Category: GENERAL
Contest: Name That Column
Some good news to report: in addition to my book review column for Intergalactic Medicine Show, I’ll now also be writing an occasional DVD review column.
Now, I didn’t post that just to gloat. I need your help. The column needs a snappy title, and I can’t seem to think of anything. So, a contest!
The rules are simple:
- come up with a snappy name for the column
- enter as many times as you like
- have all entries in by Feb. 15
- your entries should keep in mind the “medicine show” concept of the magazine (i.e., my book column is called “Strong Medicine: Books That Cure What Ails You”)
- post entries to the comment thread of this post
If someone comes up with a column title that I like and decide to use, I’ll send you, as a prize, some review books that I either have multiple copies of, have read already and don’t want to keep, or have no interest in reading. Once I select the winner, I’ll let the winner know what books he or she has to choose from.
Sound good? Okay, get started!
January 2006 Acquisitions
This month we have new SF from Steven Popkes; a humorous burglar tale from Charles Coleman Finlay; an astonishingly good witch story from M. Rickert (that’s sure to end up on everyone’s best of the year lists); a dumbed-down story from Robert Reed; a tale of religious cartography from Christopher Rowe; a punny body-swapping tale from Robert Loy; a new Imago Bone and Persimmon Gaunt tale from Chris Willrich; a new dark fantasy from Alex Irvine; and the second sale by former Slush Survivor Matthew Corradi.
All this PLUS two, count ’em TWO new slush survivors this month: Kenneth Altabef and Jerry Seeger.
GroupMind Query: Remember Cookies
Okay, since that last query worked so well…
Does anyone know why the remember cookies for the comments on my blog don’t work? It never remembers your information even if you click “remember info.”
GroupMind Query: Excel
Okay, so I’m trying to do something in an Excel spreadsheet that seems like it should be really easy, but I can’t figure out how to do it.
I’m using the spreadsheet in question to keep track of my workout routine (weight, sets, reps, etc.). In column A of the spreadsheet, I have the names of the exercises. In the other columns, I have the weight, sets, and reps data. What I want to do is lock column A, so that when I fill up my columns with data and I have to scroll to the right to see blank columns, column A will still stay on the screen (instead of being scrolled away with the data). So I guess you could call it setting a false margin or something like that. I can’t figure out how to do it, and I can’t figure out how to ask Excel how to do it. Can anyone help?
The New Printer in My Life
I just got myself a fancy new (well, it’s used, but it’s new to me) printer! A friend of mine hooked me up with a HP LaserJet 2200d, which is a $500 printer, but I got it for just $85. The company she works for was liquidating printers that have gone off lease, and so employees are allowed to buy them. All indications are that this printer should totally kick ass, and printers like this one are built to last. Plus, friend says that this printer probably wasn’t used and abused very much–the department it was in wouldn’t have been printing out reams and reams of documents as some other departments do.
OpenOffice “dumbquotes” Macro
Jay Penney–
In the comments to the previous entry, you mentioned an OpenOffice macro called “dumbquotes.” I googled that, but couldn’t find it. Can you tell me where to get it? I have OpenOffice already, but not that macro.
Stripping Away Funky Characters
Does anyone know of a program that will strip away the formatting and any special characters (like curly quotes) from a selection of text? I find that notepad usually does that, and/or pasting text into my Movable Type blog interface, but sometimes it doesn’t work, I guess. I mean, to me, it looks fine, but when I send it to someone else, sometimes weird characters pop up, or more recently, weird quotes (and in random places!).
It would also be nice if anyone knew of a way to add simple HTML to a document, such as <i>italics</i> tags, and link code. The Movable Type interface does that, or did; when we upgraded to 3.2 just recently, I noticed that it doesn’t use the standard tags anymore. Now, when you tell it to italicize something, it puts <em>italics</em> tags around it. Which is fine for MT, but not acceptable for my purposes. (My purposes are writing my SCI FI Wire pieces; I have to turn them in with that kind of simple HTML included.)
Movable Type 3.2
My blogging software, Movable Type, was just upgraded to version 3.2. This should help fight comment spam and will do a variety of other things. It looks to be working fine so far, but if anyone notices any bugs, let me know.
Paragaea
Chris Roberson recently launched a new website dedicated to his new novel, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance. It’s got lots of cool stuff on it, *and* has a whole prequel novel available for free featuring the protagonist of Paragaea.