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ping pong glue
Sunday, March 21 2004
Eva, one of the women we'd met randomly at Onteora Lake (the day of the St. Patrick's Day parade) has become a fast friend of Gretchen's. Today she and her husband came over with their big gimpy white lupine dog to walk in our woods. They live near the end of Eagle's Nest Road, the next road parallel to Dug Hill Road to the north. Professionally, they are freelance writers and photographers for National Geographic. Originally Eva is from Poland and her husband is from New Zealand (which, this morning, I had been calling "New Zedland").
After the walk we sat around drinking coffee and eating a delicious tart Gretchen had baked. We'd already decided we held a lot of beliefs in common, particularly concerning politics and the preservation of nature. Eva said she thought that the newcomers to these rustic hills usually seem to bring an appreciation for natural beauty that always seems to be lost on the oldtimers. She then talked about all the repairs and enhancements she and her husband had made to their house (which, like ours, overlooks the Esopus Valley). This led her into the topic of extreme do-it-yourselfism, particularly the kind necessary back when she was an architectural student in Poland. Certain commodities which we take for granted in the West were unavailable in the communist bloc. Oddly, glue was one such commodity. Eva told us about how she and her friends used to dissolve ping pong balls in nail polish remover in order to make the adhesive to hold architectural models together.
Many of my computer habits are antiquated and disorganized. Typically my Windows 2000 computer is operating with 20 to 40 entries in the taskbar, and I've never once used the alt-tab command (though I've known about it since 1998). My bookmarks are an unsorted pile, too long to actually use. Or, more accurately, they were that way. The other day I devoted a half hour of my life to organizing everything into a series of topical folders sorted alphabetically, though I'm not yet in the habit of using the new system. I've never once benefitted from the Recent Documents menu - and since it constitutes something of a privacy risk, I've edited the registry to disable it.
A couple recent discoveries:
- A Macintosh .dmg file is in the same format as an .iso file. You can change the extension to whichever your software can handle. Knowing this would have saved me a lot of aggravation a few months ago, but the knowledge wasn't out there.
- An .avi file saved using MPEG compression can be changed to a .mpg file by just editing the extension.
- The mystery of Fleetwood Mac's originality and maddening inimitability has finally been solved (with the help of Windows Media File samples).
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