Collected Miscellany has a couple of posts on the writing of history. The first points out that history is about determining and recording historical truth–not about exporting present day politics into the past. This should go without saying. The second champions narrative history, to which I say “Hurrah!”.

There’s a place for non-narrative history–it can usefully condense, summarize, and analyze the primary sources in a particularly area, and make them accessible to a wider group of historians. But for communicating our past history to those who need to know it and make use of it–the rest of us, that is–nothing succeeds like narrative history.

Which reminds me, I just got a copy of William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire. Why am I blogging when I could be reading?

Over here, Jaquandor (BTW, is that pronounced Jock-on-dor or Jak-wan-dor?) discusses whether blogging is bad for writers. It seems a correspondent had suggested that blogging is simply another form of procrastination, and of no benefit to a professional writer.

It seems to me that there are two aspects to this question: first, is
blogging beneficial to one’s writing? And second, is blogging beneficial
to one’s career? Certainly, while one is blogging one is not trying to
find an agent, sending out manuscripts, or writing salable prose. I can
see that for some writers, blogging might be a dangerous distraction.

But, not being a professional writer, I’m more interested in the first
aspect–how does blogging affect my writing skills? And I think the
answer is simple: if the three most important words in Real Estate are
“Location, location, location,” then the three most important words in
writing are “practice, practice, practice”. If you wish to write clearly
and well, you can never get too much practice in putting your thoughts
and visions into words. And if you approach blogging with that in mind,
then it is excellent practice. The daily format is especially helpful at
turning writing from being something you do every now and then, when
especially inspired, into something you can do whenever you like.

The horror of every student is the five or ten or twenty-page
paper. I still remember my surprise when, some five years or so into my
career as a software engineer, I realized that I was often writing
documents of much greater length than that. That was my first
lesson–writing is much easier if you have something to say. And the
great advantage of doing technical writing is that it emphasizes clarity
and directness, two qualities I find valuable in any kind of writing.

I’m a history buff; I once brought home a copy of the celebrated Hobbes
translation of Thucydides. I soon discovered that Hobbes’ translation is
celebrated because of Hobbes’ Herculean command of English prose style, a
style fraught with sentences containing seemingly dozens of
clauses–Herculean, because only a Superman can do the necessary heavy
lifting. It’s the sort of writing where you need to read each sentence three times to
be sure you understand it; and it takes you twenty minutes because the
sentences are so long. It might, perhaps, be an accurate reflection of
the original Greek; but it’s no kind of way to read Thucydides, and to
date I haven’t done so.

But I digress.

A little over seven years ago, I started writing and publishing
book reviews on the web. I started out updating the website daily (it
was nearly a proto-blog in that regard) but after a few months gravitated
to a monthly format. At the end of each month I’d sit down with the
stack of books I’d read during the month, and spend several hours
reviewing each one. I don’t claim that every review was a miracle of
clarity and style, but over time it, along with my technical writing,
taught me to write on demand. Writer’s block be damned!

In fact, I think writer’s block is widely misunderstood. A few years
ago, when I began to write more seriously, I read quite a few books on
the subject. There’s a certain category of book–I’m thinking of
Writing Down The Bones and So You Want To Write that treats
writing as a semi-mystical activity. These books emphasize something
they call “writing practice”, which amounts to written free-association.
The goal is to stifle one’s “inner editor,” that little voice that says,
“This is garbage!” and to write down the contents of one’s heart before
it can be censored or edited.

I tried doing this kind of writing practice, and I did not find it
particularly helpful. Indeed, I’m not entirely sure what it’s supposed
to accomplish–unless it is simply intended to help those who have never
written to get words down on paper, so that they see that they can. For
my part, I cherish my inner editor. For me, it’s that little voice that
says, “That sentence is too long. Delete those three words and that
comma, and it’ll say the same thing.”

Or perhaps it’s a way for people to practice writing when they don’t have
anything in particular to say. And that, I think is the key to writer’s
block, and the prime difference between writing fiction and non-fiction.
For non-fiction, such as a book review or a technical document, the
material is before you. You must put it in some kind of order, and
present it clearly, but the content already exists. Your concern as a
writer is not what to say, but how to say it, and in what order.

When writing fiction, however, the material must be made up. Figuring
out what happens next is hard; writing it down is relatively
easy–provided you’re used to expressing your ideas and visions in words.

And that’s where blogging helps. It’s practice at the craft of writing,
at training the words to be your servants rather than your master. And
then, when the muse strikes and you’re ready to perpetrate some
literature, your servants stand ready.

This is really quite amazing. They’ve found the remains of one of the three escape tunnel dug for the real-life escape attempt the inspired the movie The Great Escape. There were three tunnels, Tom, Dick, and Harry; Tom was discovered by the Germans and collapsed, and Harry is the one they escaped through. Dick was abandoned before completion, and used to store supplies and dump sand from the other tunnels. No one ever found it…until now.

As I related in Part 1, I brought home an HP PSC 2510 All-In-One
PhotoSmart printer that prints, scans, copies, faxes, and reads digital
camera memory cards, and has both USB and wireless interfaces. I was
overjoyed, because I’d gotten the wireless model for the price of its
wireless-less sibling.

Later the next morning, I wasn’t so happy. The copying worked OK, and I
could print stuff using it, but the photo quality was, frankly, lacking.
Even with the special photo ink cartridge and premium photo paper, and
the proper print settings, the photo prints were clearly pixelated if you
looked closely. Arrgh! More than that, I couldn’t use the scanner at
all; every time I started the HP scanning software it would just sit
there and twiddle its thumbs until I killed it.

I checked the HP website; sure enough, there was a new printer driver
available as a 71 megabyte download. Why they needed 71 megabytes, I
have no idea. But it was dated 12/30/2003, comfortably after the release
of the latest version of OS X, and it seemed likely that if nothing else
it would fix the scanning problem. (I’d resigned myself to living with
the print quality issues.) But all I’ve got here is a dial-up line; 71
MB would take hours.

Not to worry; yesterday evening I bopped over to my friend Dave’s house,
and used his DSL line. (I digress: Apple hardware and software are truly
wonderful. When it was time to go, I simply closed my laptop, putting it
to sleep, and went to Dave’s house. When I got there, I opened it again,
and was immediately on the ‘Net via Dave’s wireless network. No muss, no
fuss, and it works every time.) I downloaded the new driver; it also
turned out that Apple had some OS updates to download that included
printing improvements, so I made sure to snag those as well.

By the time I got home, it was too late to try anything more, so I went to bed.

This morning, after taking Dave to school, I got down to business, and
installed the new driver. As soon as it was done, I tried to scan–and
it worked flawlessly. Two points for HP. Then, just to see, I made yet
another test print on the nice photo paper–and the pixelation was gone.
The print was lovely.

Whoo-hoo!

But third time’s the charm. Not wanting to borrow trouble, I’d been
using a USB cable to talk to the printer. Now that everything else
seemed to be working, it was time to try the wireless interface. And
here’s where the story gets really exciting.

The HP manual offers detailed instructions for how to set up wireless
printing with a WiFi base station. I didn’t follow them. I read them
just enough to glean a few important facts:

• How to enable the printer’s WiFi interface, which is disabled by
  default.
• That once the interface is enabled, the printer will allow
  ad-hoc connections from any wireless computer in the vicinity,
  without going through a base station.
• That the printer’s networking features can be set up via a built-in
  webserver, whose address is included on a Networking Configuration report
  you can have the printer print out.

So happens, Mac OS X supports ad hoc wireless networks seamlessly.
I simply:

1. Wrote down the name and WEP password for my Airport Base Station.
2. Selected “hpsetup” from the Airport menu on my menu bar.
3. Pointed my web browser at the web address on the Networking
   Configuration report.
4. Clicked a few times, and typed in the name and WEP password for my
   Airport Base Station.
5. Selected my normal wireless network from the Airport menu on my menu
   bar.

And bang. The new printer was now available to me over my wireless LAN.

There are a number of reasons why my old Epson printers didn’t get much
use. The primary reason, of course, is that I only want to print stuff
every so often. But on top of that, I use a laptop, and I hate being
tied to my desk–and that USB cable tied me to the desk. And I hate
having to get out the paper and load the printer–which I always had to
do, because if I left the paper in the printer the dust cover made it
curl up. Thus, there’s always been a sizeable psychological barrier to
actually sitting down and printing anything.

So ironically, the new printer I bought in hopes that it would be more
reliable than its predecessors when used only rarely will almost
certainly get considerably more use than its predecessors.

Anyway, color me one happy camper.

Some while back I mentioned that I hate my
printer. I got a number of good suggestions for a replacement; in
particular, most people had had good luck with Hewlett-Packard inkjets.
Now, I’ve got a good history with HP; I had a couple of their early
injkets (the Deskjet and the DeskjetPlus), and we have a Laserjet 4
that’s still working fine after something like 15 years. At this point
I’m sure it will obsolesce before it wears out.

I got my first color inkjet shortly after getting my first digital
camera; it was a Canon of some kind. I didn’t get an HP because at that
time HP’s color inkjets were lagging, and printers that could reproduce a
photo nicely were rare. The Canon’s print quality was OK for its time,
if not outstanding, but I was continually having problems with it–every
so often the it would start garbling the data sent to it. Or perhaps the
computer was garbling the data; I never did figure it out.

I replaced the Canon with an Epson Stylus Photo 700, which printed
beautiful photos and got irredeemably clogged if you didn’t use it often
enough, which I didn’t. I replaced it with a rather less expensive Epson
(The 888? I don’t remember.) It produced adequate prints, and suffered
more or less the same fate. I replaced it with yet another inexpensive
Epson, the C-82, which is the one I wrote about last time. It has
multiple problems: it clogs regularly, and sometimes in mid-job, and it
doesn’t play well with Mac OS X 10.3–nor is any new driver forthcoming
from Epson. I installed a third party printer
driver that solves the driver problem, but given how much ink and paper
costs, the mid-job-clogging problem is enough
reason to look for another printer.

You’ll note that that was three Epsons in a row to go south. Even I
couldn’t ignore that. The picture quality is great, and inkjet printers
are ridiculously inexpensive these days, but they are not quite
disposable.

So. Time to look for another printer.

On Wednesday, whilst our three older kids were all in school, Jane and I
took little Mary off to the mall for a stroll and a road-test of our new
Urban Assault Stroller. While there we stopped off at the Apple Store,
where I investigated the printer aisle. “Naturally,” I reasons, “If they
sell the printer at the Apple Store, they expect it to work with their
latest OS!”

(Whether this was a valid assumption shall be seen anon. Foreshadowing:
your guide to quality literature.)

(The line about “foreshadowing” is a quote–10 points to anyone who can
identify the source.)

The Apple Store had Epson, Canon, and HP printers. Given my past history
with Epson and Canon, and the good words folks had for HP, I decided I’d
give the HPs a serious look. And the one that really caught my eye was
the PSC 2410.

The PSC 2410 is an All-in-one printer: it prints, scans, copies, and
faxes. I’ve previously avoided this kind of beast–jack-of-all-trades,
master of none–but this one is part of HP’s PhotoSmart line, implying it
should print photos nicely. In addition, it accepts digital camera
memory cards, allowing you to make prints directly, without benefit of
computer. And the scanner is a really nice feature. (I’ve got a scanner
that I never use. It lives in a box, because I don’t have room to leave
it out all the time. Because it’s in a box, I never use it. It probably
doesn’t work with OS X anyway.) In addition, the paper feed for HP
printers is on the bottom, instead of sticking up in the back. This is
good; it means that I don’t need to take the paper out when I put the
dustcover on the printer.

The price for the PSC 2410? $299.

I decided to think about it, and to check prices elsewhere. A little web
research, and I determined that yes,
indeed, the printer is well-thought-of, and that yes (surprisingly) $299
is a reasonable price. OK, I said; I’ll get one.

Now, the Apple Store is at a mall about thirty minutes from our house.
On the other hand, there’s an Office Depot five minutes from our house.
Feeling slightly guilty (the Apple salesman was extremely helpful,
and really deserved to make the sale) I stopped off at Office Depot and
took a look around.

And stopped dead in my tracks. You see, the PSC 2410 has a big brother,
the 2510, that allows you to print, scan, and so on over a wireless
network. It usually sells for $100 more than the 2410, and though I’m
big on wireless I wouldn’t spend an extra $100 to get a wireless printer.
But Office Depot had a special sale on HP wireless printers–in short, I
bought a PSC 2510 for the same price as a PSC 2410. Good stuff. Plus,
Office Depot has all of the HP paper and inks. I got a ream of Bright
White inkjet paper, a package of Premium Glossy photo paper, and some
ink, and headed home.

The Forager has some comments about Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark series.

A detailed look at the technology by Dawn Eden.

What I want to know is, where’s my disposable iMac?

I’m not sure what to say about this book. I’ve read and reviewed it
before; you can go see what I thought about it then.

What it is, is a satirical heroic fantasy. Apropos of Nothing is a
bastard child of some nameless knight who forced himself upon Apropos’s
tavern wench mother–nameless because, in fact, there were a crowd of
them. He’s clever, quick, and lame in one leg. He despises most people,
including himself, and including especially the heroic Tacit, a stalwart
fellow who befriends him one day when he’s about to be beaten up by the
local bullies. He’s crude, nasty, dishonest, lewd, and nicer than he
thinks he is.

He lives in a fairly typical heroic fantasy world–kings, knights,
dragons, peasants, thieves, the whole nine yards. The kings are fools or
villains, the knights are glory-loving scoundrels, and the peasants would
steal your clothes or burn you for a witch as soon as look at you. This
is because it’s a satire, right?

The whole thing is full of goofy puns. Apropos is apprenticed to Sir
Umbrage of the Flaming Nether Regions (an area of great volcanic
activity) in the service of the king of Histeria; later he is chased by
the Harpers Bizarre. He flies on a phoenix, is nearly killed by a
stampede of unicorns, steals the story from the hero (!), rescues and
beds the princess, and on and on.

It’s crude, vile, funny, clever, and pessimistic by turns, which isn’t
the best combination; and the tone is patchy; the author seems unsure of
whether he’s trying to write a serious fantasy or a farce. Or, rather,
he knows he’s trying to write a farce, but he keeps getting too serious
about it. It should be a souffl´, but it’s more like a pound cake.

So, not a success…but not entirely a failure, either.

Don’t laugh. It’s actually a pretty good book and I’m not a big Western fan.
When I was in high school, I stumbled across Owen Wister’s The Virginian
and fell in love with it. That was followed by Vardis Fisher’s book Mountain
Man after Redford made the movie “Jeremiah Johnson” out of it. And a few
years back I read a few of Ivan Doig’s stories about Montana, particularly
“Dancing at the Rascal Fair.” But the Louis L’Amour type westerns have never
interested me much. However, at my book group we were talking about
Westerns as a movie genre—we tend to digress from topic occasionally—and
one of the guys recommended this book. He’s got pretty high end taste in
books too, so I was surprised.

It is good. In some ways, it’s better than the classic movie they made of
it. After reading it, I don’t see Gary Cooper as Shane though. He’s not
dangerous looking enough to be true to the character in the book.

I read it as an allegory. Shane is the old west of gunslingers and outlaws
trying to adjust to the new settled west of the homesteaders. He’s the
classic hero—-tall, dark, handsome, straight, soft-spoken, dangerous and
conflicted. Joe Starrett, the little boy’s father, is the new
west—-hardworking, independent, proud, earthy, honest and striving. The
conflict is between the old way of working the land in the west with open
range and long cattle drives and the newer, more settled way of breeding and
feeding fewer cattle but doing it more land intensively.

Of course, it also a pretty well-told adventure story. Shane is the perfect
good/bad guy. You want him to win his fight to give up gunslinging and yet
you know that for him to remain true to who he is, he can’t. Telling the
story thru a young boy’s eyes only makes it more dramatic. It also gives you
the great line he keeps repeating “and he was Shane.” Only a kid could
accept someone at face value and then, growing up, imply the deeper meaning
in the story.

It isn’t great literature but it is a good story well told and certainly
worth the reading.

Via Mirabilis, we have the amazing story of an astrologer and rascal whose career was destroyed by bogus astrology. The pen is mightier than the Zodiac!

This is hardly topical, as it took place in 1708, but it’s still funny.