Eddie On Everything

I’m currently reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Though not quite finished, I’d recommend the book to anyone who does even a modest amount of writing in his daily life. The book isn’t a typical “how-to” grammar guide; instead, it reads like a memoir meets wise-old-uncle advice column, mixing anecdotes from King’s life with solid, “here’s how I see it” and “here’s what worked for me” styled writing advice.

I thought the following passage both amusing and informing, and thought I’d share.

Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense. I’m not the only one who says so; you can find the same advice in The Elements of Style.

Messrs. Strunk and White don’t speculate as to why so many writers are attracted to passive verbs, but I’m willing to; I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. There is no troublesome action to contend with; the subject just has to close its eyes and think of England, to paraphrase Queen Victoria. I think unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty. If you find instruction manuals and lawyers’ torts majestic, I guess it does.

The timid fellow writes The meeting will be held at seven o’clock because that somehow says to him, “Put it this way and people will believe you really know.” Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write The meeting’s at seven. There, by God! Don’t you feel better?

I won’t say there’s no place for the passive tense. Suppose, for instance, a fellow dies in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else. The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although “was carried” and “was placed” still irk the shit out of me. I accept them but I don’t embrace them. What I would embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa. Why does the body have to be the subject of the sentence, anyway? It’s dead, for Christ’s sake! Fuhgeddaboudit!

Two pages of the passive voice—just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction—make me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous, as well. How about this: My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun. Oh, man—who farted, right? A simpler way to express this idea—sweeter and more forceful, as well—might be this: My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I’ll never forget it. I’m not in love with this because it uses with twice in four words, but at least we’re out of that awful passive voice.

You might also notice how much simpler the thought is to understand when it’s broken up into two thoughts. This makes matters easier for the reader, and the reader must always be your main concern; without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void. And it’s no walk in the park being the guy on the receiving end. “[Will Strunk] felt the reader was in serious trouble most of the time,” E. B. White writes in his introduction to The Elements of Style, “a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone trying to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.” And remember: The writer threw the rope, not The rope was thrown by the writer. Please oh please.

I logged in to my Facebook account today and saw that Facebook has once again changed things up. Since the changes are being rolled out to just a few users right now, here are a few screengrabs of the new layout.

(Click for a larger version.)

It looks like they’ve really cleaned things up – most everything has been moved to the top navigation bar, and account functions are now available via a drop-down menu. Also, the search bar has been expanded, and now occupies the center of the menu bar. Finally, 3 notification icons have been added, ala the Windows system tray – “Friend Requests,” “Messages,” and “Notifications.”

Said one Facebook engineer,

“We’re releasing a set of products designed to improve your everyday experience,” said Facebook engineer Jing Chen in a blog post. “In keeping with our commitment to innovation, these product releases are part of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to streamline the site and make it easier to use.
“For example, when you receive a Facebook notification about someone writing on your Wall or tagging you in a photo, you’ll see a red bubble appear in the left-hand corner, near the search bar. When you click on the icon, you’ll see a drop-down menu with the most recent notifications.”

All in all, I think they succeeded – I really like the new look.

I have to wonder if they are taking aim at Google with the newly prominent search box placement. After all, you can search for literally anything in that box, and the results will show you not only Facebook pages, but internet-wide search results as well.

What do you think? How do you like the new Facebook look and feel?

A recent Facebook hoax reads like this:

IMPORTANT No joke! Apparently multiple people have had a hacker. I tried this and yes he was listed on mine too. The way to find them is to go into your settings, privacy settings, block list, and in the “person” box, type “automation log.” If someone pops up, block them because it seems they’re the hacker. I had 3 names in my block list show up!!!!

The problem is, this is entirely false.

Here’s what’s happening: When you search for “automation log” you are searching for all people with the words “automation log” listed as their employer. It’s as if you were searching for the term “Microsoft,” or “Comcast.” What you are seeing is a list of people who have written that word in their profile, not a list of people who have hacked your account.

As an experiment, I changed my Facebook page to contain the magic words “Automation lab.” Within 10 minutes I had received a couple dozen hate emails. A sampling:

“get a life dude. stop hacking my sh*t”

How the F*CK did you get into my friend’s list?
“I just reported you – LOSER”

“you fu*in freak get a job you fat fu**er specky tw*t!!!!!!!!”

FU* YOU AR** HOLE

“u bin tryin 2 hack me pu**yole?”

“okay so I have to ask you … there is this going aroung on fb. it’s saying there’s hackers…are you a hacker automation log. is what I was told on how to find you?”

You just pissed off the wrong people…

Wow, harsh! Hey guys (and gals), I’m only trying to help!

To be fair, I did receive a number of thoughtful inquiries as well. So the world isn’t all bad. :) One person even wanted to save my soul!

“They say y’all are hackers, and I don’t care what you are doing Eddie even if you are stealing information. I am worried about your eternal soul. did you know that you are on your way to hell unless you have asked Jesus Christ to save you? Eddie you should stop whatever you are doing right now and get on your knees and ask and beg the LORD Jesus to forgive you through His Blood. I am going to report you to Facebook and block you from my profile, but you can still contact God. I am truly concerned for you and where you will spend eternity. Please ask him to forgive you!”

Ah, the joys of Windows XP. Ever go to delete a file, only to be met with the annoying error message, “Cannot delete <filename> It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.” ?

This behavior is meant to prevent you from hosing things up by deleting files that shouldn’t be deleted. Unfortunately, while the safeguards work most of the time, there are sometimes glitches, particularly with network files and background applications. Sometimes, you are not able to delete a file, even though no other program is actually using it. In other cases, you don’t really care whether another program is using the file, you just want the file gone!

Of course, the first thing you should do is make sure you know what you’re doing. If you are sure that the file you want to nuke is not an important system file, or an important part of some software package, you have a couple of options.

One method of deleting locked files is to reboot your computer. When you restart your computer, you are killing all processes that might be using the file. This usually works. But not always. The downside of this method is that it can be annoying and time consuming to reboot your workstation.

Another method is to kill Windows XP’s “explorer.exe” process, delete the file, then restart explorer. To do this, hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE to bring up Task Manager, then highlight “explorer.exe” and choose “End Process.” However, this method is not recommended: when explorer starts back up, your computer may not be in the exact state in which you left it. (For instance, you may notice that some icons are missing from your system tray.)

Fortunately, there is another way.

Unlocker will remove a file’s access restrictions that prevent your from moving, deleting, or renaming a file. The way it works is this: You install the program, and it runs in your system tray. Whenever you encounter the dreaded File is in use by another person or program message, Unlocker Assistant will pop up and ask you if you want to break the hold that some other application has on your file. You simply highlight the file you want to delete, hit “unlock,” and voila, problem solved.

Egad! My Kindle stopped charging!

I settled in to bed the other night and grabbed my Amazon Kindle, looking to pick up where I left off in The Hades Factor. I was met with a familiar “Your battery is running low” message, so I plugged the Kindle in to the charger for the night and instead settled in with an old-fashioned, low-tech, printed-on-dead-trees style book.

The next morning, I unplugged my should-have-been-fully-charged Kindle & sat down to read the morning paper, only to be met with the “your battery is CRITICAL error!” Zoinks! For some reason, despite being plugged in all night, my Kindle had not charged!

I quickly ran to my computer & attached the Kindle. My Windows XP PC popped up that dreaded “USB Device Not Recognized” balloon. “It’s OK,” I thought. “It’ll be OK. I’ll just power the Kindle off by holding the power on/off slider for 15 seconds, and I’ll check back later.”

I returned later and … No dice! The Kindle was still not charging!

Thankfully, I was able to find a solution to this problem. (Whew!) After searching for things like “Kindle reset,” “Kindle hard reset,” and “Kindle soft reset,” I learned that while the Kindle 1 can be reset with a paper clip, or by using the Shift-Alt-R trick, these methods didn’t work on the Kindle 2.

I eventually came across a page that relayed a tip by Amazon Kindle Tech Support. I followed these steps, and within a couple of hours, I was back in action.

How to reset your Kindle when it won’t charge

1. Slide the power button and hold it for 30 sec.

2. Release and wait for 20 sec until the screen begins to flash.

3. As soon as it does, plug in the power and keep it connected for 2 hours.

Big thanks to The Epistemist for pointing me in the right direction. Now, back to my Robert Ludlum book…

I just finished Will Leitch’s excellent book God Save the Fan. (If you’re a sports fan, I highly recommend that you check it out.) The book was published in 2008, before Tiger Woods’ exotic sex life became late-night talk show fodder.

I thought this passage was worth posting, given that we now have the benefit of hindsight:

As to what Tiger did to “piss Jesus off,” I think we now have our answer. Heh.

In case you’re interested, the chapter goes on to make what I think is an excellent point: When athletes give thanks to God, they’re not grandstanding, nor are they trying to shove their religion down your throat. Instead, what they’re really saying is, “I’m not that great, and I don’t deserve these accolades.” In other words, they’re trying to stay humble.

You read that right – if you want to make sure that an airline doesn’t lose your bags, or that TSA staff doesn’t steal things out of your bag, you should pack a gun in each bag that you check. It doesn’t even have to be a real gun – a simple, totally-legal-in-all-50-states starter pistol will do.

Boing Boing and security expert Bruce Schneier have more:

A “weapons” is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, and STARTER PISTOL. Yes, starter pistols – those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets – are considered weapons…and do NOT have to be registered in any state in the United States.
I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare…I’m given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me.

That’s the procedure. The case is extra-tracked…TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero.

It’s a great way to travel with camera gear…I’ve been doing this since Dec 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

What a great tip! I have personally had my bags lost 6 times, once with no recovery at all. In that case, I had to go through the arduous process of itemizing everything in my bag (from memory!), watching the airline depreciate the value of everything I owned, only to receive a check a full 2 months later that barely covered half of the replacement costs. Not to mention my out of pocket expense for being on a week-long trip with no clothing, no personal items, nada. Or the time and frustration it took me to get the matter sorted out.

I’ve also had a couple of items come up “missing” from my bags on other occasions. I’m not pointing any fingers here, but they were in there when I packed the bag, and they weren’t when I unpacked it. What *was* there in each instance was a little card notifying me that my bag had been searched. (OK, so I guess I am pointing fingers.) Screw you, TSA.

I’ll be sure to pick up a few starter pistols and pack them with each and every bag that I check.

Found this little productivity gem, courtesy of Ernest Hemmingway, over at The Second Act:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemmingway used this approach in his writing. Given the source, it should be considered good advice. I take a somewhat similar approach to writing serious pieces, though my version is slightly modified. See, the tricky part for me is the “not thinking about it”; unfinished business tends to hang on my mind, and the very idea of an unfinished task that I know how to complete keeps me up at night.

That’s why I like to finish a draft, then re-work the piece in my head as I go about my daily business. I like to get my main ideas down on paper, a “roadmap,” if you will, and then think through the ways I’d like to revise them or flesh them out. This method affords me a sense of completion, and helps to alleviates some of the stress that comes with “finalizing” something.

I find that I use this approach when doing most anything creative – dreaming up new inventions, ideas, theories, etc. I wonder, is this advice applicable to non-creative disciplines as well?

This is a cached page that goes with this article.

Intel® 82915G/82910GL Express Chipset Family

The Sims* 2 Game Crashes or Freezes During Game Play

Symptom(s):
The Sims* 2 game crashes or freezes (locks up) during game play.

Error: “The ialmrnt5 display driver has stopped working normally. Save your work and reboot the system to restore full display functionality. The next time you reboot the machine a dialog will be displayed giving you a chance to upload data about this failure to Microsoft.”

Error: “The graphics adapter in this system experienced an internal error. Please contact your graphics adapter manufacturer for technical support. The application will now terminate.”

Blue screen appears with STOP error 0×000000EA referencing the ialmrnt5 display driver file.

Solution:
Use the latest Intel® graphics driver to correct this issue. Refer to the driver README file for installation instructions as needed.

Note: If you continue to experience issues running the game with the latest graphics driver, try running the game with the -w switch which forces the game to run in a window.

To add the -w switch, use the following steps:

1. Right-click on the The Sims 2 game and left-click on Properties. You can do this either on the game’s shortcut on the desktop or on the game’s entry in the Start menu.
2. Add a space and -w to he end of the Target field, so that it looks like this: The actual path may vary depending on where the game was installed. Make sure that the -w goes outside the quotation marks and that there is a space between the last quotation mark and the -w.
3. Click OK.

This applies to:

Intel® 82915G/82910GL Express Chipset Family

Solution ID: CS-016497

Date Created: 17-Oct-2004

Last Modified: 27-Jan-2006

How to Train the Aging Brain, a very interesting article in today’s New York Times, highlights a new understanding of how the middle-aged brain works.  As it turns out, many long-held beliefs have been proven untrue; for instance, our brains do not lose 40% of our brain cells as we grow older.  Instead, we retain much of what we have learned, the brain just squirrels it away, where existing neuron pathways make it a bit harder to recall at a moment’s notice.  Given the right stimulation, however, that information will pop right back into our conscious minds.

[I]f you are primed with sounds that are close to those you’re trying to remember — say someone talks about cherry pits as you try to recall Brad Pitt’s name — suddenly the lost name will pop into mind. The similarity in sounds can jump-start a limp brain connection. (It also sometimes works to silently run through the alphabet until landing on the first letter of the wayward word.)

Interesting, no?  I’ve personally noticed that my mind works more in this way as I get older – specifically, I’ve noticed that I increasingly tend to make associations or see similarities between things that many other people do not.  I thought I was just going crazy, perhaps developing late-onset schizophrenia at my advanced age. Turns out I’m OK.  (It’s the rest of the world that’s crazy. :)

There’s more good news – as you get older, you get quicker & smarter. The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.

So how do we old folks go about building these new connections? Turns out it’s not that hard. It can be as simple as just mixing up your daily routine by taking a new route to work.

Such stretching is exactly what scientists say best keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain. Do anything from learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work.

“As adults we have these well-trodden paths in our synapses,” Dr. Taylor says. “We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up. And if you learn something this way, when you think of it again you’ll have an overlay of complexity you didn’t have before — and help your brain keep developing as well.”

But don’t stop there – you should also continue (or start) to challenge your own existing belief system.  Examine the basis for your closely held beliefs, and think critically about how new or differing ideas mesh or clash.  In other words, you need to challenge your perception of the world.

Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

“There’s a place for information,” Dr. Taylor says. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.

…

Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma,” or something that “helps you critically reflect on the assumptions you’ve acquired.”

Dr. Mezirow developed this concept 30 years ago after he studied women who had gone back to school. The women took this bold step only after having many conversations that helped them “challenge their own ingrained perceptions of that time when women could not do what men could do.”

Such new discovery, Dr. Mezirow says, is the “essential thing in adult learning.”

“As adults we have all those brain pathways built up, and we need to look at our insights critically,” he says. “This is the best way for adults to learn. And if we do it, we can remain sharp.”

Hear that? It bears repeating.  And bolding: Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education. Instead, you should focus on challenging the very basis for your closely-held ideals and preconceptions.  Doing so will make you smarter in two ways – of course, you learn the new idea, the new viewpoint, the new theory. But more importantly, when you critically consider how new ideas mesh or conflict with your own, your brain physically changes – it builds new pathways, easing access to your squirreled-away information.