I’ve been looking for a software tool that would convert foreign characters into a poor substitute.

Call me Ugly McAmerican. I don’t care.

My language has been worn down — I would say, “polished” — like a river rock to the point where it doesn’t have a million characters or funny accent marks or any of that stuff. Now, I don’t mind if your language uses them. I don’t even mind if we have a common encoding. What I do mind is that none of my tools work with your stupid common encoding. When grep and sed and diff and ruby all know what to do with your ?q???????, give me a call.

In the meantime, I plan to go on working in ASCII as much as possible. Then, when necessary, I’ll use tools to convert ugly-quotes to pretty ones, or turn ... into ellipses, etc.

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Amazon’s front page today is all about the version 2.0 Kindle. I have to admit, it looks pretty sweet. Choosing B&W rather than color was a good trade-off so you can up the pixel density.

I looked up three books I’m reading right now, and they were all available. Interestingly, they were also (slightly) cheaper on Kindle than on paper. In my experience, electronic versions are usually no cheaper than the hardcopy. This is especially true of bibles and bible-study materials like commentaries and lexicons. I understand why the BDAG is $150 in print (well, sort of) but there’s no reason they should charge that much when you spare the trees.

On the other hand, the Kindle costs $360. How many years does that buy you? That is, what price are you paying for your new “bookshelf?” And will the next version read your ebooks? (And if it reads them at all, will there be a media conversion “upgrade” fee?)

Sorry not to be updating this blog more. Partly it’s that I’ve been terribly busy the last two months (it’s sort of the busy season at work). And partly it’s because of microblogs like twitter and time-wasting walled-gardens like Facebook. But mainly, it’s been because of my DSL, which has been horribly unreliable.

I dare to think that it might have been resolved now.
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I found this article informative. I didn’t actually know the details of how the credit score is determined. But I especially found interesting the conclusion that Uncle Sam is (or should be) a sub-prime borrower.

Update (January, 2014). I’ve been asked to remove the link because it’s causing the originator’s spam rating to go up. Sounds like a bug in the algorithm. Here’s the equivalent link, in case it’s helpful: http://goo.gl/swFwgW.

We’ve been pretty happy customers of Netflix for 2+ years now, but I never knew what it cost us, compared with a brick-and-mortar DVD rental place. Now, courtesy of Feedflix the answer is as clear as this graph: