

We've had three teenagers from other countries staying with us roughly since the beginning of the school year. My wife and I recently told them to leave their phones and computers downstairs and they can use them only for a few hours a day in the common areas.

Law of unintended consequences no. 1: Left them without alarm clocks.

Law of unintended consequences no. 1a: Do you know how hard it is these days to find AM/FM alarm clocks? Smartphones have killed them. Finally found a few at Walmarx. You can get just alarm clocks (no radios), and of course you can get all kinds of digital crapola and stuff to plug your phones into.

Get 'em while they last

A big kick for me growing up was listening to AM radio late at night to stations from different cities. Between 1969 and 1977, I lived on the 10th story of an apartment building on Staten Island, NY, facing away from the Empire State Building, which was the primary broadcast tower for NYC at the time. For major TV networks we got Philadelphia TV, not NYC, and at night I would spin the radio dial and pick up the clear-channel stations from Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis, et al., and on rare occasions, I believe, Salt Lake City.

I posted a picture of that building very early in this blog's history. I wonder if the Google has taken it out, along with pictures of my dog and John Cale, although they are not together. That would be a sight.

Not Helping Matters

Bill Gates: Stay offa my lawn!

Microsoft introduces enhanced research and editing features for Word.

This move will not make for better research or better manuscripts. It will, however, lead to increased plagiarism and more embedded links in Word documents that make my life hell.

Dipping My Toe Very Gently into the Antitechnology Pool Again

How can LinkedIn become more irrelevant to me? By looking like Facebook now when I open it. I'm finding that my six friends on Facebook are about two too many. And now every so often when I open LinkedIn, I'm seeing what people are liking who are even more irrelevant to me than the connections I see through Facebook.

People from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta? God help me. I mean, perfectly nice people (most of 'em), but it's odd the memories that are dredged up.

Crossing the Great Magnet

The good doctor Hunter S. Thompson cranked out a lot of great phrases. The one that serves as the title of this posting I've always taken to mean that when you interfere with the greater powers that control the universe, you're inevitably going to get sucked back across whatever line you've violated and slammed back down onto the pavement.

My technology update of a few posts ago? Well, well, what's happened since?

Old computer finally became unworkable, particularly due to the huge and steady flow of nonsense that Google Chrome forces on it. So I took it up to my computer genius, who explained to me that you can only put so much water through a hose, or whatever metaphor he used.

I also took up there the computer on which I'd had him disable the Internet when I purchased it a few years ago. It has more memory and enough additional processing power to handle my limited needs. I'm also using Firefox now, which helps.

But since I'd bought this computer a few years back and it's never been hooked up to the Internet, I had a few hundred (yes) and probably 24 hours worth (yes) of updates to install. I think that computer is finally working mostly OK, although I'm getting some undebuggable script message whenever I'm online too long. And the older computer now . . . I'd removed Office 360 from it, hoping to free up some space. However, in doing so, Mr. Gates reverted my system to the original Word 2003. While Mr. Genius found and downloaded the service pack for it, the 2003 -> 2007 converter is now missing. I'll need to take both back eventually, although now at least I'm able to work.

Paraphrasing Warren G. Harding, "My shredder, my goddamn shredder" -- the piece of equipment that prompted the other blog post . . . I tried to feed too much paper at once through the thing, and it jammed. I took out some not entirely sharp instrument to try to clear the jam, thinking, I won't hurt myself with this.

Uh-huh. The moral equivalent of a redneck's last five words: "Hold my beer. Watch this."

I ended up jamming some blunt force object from about the base of my index finger about two inches into my hand. Filled up four paper towels with blood, not to count the amount that I washed down the drain just letting water run over it. Pint of blood maybe? Who knows?

Three stitches later . . . and a tetanus shot tomorrow.

Let me go on record as saying I love technology. Absolutely love it.

PS: And just how stupid am I? My hand is swelling and turning purple (this is the hand I didn't break in December and let go untreated for a month, leaving me with a pinky finger that's permanently at half staff and something that looks like a double-size and slightly off-center knuckle), but what's the first thing I do when I get home? Certainly not attempt to get back on track with deadlines that were thrown out the window because of a week lost to exchange student, computer, and health issues . . . nooo, that would make too much sense. I'm obsessed with clearing the shredder, so I have out an exacto knife and a Swiss army-type knife to fix it. Mission accomplished and life is peaceful . . . until the next freakout, which'll probably be about three hours from now, if everything remains on schedule.

Technology Update

Flip phone? Check.

Word 2003? Check.

Adobe Acrobat 9.0. Check. Maybe it's 7.0. I don't know. It works, and I have the disc if it doesn't.

Unable to intuitively or at a glance operate the televisions in my house? Check. The last time I voluntarily turned on the TV was to watch the Masters a few years ago to help me get to sleep. (I actually have enjoyed watching golf on TV. No stress. Nothing bad happens, except some gazillionaire only makes $60,000 this week for finishing 35th.)

iAnything? Nope. I used to have one of those tiny iPods years ago. I put about a dozen albums on it and lost all interest.

I seem to catch the blame for this, but the -- uh, sh!t, what's the opposite of receptive? (see, you few blog readers; it all comes together) -- end of a plug-in music-type device snapped off in the receptive part of my dashboard while someone related to me by marriage was plugging it in and I was supposedly making a sharp turn. Ehh . . .

Anyway, this little nub is as deep in there as you can get (not far), and according to the geniuses here in the home of the World's Fastest Half-Mile, you'd have to take the whole dashboard out to fetch the thing. About $400 of labor for something that they'll actually fix in about two seconds. I never listened to music much anyway in recent decades. I've been driving around in silence for years, even before that -- and that's Bristol silence in the car, baby, not Brooklyn silence. I think I turned off the radio when Sean Hannity went to New York from Atlanta. I might not be making that up.

[Speaking of which, turns out that Bernie Sanders's boyhood home was about a tenth of a mile from my last known NYC address. Right down the street, make a little turn, two houses down. Have I already mentioned this?]

The problem is that I think my younger son will be taking this v-hikl to Colorado with him. The man needs some music. As did I at that age. But I've always got AM radio, where few people dare to tread.

But the car. It seems to me that if I parked on a steep enough hill and got a little vacuum action going on . . . or a magnet. . . .

Technology.

So yeah: AM radio.

What prompted this post is that Tere bought a shredder a year or two ago and had it up where she does some work, but she never uses it. I have all kinds of uses for it. I moved it down to the LoD headquarters a week or two ago. Used it yesterday. What fun.

Shredder. Check.

It's May 1, 2016, and I'm happy to have a shredder at hand. This century is just passing me by. I'm not really complaining.

Facebook. Assumed name. Five friends. Wife, two sons, one future daughter-in-law, one ex-girlfriend. I've received two friend requests from people who know me, who know the name from Tere's posts. One I friended for about a week and told him, Look, you know I love you, but I can't do this. He understood perfectly. The other friend request is just sitting there. Completely wonderful guys. Love 'em. Facebook is a rats' nest, or can be.

Younger son doesn't post at all. I think his last activity was changing his relationship status four months ago. I enjoy seeing my older son's posts, as it's mostly Chicago antics with a very nice group of people around various arts scenes.

But if Facebook were to go away tomorrow, I'd know less about what's going on with my son (well, and his ex), and that's about it. We can always talk on the phone, which he's happy to do. Which is a hell of a lot more than my parents got from me at age 26. I'd talk to my mother once a week and my father every few months. Not like they were after me, either. Well, actually they were hearing more from me at age 26 because I was fixin' to get married. . . .

Geez . . .

Maybe I'll do a post about my bar mitzvah.

That's not me, but it might as well be, except I of course had the Coke-bottle glasses. And the rabbi was a lot younger, and my great-grandfather (who I think appeared in the picture) was a lot older. And shorter. Grampa Isaac was a little guy. About 4-10. Always told me to move my legs so that he didn't have to step over me. If anyone stepped over me, I wouldn't grow. That's the kind of advice you take seriously from a 90-year-old guy who is 4-10.