Moot Thoughts & Musings

Why is it that whenever you have to print something really important, like a draft, your printer breaks? or runs out of ink? or jams at every page?

Or, let's say it's almost 10 pm and you need to give your committee a copy of your thesis tomorrow when you realize that you need to use the scanner. Let's say there are two operational scanners in your household, one for you and one for your husband. Your scanner currently has cords missing from it, because husband just got his and stole them. Furthermore, you can't use his, because he runs Linux and thus scans by means of a command line, which you have no idea how to do. So what do you do?
a) Steal the cords back (which means finding the right ones in the huge mass of his home computer network)
b) wait until morning and get him to scan (oh wait, you're going to be gone all morning, and he's going to be gone all afternoon)
c) write blog posts lamenting your dependence on technology to make papers that have really cool layout, because, of course, said technology will always be dependable when all you have to do is write stupid blog posts, but not when you have to do something resembling importance.

Sigh. I think I'll try to choose A.

In other news, I've been having way too much fun on the Chicago Manual of Style website. Non-subscription options include a Citation Quick Guide (which, to tell you the truth, is more extensive than my undergrad copy of Kate. It even tells you how to cite blogs.), Chicago Style Q&A (which is almost as entertaining as informative, and updated every month), and a variety of tools such as sample forms and letters targeted towards preparing and submitting your work for publication.

And you can sign up for a free 30 day trial of the actual Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. online. It was super easy to sign up. I love being to browse and search volumes like this electronically. (Like I was doing earlier today with the Oxford Companion to the Year, which is SUCH an invaluable resource.) For fun, I looked up the section on American Sign Language. It was so great!!! It taught me more about ASL grammar than a lot of other places I've looked. A wonderful place to start for ASL.

Anyway, so I'm down to formatting and layout. I have lots of diagrams, tables, and images. Not fun.

My fingers just automatically hit Apple-S, the short cut for "File: Save". That's what they do every time I pause in writing. But it only works in Word.