(no subject)

I met marykaykare for lunch today, which was fun. I don't think we got around to chocolate, but we certainly talked about cats. Also newsgroups, and weather/climate.

On the way, I had my first encounter with a talking crosswalk. I knew there was something different about it by the shape of the button and the beeping noises and flashing lights; I was still a bit surprised when it said, in a voice reminiscent of the one in my answering machine, "The walk light is now lit." The number of levels of indirection in that rather amused me. One of my colleagues suggested later that it would be a liability issue for it simply to say, "Walk."

Very old words

Back in the early 90's, I was writing in Ami (the cheap underpowered version of Ami Pro, but quite sufficient for my purposes.) Tonight I had a sudden urge to look at those old drafts; it turned out that OpenOffice can't read those files, though the old StarOffice on Win98 could. A little googling turned up a Word converter, and the floppies proved to be still readable, amazingly enough.

So now I know that Laura-from-Communications disappeared somewhere between drafts 2 and 3, which explains what she was doing in Strange Seas, written in the fall of '93 just after draft 2. It's an interesting exercise in recognizing something that, though not really bad writing, wasn't pulling its weight and needed to come out. (Draft 3 was the one where I tried to file off the serial numbers. It's not easy doing that to a large titanium submarine, I can tell you.)



There were a few stray files on the floppies, including one of comments on student essays. I wonder what prompted me to say, "Refreshingly honest, but perhaps you could find a less blunt way of putting it!" about something in an essay on Dirac?