(no subject)

Il fait assez du vent aujourd'hui. Which is the polite French way of saying it's blowing like hell out, but the wind is warm, and it's definitely suitable weather for chewing on. I look like the wild woman of Borneo, red hair and all, because the minute you step outside, you get blown around. The wind yanked my screen door out of my hand this morning, but I managed to get out of its way before it slammed on me.

I'm about ready for somebody else to be in charge of the coffee hour, thank you. I ended up coming to campus a couple of hours earlier than usual today, in order to get the project management stuff from Tuesday done. I didn't exactly mean to spend all of yesterday working on my case study, but I did, and since the project management stuff is due in half an hour or so, it was either do it before the coffee hour or do it afterward and feel rushed about it. (Not that it wasn't rushed anyway, but there you are.) So I did that, and then went to the coffee hour, following which I went to the library and went in search of my own coffee (you can get coffee in the library. I still think that's highly cool.)

I still think "the seat of the tremor" sounds funny, but every dictionary I've come across that has anything to say about it says that it's "seat", not "source". Damned if I wasn't right about "biosynthetic enzyme replacement", though.

I'm sure there's something useful I could be doing, but I don't particularly feel like doing it, since the project management lecture starts in 22 minutes or so and is followed by our second group meeting of the week. I sort of hope it's a short meeting for want of feedback so I can go home earlyish and do some of the editing I got socked with yesterday. My advisor wants this journal to go to the printer by the end of next week, with overtones of "hell or high water". It's going to be a busy week next week. If I knew how long it would take me to get to Ravenna by bus, I'd know how much time I'd have to do editing tomorrow.

irresistible force versus immovable object

One of my attributes, which is either a virtue or a vice depending on the situation, is that when I know there has to be a way to make a computer do something, I'll fight with it until I come up with a way to do it. The way I come up with is usually the hard way, unfortunately, but at least I get a result. In the present case, it's a word count from three different Flash files, and it only took me three different downloads on two different computers to do it.

The first piece of software I tried was freeware, and it worked for one of the files, but couldn't read the other two. Then I discovered that Flash MX has a free trial version. Ha, says I, that'll do it.

The lab's computers are set up so that they wipe the disk image and reset it every time they restart. Flash requires restarting the computer before you can use it. I'm sure you all can see where this is going: you download something to use in the lab, run the installer, and it tells you that in order to use what you just installed, you have to restart the computer. When you restart the computer, it deletes both the installed program and the .exe file. So you just wasted however much time you spent finding the program, downloading and installing it.

So I came home and installed the Mac trial version of Flash MX on the Moose, and happily sat there counting words in the Flash files in question. I'm sure there's a way to export the text out of a Flash file and run it through a word counter somewhere or other else, but getting any number, even if I'm wrong, is better than no number at all at this point. We need the number in order to get things done before our next meeting (on Saturday, oogh). I'm supposed to be revising the scope statement, too, but I'm damned if I do it tonight. (I can't, anyway, since it depends on a file I can't open at home and I am NOT going back to the lab again tonight.)