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lost on the dogs in tonight's audience
Sunday, March 17 2002
Everything was going swimmingly with my new Flash chat system and then (mostly for server-related reasons) it just started running like shit, so all through Six Feet Under I was working on it, unaware that somehow three or four crucial lines from the chat's Actionscript had been deleted. Flash tries to be a forgiving environment in many ways, but because of this it can be hard to detect accidental errors introduced into the code (something that is unusually easy to do in the non-standard text editor provided by development environment). I'll accidentally delete a line (perhaps via an unnoticed drag and drop operation) and the program will continue working as before, but with a subtle change that doesn't manifest without lots of testing. Only later, when the whole thing shows itself to be a stinking pile of crap do I realize what's happened, but by then I've used up another couple valuable hours of my life. If I've been smart, of course, I can always revert to a backup I've made. But which backups aren't tainted with the unnoticed new error?
For tonight's viewing of Six Feet Under, we had two additional dogs and four additional humans. One of the dogs was that huge Labrador/Rottweiler who had been at Ray and Nancy's apartment yesterday evening, and he tended to be more disruptive than either Sally or Ray and Nancy's dog Suzy. We'd be sitting there trying to watch and he'd start woofing at us demanding that we play with him. Between that and the Flash chat headaches, I don't think I got the full benefit of the show.
Six Feet Under always begins with somebody dying. Tonight's death featured mysterious reference to a dog which, though lost on the dogs in tonight's audience, was to play an important role in the official Six Feet Under website's take on the episode. Indeed, since that dog could have been any dog, Sally could play the role!
In other news, today I found myself re-installing Microsoft Office yet again on my main PC. For some reason it could no longer open Word documents. I'd double click on, say, my resumé, and it would just sit there for a time until the Task Manager told me it wasn't responding. What the hell good is a word processor that you have to re-install every so often? How complicated can word processing be? Why are Microsoft Word documents several times larger than their Rich Text Format equivalents? But, most egregious of all, why is the file format of Microsoft Word always incompatible with all preceding versions of Microsoft Word? We all know why, of course, to force upgrades. Today I found that the file format extortion situation is even worse than I'd suspected. It turns out that the latest version of Microsoft Office, XP, doesn't install the export component for Office 20001 by default - you have to get out your CD again if you want to add that "feature." It's such a hassle to get to this functionality that I'm sure most people don't, dutifully saving their work in a format that only those with the latest version of Office can read. I wish I'd hear the issue of file formats come up more often in the debate about what to do to the Microsoft monopoly. It angers me a lot more than the fact that Microsoft packages a good web brower with their operating system. I've said this before, but I think it bears repeating. If Microsoft is so into .NET and XML, why isn't Word's default file format XML?
For my part, I've done the best I can to keep my creative output from ending up in proprietary formats. I do almost all my writing in a text editor, and the text file format is a good bit older than me. Open, stable file formats are crucial for the long term survival of information. The openness and stability of, say, DNA code, has made it possible for certain passages of information to persist nearly unaltered for billions of years.
In the bathtub today, I realized that Cliff NotesTM are a form of lossy compression for text.
1A clear giveaway to the fact that there is no useful difference between file formats for Office '97 and Office 2000 is that Office XP has only one option for saving both of them - Office '97.
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