Spring

A maple leaf

as flat as an open palm

and cold with rain

leaned over and slapped me

as I walked on the sidewalk.

The advantage is mine:

I have evolved thumbs and vengeance.

[Technorati tags: poetry humor]

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RageBoy writes what may be the least corporate blog post to ever appear as an official corporate blog post. Called “Lashing them together” — the “them” refers explicitly to a writer’s sentences but sentences are not the only ones who receive the edge of RB’s cat o’ nine tales — this is a cauldron of ideas and gestures that is about child rearing the way Mt. St. Helen’s was about the even distribution of ash. [Technorati tag: RageBoy]

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Terry Heaton blogs about a “think tank” confab at Ball State University where he became more convinced than ever that the mainstream press is on the precipice. I have that sense more and more, too, although I couldn’t quantify it or even argue for it. You know how you feel when the wind blows a little colder than usual and there’s a drop in the air pressure? That’s how I feel. Something is on the way. [Technorati tag: media]

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Comic Life (Mac only) turns a series of photos into comic book format, complete with captions. The Flickr feed of the results is pretty cool.

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I got an Citizen Eco-Drive watch off eBay a few of months ago. As I blogged, the instructions for setting it are incomprehensible. So I posted my own instructions into the entry for Eco-Drive at Wikipedia . But I’m afraid an editor will take it down since I think Wikipedia doesn’t like “how-to” articles. So, I’m going to post it here, just in case.

The English-language instructions for setting Eco-Drive watches are close to incomprehensible. Here are instructions for one particular model – BL5XXX – that probably hold for similar Eco-Drive watches. This particular model has three small dials in addition to the main face, two buttons and a stem. Its functionality includes an alarm clock, a chronograph (i.e., stop watch) and a perpetual calendar.

Here is how these instructions will refer to the various elements of the watch:

Main Face: The place where the main minute, hour and second hands are.
Dial A: The upper left small dial numbered up to 24. Underneath it says “Chronograph” and “Alarm”
Dial B: The upper right small dial numbered 0-8. Underneath it says “Perpetual calendar”
Dial C: The bottom middle small dial. It has four labels that repeat around the circle: TME (time), CHR (stop watch), L-TM (local time) and ALM (alarm)
Button A: The top button
Button B: The bottom button
Stem In: The stem in its normal position, full pressed into the watch
Stem Mid: The stem in its middle position
Stem Out: The stem pulled out all the way into this third position.

Turning the stem to the right means giving it a half turn or so in a clockwise direction. This generally turns the affected hand counter-clockwise. Likewise, turning to the left means turning the stem counter-clockwise, generally causing the affected hand to turn clockwise.

Changing modes

With the stem in, give the stem a little twist in either direction. This will cause the hand on Dial C to move, changing the mode of the clock from TME (normal time), CHR (using the stop watch), L-TM (local time) and ALM (setting the alarm). Depending on the function, changing modes may automatically change the big hands on the main face.

Setting the Perpetual Calendar

Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See “Changing modes” above.)

Set the stem to mid. Turning it to the left will set the date. If you give it a full turn instead, the date will change continuously until you give it another little spin. (It can be difficult to get the stem spun just right to start the continuous date changing.)

The second hand points to the month. E.g., if it is pointing to 1, your watch thinks it is January. If it points at 12, your watch thinks it is December. Press B once to advance the second hand by one month.

Now you have to tell it when the next leap year is coming. Dial B indicates that. If the hand on Dial B is pointing at 0, then your watch thinks it is currently a leap year. If it points at 1, it thinks it was a leap year last year. If it points at 2, it thinks it was a leap year two years ago. And if it points at 3, it thinks it was a leap year three years ago (and that therefore next year is a leap year). Adjust this by pushing Button A once for every year you want to advance Dial B.

Push the stem all the way in. Your watch is now set to keep track of dates for the next few decades.

Setting the time

Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See “Changing modes” above.)

Pull the stem to its out position. The second hand should advance to 12.

Turn the stem to the right or left to cause the big hands to turn. (To the right moves the hands clockwise.) The hand in Dial A will turn. Give the stem a little turn in the other direction to stop the movement. (NOTE: Dial A tells you whether the big hands are showing AM or PM; if you are setting the watch to 7:00pm (or 19:00, if you prefer), for example, the hand on Dial A should be pointing at 19. To make the hands move faster, give the stem two or three fast turns. (NOTE: This doesn’t always work.)

Push the stem in all the way.

Setting the date

Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See “Changing modes” above.)

Pull the stem to its mid position.

Turn the stem to the left to cause the date number to change. (Give the stem a little turn in the other direction to stop the movement.) The big hands will move as the date is set. (NOTE: This doesn’t always work.) To make the dial move faster, give the stem two or three fast turns.

Push the stem in all the way.

Using the stopwatch

The stopwatch, or “chronograph,” can measure up to an hour.

Set Dial C to CHR. (See “Changing modes” above.) The second hand will advance to 12. Button A starts and stops the stopwatch. Pressing Button A continuously resets the stopwatch to 0. Dial B records minutes.

Using local time

Set Dial C to L-TM. (See “Changing modes” above.)

Pull the stem all the way out. Turn the stem left or right once for each hour you want to advance or setback the time. When you’re done, press the stem back in. So long as you are in L-TM mode, the watch will show local time. If you set the mode to TIM, it will show the time where you started.

For example, if you are visiting some place three hours ahead of your home, you would go into L-TM mode, pull the stem all the way out, and turn it stem three times to the right.

NOTE: If in setting local time you go past midnight, the calendar date will change

The alarm

(I think these instructions are correct.) To set the alarm, set Dial C to ALM. (See “Changing modes” above.) The hands move to whatever time the alarm had been set to previously.

Pull the stem out fully. Set the time you want the alarm to go off by turning the stem. Check Dial A to make sure you have it set for AM or PM. (For example, to set the alarm to go off at 11:30 PM, Dial A should point to one tick before 24. Push the stem in. The alarm is now set.

To turn off the alarm when it is beeping, press Button A.

To un-set the alarm so it won’t go off at its appointed time, set Dial C to ALM and pull out the stem. Pressing Button A toggles the alarm on and off. You can tell whether it’s on by looking at the second hand. If it is pointing to 41 minutes after the hour, the alarm is on. If it is pointing to 37 minutes after the hour, it is off. Why Citizen decided to make the difference a matter of four minutes beats the heck out of me.

[Technorati tags: ecodrive eco-drive howto]

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Bev Trayner gets appropriately complex about the intersections of communities, languages, norms and metaphors. Here’s a snippet:

Recently at two different conferences which represent two different international communities I belong to I was aware of the genre boundaries we are crossing in our work on communities, technologies and learning. The combination of different modes and technologies and a focus on emerging processes and diversity changes the whole nature of communication. It also changes our ways of of working together, what gets done, whose voices get heard, and where power lies…

Meanwhile, in my local community I have to develop another Zen-like robustness to help me through the quagmire of rules, norms and fixed expectations. The complexity of my universe here is to be found in the discovering or revealing of nests of relations and realities…

(Thanks to Nancy White for the link.) [Technorati tags: NancyWhite BevTrayner]

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The Man Who Loved Only Numbers was worth reading, but I felt used. Paul Erdos was a completely fascinating eccentric who proved that not all mathematical geniuses do their important work by the time they’re 30. I won’t go through his bundle of oddities because the author, Paul Hoffman, does a good job enumerating them through anecdotes. But don’t expect a biography: Hoffman doesn’t get much past anecdotes.

That’s not, however, why I felt used. First, the title is a lie. Hoffman makes it clear that Erdos loved his mother, loved little kids, and loved — in his own weird way — his friends, many of whom he kept for his lifetime. Second, this started out as a magazine article and it reads that way. It jumps around in the history of mathematics in order to pad out the book. Some of those jumps are interesting, but as a reader, I felt disrespected, as if Hoffman thought I wouldn’t notice that he’d changed the topic without even the courtesy of a transition sentence.

When in London I picked up a paperback of Blowfly, the not-quite-the-latest in the Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell. I’d pretty much given up on the series, but the book was on sale so I figured I’d give it one more shot. I’m about half way through it and that’s probably as far as I’m going to get.

The series started out well — a smart, feisty, female forensic pathologist who solved crimes the CSI way except without the techno beat. (The series undoubtedly was an inspiration, if that’s the word, for the CSI sausage factory.) But as it’s progressed, Scarpetta has gone from interesting to perfect. The people around her tell us that she is gorgeous, flawless, a genius, perfectly moral, the most caring person they’ve ever met. This would just be bad writing except I get the creepy feeling that Cornwall identifies completely with Scarpetta.

That’s in addition to a standard problem writers of crime stories now face: The Temptation of the Lambs. In the first half of Blowfly, Cornwall spends more time with her pair of serial killers than with Scarpetta. She apparently believes she is a fine observer of character. But, her serial killers are impossibly monstrous and monstrously over-written. It’s embarrassingly melodramatic and creepy in all the wrong ways.

O, Thomas Harris, what hast thou wrought?

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If you’re a PC owner and have looked under the hood at the BIOS, you may be a teensy bit confused about whether you should “Allocate IRQ to PCD VGA” or enable “Palette Snooping.” The Rojak BIOS Optimization Guide will explain it all to you. Then it’s up to you to decide if you want to risk varying from the defaults. Most of the entries come from 2003, and the information is not specific to particular motherboards, but I’ve found it to be a good place to start. [Technorati tag: bios]

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That’s the title of a piece by Joan Didion in The NY Review of Books in which she insists on finding the complexities, ambiguities and unaddressed questions in the Schiavo case. Whatever your position, you’ll come out of the article less sure that you were right. [Technorati tags: Schiavo JoanDidion]

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An email from Brendan Greeley (lightly edited):

Last night on Open Source (Chris Lydon’s radio show), in honor of Bloomsday, we decided — quite arbitrarily — that this Tuesday, June 14, 2005 was “blogsday.” We spent two days poking through the Internet to find the sound of ordinary people writing about their own lives.

For an hour on the radio, we had Chris Lydon and two actors read out these blog entries, all from a single day. I think the results are kind of stunning, which is why I’m sharing them. The writing is gorgeous; it hits on barbecue, adopting a child in China, an infantry patrol in Iraq, marriage, the purchase of a hula hoop and about fifty other things.

My favorite entry is a post from a 365-pound man who had made it his goal to get a yellow belt in karate; his tone is earnest, driven and honest in a way I’ve never read, from any writer.

I think we captured a bit of this hum of people recording their lives and came up with a day in the life of America. We’re proud of it. Take a listen.

I haven’t listened to it yet, but I figure especially with podcasts, if I wait until I’ve actually heard it, it will be too late to recommend it. But between Brendan and Chris, its provenance can’t be beat…

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