BrownStudies

Using Keyboard Maestro to fix Safari 5.1 keyboard dumbnesses

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The MikeBook has been receiving tons of app upgrades due to Lion (haven’t upgraded yet; waiting a few months for the bugs to shake out).

In general, the app upgrades have caused no problem except for Safari, which disabled the Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys. I mean…what?? Sorry, Apple, but I don’t have a Magic Trackpad, and I still use my quaint little keyboard to navigate through my web pages.

Fortunately, a poster to this thread on the Apple support forum provided the secret handshake:

• COMMAND UP ARROW takes you to top of page
• COMMAND DOWNARROW takes you to bottom of page
• OPTION UPARROW takes you up a page
• OPTION DOWNARROW takes you down a page

So, using the wonderfulness that is Keyboard Maestro, I remapped my Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys to the above keystrokes. Now, I can use my keyboard the way God (and not Apple) intended.

Posted in Tools/Tips/Tricks | No Comments »

Vivian Maier

In 2007, John Maloof ran across a storage locker at a thrift auction house that contained over 100,000 negatives of pictures. The photos spanned the years from the 1950s–1990s and were primarily urban scenes of Chicago and New York.

Maloof began posting the pictures on a blog and dug into the life of the woman who had taken these pictures: Vivian Maier. It took a lot of detective work, but it turned into a labor of love for Maloof, who has parlayed his interest in Maier and her photos into a handsome site, exhibitions, a film, and a book.

I particularly love her urban photos, seemingly taken on the fly, the sort of thing you might see yourself as you briskly walk past a street person or sightseers or a woman talking on a telephone. They’re wonderfully evocative of a different place and time.

Related articles

• Vivian Maier: the nanny with a flair for photography (telegraph.co.uk)
• Revealed: Treasure trove of amazing pictures that were kept hidden from the world (dailymail.co.uk)

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A Flapper’s Dictionary

Ran across this delightful post from a used bookseller in Pennsylvania. He acquired the July 1922 edition of Flapper magazine and reproduced an uncredited article that listed phrases and jargon that, while probably quite cheeky at the time, seem quaint and amusing now. It’s fun working out the chain of associations that lead from the slang to the definition.

I wonder really how old the writer of the article was; I smell a fuddy-duddy who wants to appeal to the “with-it” generation. I could imagine a Beatnik or Hippie dictionary article of the same stripe.

Some of my favorites:

• Cancelled Stamp—A wallflower.
• Embalmer—A bootlegger.
• Eye Opener—A marriage.
• Father Time—Any man over 30 years of age.
• Strike Breaker—A young woman who goes with her friend’s “Steady” while there is a coolness.
• Rock of Ages—Any woman over 30 years of age.
• Meringue—Personality.
• Lallygagger—A young man addicted to attempts at hallway spooning.
• Houdini—To be on time for a date.
• Smith Brothers—Guys who never cough up.

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Fibonacci sonnets

I have lately been enjoying a blog by Austin, TX artist/writer Austin Kleon, and have been happily plundering his archives for posts on sketching, storytelling, art, and the like.

I was charmed by this post: Writing The Fibonacci Sonnet. It’s a neat little writing trick that uses the Fibonacci numbers (1,1,2,3,5,8, 13, 21) to create short short stories with sentences that have one word, one word, two words, three words, and so on. Kind of like haiku, except counting the words in the sentences instead of the syllables.

It also reminds me of the poet Jonathan Williams’ dotty “meta-four” poems, where each line only had four words. An example of one of his meta-four poems in this Guardian UK obit. Here’s a meta-four from another appreciation of Williams:

estimated acres of forest

henry david thoreau burned

down in 1844 trying

to cook fish he’d

caught for dinner 300

Posted in Oddments, Writing | 1 Comment »

A student or a scholar

One of the things I discovered about myself during the past year is that I’m a student, not a scholar. I’ve always thought of myself as a “lifelong student,” but I’m not sure I really understood what that meant till recently.

In my view, a master’s candidate is a student, a PhD candidate is a scholar. The differences are many: the difference between being an amateur (student) and a professional (scholar), between minor league and major league, between levels of commitment in terms of time, energy, passion, and dedication.

For me, a lifelong student retains the joy of learning new things and loves sampling the buffet. That’s been me, that will always, probably, be me. The scholar, I think, takes a deeper interest and is best served (at least in their early years) by not flitting from flower to flower. Also, the way academe is structured, scholars are professionally groomed for a tough job market; the decisions they make today on the research they publish will have repercussions years down the line. The student, I think, lives more in the moment, or at least has a shorter time horizon for the satisfying of their desires.

As I’m sure I’ve said in other posts, I like taking classes. This seemed to separate the student from the scholar, in my brief experience. I think I’m one of the “Scanners’ that Barbara Sher describes in her book Refuse to Choose: someone who loves the novelty and variety of learning and resists constraining themselves to a single specialty.

Reminds me of these quotes by Bill Moyers on the fun of being a journalist:

A journalist is a professional beachcomber on the shores of other people’s wisdom … A journalist is basically a chronicler, not an interpreter of events. Where else in society do you have the license to eavesdrop on so many different conversations as you have in journalism? Where else can you delve into the life of our times? I consider myself a fortunate man to have a forum for my curiosity.

Had I stuck it out in the PhD realm, my chosen research style would have been that of a journalist. The challenge for my life now, I think, is to elevate that curiosity and focus from a hobby done in my spare time to a respected place of prominence at the center of my life and how I choose to spend the rest of my years on the planet.

Posted in Academic life, Ideas, MeMeMe, Quotes of Note | No Comments »