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a replacement for Homesite
Thursday, September 15 2016
Air temperatures were so cool today that I was forced to wear leg-covering pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Despite recent gains in the war against them, I probably killed between seven and ten fleas today.
Donald Trump's recent rise in the polls has me (and, really, anyone who isn't terrified by the prospect of the end of white hegemony in America) demoralized. I pay close attention to this stuff, and when polls rise for Trump and dip for Clinton, I'm among the first to know. There are websites that can talk me down from such ledges, but I'm skeptical of happy talk; I was one of may liberals burned by the unexpected re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, a tragedy that had me listening exclusively to non-political programming for something like a year afterwards (or at least until Hurricane Katrina came along to rub Bush's nose in his incompetence). This demoralization is real; it takes the spring out of my step and makes me less productive than I might otherwise be. Now I know what it's been like in red state America for the last eight (or ten) years. If there's a reason it seems your roofer, stock broker, or pipe-fitter has been phoning it in, it might just be that you have Obama to thank.
This evening Gretchen made a delicious wonton soup with noodles, broccoli, and kale (none of it from our garden, which has fallen on hard times, what with the drought and kale blight). Most evening, I have enough slack in my schedule to watch Jeopardy with Gretchen, even though there can be as much as an hour and a half remaining of my Pacific-timezone workplace.
Late tonight, I became so frustrated with Notepad being the default text editor on Woodchuck (my main machine, which runs Windows 7), that I decided to do something about it. It might surprise you to hear that I don't automatically change my default text editor, but I don't. The reason I don't probably dates back to a time when non-Notepad text editors opened and ran noticeably slower on a computer, and that difference was enough to keep me with the default, ghetto though it was. But I've had it with Notepad; it usually fails to recognize the linefeeds in my text documents, there is only one level of undo, and, Christ, I could go on and on. Today I Googled "alternatives to Notepad" and found a page with ten recommendations. I scrolled down the list until I found something unfamiliar, PSPad, and installed it. PSPad might be a bit much for a Notepad replacement, but it might well be something even more useful: a Homesite+ replacement. I've been using Homesite+ (or whatever came before) since 1997 or so. It was the Windows-environment text editor I settled on after leaving the world of Macintosh (and BBEdit), and I've liked how responsive, uncluttered, and powerful it has been. The reason I haven't abandoned (despite occasional claims to the contrary) it has been that it is the only text editor that allowed me to drag & drop images into a document to produce an image tag. That might seem like a small feature, but it was always enough to keep me using Homesite. But PSPad does that, along with all the things Homesite+ can't do, given that it was last upgraded circa 2003.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?160915 feedback
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