About Love
(What it’s about)
Posted in aesthetics, general on 24 Sep 2005
What it’s about
Eyolf wrote in the month of September, 2005
The dylanchords.com guide: “How to use Word without hurting Heiner’s eyes”
Posted in computers, software, typography on 25 Sep 2005
Upon general request, here’s my guide to proper use of MS Word:
- Never ever use direct formatting.
- That means: never ever click on any of the buttons in the formatting toolbar
- . . . which means that you might as well disable that toolbar altogether (right-click in the toolbar area and uncheck “Formatting”)
- You are allowed to keep it there for two reasons:
- To control what is going on in the document, and
- to click on the “Styles” button (the one with the two “A”s), which opens the “Styles” sidebar, . . .
- . . . which should always be visible, and which is the only acceptable way to format the text.
- Create styles for the types of text that you are going to use, and/or modify the existing styles to suit your desires.
- These desires should under no circumstance include using Times New Roman or Arial, which are Microsoft’s rip-offs of slightly more acceptable typefaces; but which in themselves are objectively ugly; and which give a discerning reader the impression that you don’t care how your document looks. Good alternatives are Garamond (which, in Microsoft’s version, is not a Garamond at all but a Jannon, but it comes close enough), Gentium, a nice, free unicode font (a combination of three huge advantages which are rarely seen together), or for that matter Book Antiqua, which is also a rip-off, but of a nice typeface: Hermann Zapf’s Palatino
- Use templates:
- In an empty document, set up all the different styles that you think you will be using (plain text, indented text, blockquotes, headings, etc.), and save the document, not as a Word Document, but a Word Template (choose it in the drop-down list below the field for the file name).
- Choose New document from template from the Files menu and select your template.
- Lo and behold! All your styles are there.
- You can apply your new template to any document through the Functions > Templates menu. Check the box with “update styles automatically”.
The politics of typography
Posted in computers, typography on 24 Sep 2005
Did you ever consider the political implications of the ascii standard? No? Thought so.
Someone who did is Robert Bringhurst. And these are not the only implications of typography that he has considered. The title of his book The Elements of Typographical Style may not be sexy, not the kind of thing you would read on the bus or in bed, but, holy shit, it is! If one happens to be a typography freak, this is just heaven, but I suspect that even people who use Times New Roman and Arial (or who don’t know which fonts they’re using, which probably means that they use Times New Roman and Arial), might find …
Chimes of Freedom
Posted in dylan, guitar, music, tabs on 21 Sep 2005
Chimes of Freedom was, I think, the first Dylan song that I really made an effort to transcribe. This was before the days of the Internet and in my case also before the days of Lyrics, so if I wanted the words on paper, I had to write them out myself.
Which I wanted, and which I did.
I was spellbound by those words. The layer upon layer of different meanings connected to different sensual experiences: the thunder storm, the lightning, the sounds, the “we”, which is not explained in the song, but I imagined a loving couple, on their way home from a date, to . . ., well, you know – all these and more, working together, flowing in and out …
Useful software III: Image viewers and editors
Posted in computers, software on 15 Sep 2005
I wrote earlier about a new image viewer — FastStone. I did like it, but it turned out the “Fast” part was an exaggeration. For a quick, efficient, feature-rich picture viewer/editor, there are really only two alternatives: irfanview and XnView. Which one is the right one, depends on your needs, but they’re both free and small, so why choose? — you can use them both.
Irfanview is the fastest viewer around. If what you have is collections of images off the net, this may not make much of a difference, but if you have the occasional 18 Mb scan on a CD, you’ll be grateful for the speed. It is also quite versatile in the handling of images.
The cons are, …
“. . . whatever / I Stumble Upon”
Posted in community, general, software on 6 Sep 2005
It started with “google” — an internet term which became a standard word in any word class and in any language. Then it was “blog”, which is apparently the word that most quickly has been entered in French dictionaries.
But where I live, “Stumble” tops them all. People can be ‘thumbs-upped’ for their great stumbles. It’s the best example I can think of of an idea which in itself is great, but which, when put into practice, not only proves itself as great in the way it was meant, but also has a potential for growth in all possible directions, which the originator could never have imagined.
The basic idea is this: say you’re interested in cats. You look for pictures …
Wedding song
Posted in general on 4 Sep 2005
I try to be meek and mild. I try to be humourous too. And I’m always serious. Honestly. To some people, those don’t seem to go together well.
I’ve never received more complaints — verging on the indignant — than after I wrote about Wedding Song that
It may be a silly song, hastily written, badly rehearsed, and with some of the least successful poetic images Dylan has ever written (“I love you more than blood” – yuck!)
I’m sorry if I hurt someone’s feelings by trashing their favourite song, but I do think it’s a silly song; all reports agree that it was hastily written; and the recording bears ample evidence to the short rehearsal time, even though the performance miraculously …