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Avantgo Blithering

For those who don’t know, AvantGo provides a nifty service for PDA’s. Basically, you tell Avantgo “I want to be able to read this web page on my PDA”, and AG will make a note of it. Everytime you sync, the most recent version of the aforementioned page is downloaded and saved to your PDA.
The nice part of this service is the flexibility: you can select from tons of channels on Avantgo’s page, or you can pretty much save any page that catches your fancy. MapQuest even lets you save map directions as AvantGo-friendly pages, a feature which I use all the time.
There are, of course, a few problems. One is the selection available on the AG channels. Since it costs money to become an ‘official’ channel, it’s mostly companies doing advertising. short-stories.co.uk (which you can subscribe to on AvantGo by clicking here) is okay, but if you need a Blogging fix, there’s only one guy on the official list — the layout is nice, the writing is good, but his posts are infrequent. (I’m not linking to him. If you’re interested, search the AG channels for the word “journal” and he’ll be your only hit. Seriously.)
The other problem: sites I like to read abound, but quite a few of them aren’t what you’d call Palm-friendly. Lots of things comprise a site that isn’t palm-friendly, but let me summarize it: this site is NOT palm friendly. (Left-side link bars locked into position in a table, forced-width format… it’s not pretty, people.)
But you can find some sites that really work well on a Palm (objective criteria) and are a good read (subjective judgement call). Here’s a couple:

Continue reading “Avantgo Blithering”

Posted on

Didn’t have anything else scheduled that day anyway.

“24”, a show I liked but lost track of somewhere during the season, is finally available the way it should be: in one 24-hour block :)
The “24” marathon will kick off with episode one at midnight on Saturday, Aug. 31st, and run throughout Sunday, Sept. 1st, wrapping up with the finale at 11 p.m.
Sweet, unless I don’t have F/X on my current basic cable package; in which case, this sucks.

(via Jules)
Posted on

Yeah baby

Okay, awhile ago, I mentioned that the cable network in our area was being rebuilt.
Ongoing situation: basic cable in our non-rebuilt area is a weird hodgepodge of crap and the only way to get a different list of channels is by getting digital cable. Period. We were on digital cable (basically so I could watch the Farscape episodes on rerun every day), but when I got laid off in January we switched to basic. Since then, we just haven’t been able to justify going back. (Because Farscape is only-just-barely not worth the extra 30 bucks a month. It is also not worth 25 bucks for DVDs containing only 2 episodes — sales departments take heed).
This has all changed with the rebuild. For not-much-more, we can have the channels we’re interested in; we just hadn’t gotten around to ordering it. There was some impetus added last week when the rebuild finally kicked in and we dropped down to REAL ‘basic’ service instead of the un-moderated open feed, which cost us Animal Planet and ESPN (nasty, since football season is coming up), but since Trading Spaces was still there (Jackie checked), it wasn’t that bad. According to my wife, the channels died at 24, just after MTV. Life continued.
Then a funny thing happened.
Jackie and Justin had gone off to the store on Sunday afternoon, and I was hanging out on the couch with my good buddy the sinus headache, and I did something I just… never do.
I channel surfed.
With a range from 2 to 23, minus 5 (Skinemax), 14 (Starz), 15 (HBO), and 18 (who knows?), it didn’t take long: I went from the WB’s Sunday Matinee up to Road Rules and back down again.
Then, at the bottom of the dial, I hit the down arrow, and wrapped around to channel 61… and there was something there.
What’s this?
My thumb continued to tap along as I scrolled past a cooking show, WGN, and few other forgettable bits.
50… espanol.
49…
48…
48?
There’s picture. There’s sound. There’s a familiar little saturn-shaped logo in the bottom righthand corner. Score!
The channels died out again at 47.
Somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

Posted on

Grammar

From Baen’s Bar:

On the use of quotations: Every stylebook I have checked agrees. The form should be:
“Is he ill?” she asked.
The question mark goes within the quotation marks and the “s” in “she” is lowercase. It is one sentence, not two.
In all styles I checked, the comma goes inside the quotation marks unless the matter inside those marks is a single word used as a term. Thus the sentence:
He called it a “term”, but I disagree.
is correct. But it is correct only in one style, APA, which is an ugly style anyway. Chicago allows it with the use of single quotation marks surrounding a term, though it recommends using italics; and everyone else says to put the comma inside the quotation marks.
The general rule is that commas and periods go inside the quotation marks and other punctuation goes inside _only_ if it refers to the matter within the quote. Thus you might get:
Did she say, “He is sick”?
Please remember when you are arguing over grammar that it is a very fluid thing. The grammar that was considered standard
in the mid-1800s is considered outrageous today. That is how it should be, since English is still being used by living people. And much of what we call grammar is really a matter of style, which is whatever editors decide it is.
Much of what you learned about grammar in elementary and high school is folklore. Almost every grammarian spends at least a page laughing over the silly rules your teachers gave you.
So when you argue over grammar, try to remember that there are very few, if any, hard rules. There are, however, quite a few “nonrules” that seem to generate a lot of heat. Most important, remember that the only reason for grammar is to
make it easier for the reader to understand what you mean. So if you have to break a rule, break it. Heck, I doubt that most of us are any good with rules in the rest of our lives. It seems silly to
become upset with them here.
For those who are looking for easy grammar books, I recommend two that have helped me: Bernstein’s The Careful Writer and the AP Stylebook. They are easy to use and also fun to read.