The Lex Files

August 31st, 2002

Anyone who points out typos on a blog is missing the point.

If you see yourself in the previous sentence, then your monitor is too shiny.

Lauren’s family — the future in laws — left today. I still have the mess in my apartment to remember them by

Plop your email address in the box over on the left and I’ll email you everytime the blog is updated, so you don’t have to reload a dozen times a day. I promise never to sell your address to spammers, unless they’re offering me a lot of money. No, you don’t get a cut.

August 28th, 2002

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.2: Jaguar. the process was long and a bit nerve wracking, but well worth. (It was especially worth it because I chose to pay the education price and not the full retail price.)

At any rate, I got it, and it rocks.

The worst feature by far is the newly redesigned Mac Help. It crawls. There is, however, a solution. For all you Mac OS X users out there, use the Finder’s find command to search for everything on your computers that has Lexmark in its name. then select all those files, choose File — Get Info — and alter the ownership so that you own all the Lexmark files. Send them all to the Trash. Empty the trash. Relaunch Help. Comparatively speaking, it blazes. I’ll come up with the whole solution by myself, by the way, but I did make the solution work.

In other news, don’t forget that you can subscribe to the Lex Files over on the left. That way, you’ll always get an e-mail to whenever this site has been updated.

This blog entry was entered with ViaVoice. Was yours?

Disney and Universal

My future in-laws are in town. Today, we hit Universal, and man did we hit it good! (Note to grammarians: Yes, I know that I should have used the adverb “goodly.”) Because of our dealings with a ticket cashier moron, we were given a ‘front-of-the-line’ pass to use on one ride, and because we answered a two-minute survey, we got a front-of-the-line pass for the Studio Tour.


On Jurassic Park: The Ride, the T-Rex that jumps out and surprises you before the big drop didn’t show up. I asked a ride attendant why, and he laughed and said I should be thankful. Why? Because yesterday, T-Rex leapt out and spit out some nice hot oil on the unsunspecting passengers.


Oops.


For dinner, we visited Milk and Honey, run by Steven Spielberg’s mom. She was very nice to us, and explained that Steven’s afraid of the big drop off, so when he takes the ride, they stop it at that point and let him off.


Seriously.


Also, I’ve been checking through my blog logs — or, as I like to call them, my ‘blog logs.’ (Ha ha.) Someone at Disney is visitng my site pretty often, and I want to know more about you. Email me. I have a spec Malcolm for you to read. Unless you’re an intern, in whcih case… quit.

August 23rd, 2002

Designed a mockup page for my future father-in-law, an attorney: Check it out.

Must recommend PowWeb web hosting. $7.77/month for all your web hosting needs. I was a customer before I became a customer service rep. They host thefriedmans.net. Couldn’t they host you?

August 20th, 2002

I’m currently working on building a nightstand. Fortunately, as of now, only one finger is bleeding. There are about 6000 different shaped pieces of wood left, approximately double that number of nails and screws, and 42,679 pages of manual left to go.

As will become my new norm, this entry was written via dictation only.

August 19th, 2002

My name is Lex, an I’m not using my keyboard.

No I’m using IBM’s new ViaVoice software, a remarkable speak normally type dictation program. The idea is, I can speak conversationally at the speed and tempo I normally speak, no special phrasing, no pregnant pauses, no nothing. The software is doing a pretty decent jobs so far, and of course it hasn’t yet had to much time to train to my voice; it’s still in its first half-hour of use.


I think it’ll be especially useful in creating writings of mine meant to be conversational –like most of my columns, blog entries, and script dialogue. So far, I’ve been correcting as I go along, but that stops with the next paragraph:


And how does the dictations software measure up? You can be the judge. This is of unfiltered, on edited, and on the adjusted. In the words of Dave Barry, ” I am not making this up. ” Bear in mind, that it’s even doing all this of our work, without my ever having read any instruction manual, read me file, or P D F how-to.


We’re still going on edited here apparently, the software uses both sound analysis and Singh tactical analysis. Note that the unusual term at the end of the preceding sentence is a linguistic one–Sinn tactical–the software is getting closer but it can quite seem to say precisely what I wanted to say with the word some tactical since tactical syntactic rule. Hopefully you get the point.


I’m convinced that this software will do good things for my blog entries; if I could just spit out my thoughts instead of having to come up with the right way to write them down, I think I would blog more often and with longer entries.


But is probably more fun for you when a software messes up. your probably wondering, what if I try to say words in South African languages? Answer: it doesn’t write much. And can handle sentences like ” show on trumpet philatelists finally face the facts of their filthy existence “–sort of but the first word of that quote was supposed to be ” philanthropic. ” one can only assume that this software also those words like quadriplegic, at the of (APNEA), and Zimbabwe.

New words

They say Shakespeare invented something like 3,000 words.

Mark Twain once said something like, “My real name is Samuel Clemens, you know.” But, more to my evolving point, he also said something to the effect of, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lighning and the lightning bug.”

(Note that italics weren’t as refined back when Twain was writing, so to set apart ‘almost’ when he first wrote down the quip, he probably tugged the paper in his typewriter to the side while he typed out the word.)

So, I’m thinking, is it really so impressive that Shakepeare invented so many words? I mean, it seems pretty… pretty… What’s the word I’m looking for?… Oh, I can’t think of it, so I’ll just go with… Loofsy. Yeah, it seems pretty loofsy that we give Ol’ Shakey so much credit for inventing words. It’s not so imfacilitous. I don’t think one even needs to be exceptionally clever or ciphronic to create words when the need onimobulates.

And frankly, ferrial torbs rictly nussle my shundergiggins suboftly.

This looksl like a job for…

I quit my job. Or, as the homerow-impaired might type, I qyut bt hiv,


I quit my job for a handful of reasons, not the least of which were the exceedingly lousy pay, the frustratingly long hours, and the boss who treated me the way you might treat the dog who had just vomited — all over your face — after eating another dog’s droppings.


I am Lex, King of the Mental Image.


I’m a week away from starting work for a super super company called PowWeb. PowWeb, in fact, provides me with my thefriedmans.net domain. If you’re looking for very affordable domain hosting and whatnot… PowWeb’s the place. And I woulda said that even before they hired me.

August 12th, 2002

Lauren’s in a movie, and I spent last night photocopying my spec script to show to some producers and agents. We’re close. We need another year, or maybe two, or maybe even three, but we will both find success doing what we want to do.

Update, October 2006: I was right and wrong. It took a few years to figure out what was really important to us, but once we did, we certainly achieved success in those areas (family, love, personal satisfaction :))

From cnn.com

Heston, 77, is a friend of former President Ronald Reagan, 91, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994, and his wife, Nancy. (Full story)

You can imagine the doctor in 1994… that fateful day:


I’m sorry, President Reagan. You have Alzheimer’s. Also, a wife named Nancy. I’m terribly sorry.