We’re having our living room painted next week.  As part of the preparation, Diane decided that it would be a good idea to clear out some of the bookcases in there, so that the painters can move them without spilling the books all over the floor.

The first two bookcases were easy — everything went into boxes.  But then she got to the bookcase containing old textbooks, and decided that maybe we didn’t actually need to pack and unpack books we hadn’t looked at in 25 years.  It was easy to get rid of Mills’ Structured Programming and Kohavi’s Switching and Finite Automata Theory, and we decided we only needed one copy of Kernigan & Richie’s The C Programming Language instead of the four we had, but I couldn’t bring myself to discard Resnick and Halladay’s Physics because of the Pierce quote about Maxwell’s equations, and Diane decided to keep the Cress/Dirksen/Graham Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV because of the picture of the punched cards on the cover.

Unfortunately, our recycling company won’t take hardback books, so I have to throw out these treasures.  *sigh*

Diane Reese has just pointed out that I might be able to sell these books on eBay rather than just dumping them out — it’s worth a try. Let’s see, now…”rare collectable treasures from the early days of computer science”…yeah, that’ll work!

Well, somebody is trying to sell the Watfiv book, but so far, without any success.  Perhaps I shouldn’t make this part of my retirement planning after all.

More chocolate ranting

I owe Nestle an apology; the Frigor Noir is 46% cocoa, not 44% as I stated yesterday.  I still think it’s artifically bitter.

Oh, I got a new computer…

But Tom Digby is right about its value in the cosmic scheme of things.  Despite that, I am certainly impressed with how quickly a 1GHz machine can boot up Windows 2000, and depressed about how often I had to do so today.  But maybe it’ll get better after I finish setting it up and put it to productive use. 

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?  It’s not really that bad — I shipped my old slow laptop back East this afternoon so it could be put to use by someone else (who, I hope, is not reading this article and won’t be upset about getting a third-hand machine). 

Artificially dark chocolate?

A friend came back from a trip to Switzerland today, bearing the obligatory chocolates for consumption by those of us who stayed behind.  One of the brands he brought was Nestle’s “Frigor” — when I tasted it, I thought it was too bitter (like the 77% cocoa bars I’d tried to eat in Switzerland two years ago), and so I was surprised when I looked at the label and found it was only 44% cocoa.  I wonder how they make it so bitter with so little cocoa?

If you’d like to try it for yourself, Swiss Luxury Chocolate will happily sell you a box.

WYSIWYG editing in Manila

This evening when I went to edit this page, I found myself looking at the old Manila edit control — the one which shows you the tags.  Since I am, after all, a trained HTML professional (I was a member of the original HTML ERB at W3C, back when we were standardizing HTML 3.2), it would have made sense for me to stay with that version; tags don’t scare me at all.

But after typing in a couple of paragraphs, I went to the preferences menu and chose the WYSIWYG control.  There are times when I want to work close to the metal and hand-craft my HTML — but those times are rare.  Most of the time, WYSIWYG editing is more than adequate — now, if there were just some shortcuts for the tags I use most often (like <h4>), I’d be in hog heaven!