actually, while it is true that the US has condemned the coup, the US' State Dept. personnel in Latin America often seem to operate with a mind of its own. It is possible that there was a difference of opinion with the people on the ground and Washington. Many of the people in Latin America came to their jobs in the waning days of the Cold War and considered their mission to contain and prevent another Nicaragua/Cuba or the victory of the Guatemala and Salvadorean guerilla (of course, Chavez is the new Devil and he has been used effectively to mobilize opposition against many of the "new left" governments in the region. For many of the US State Dept. personnel, and for much of the Honduran elite, they are still fighting against communism (now reincarnated in Chavez) and believe that having a strong tie with the military and the "trustworthy" business elite is the best way to prevent this from happening. I would not be surprised if in the corridors of the different embassies and at Foggy Bottom the comments are along the lines of "Obama is new to this, soon he will realize who are the real friends of the US..."
consider that it might need to be cut if there is a small accident. I looked at something similar in the past, we were thinking of Titanium, but on the advice of a firefighter and an ER nurse, we went with gold instead. The reason, gold can be cut and repaired quite easily, where as a very hard material like titanium (in our case) would be quite difficult to cut and could result in irreparable injury to the finger.
Do something unique with the gold, make it have some interesting patterns or shapes, but keep the metal soft enough to deal with possible accidents (the other idea we were given was to have hairline cuts fused with gold or similar material, like that it could be cut if needed.)
ok, I was a bit off... while the information is on the side of the can, trying to find it online is not so simple (also, I am lousy at english measurements. Still, I should have looked it up).
Biking is great, but not always possible (not only because of distance). A few years ago when I was still working in high tech, I had a job that was some 45 miles from home. The drive on 880 (if you know the Bay Area, you will know immediately what I mean) was horrendous. So when I found that I could take the train and bike 14 miles a day, I hoped on the bike... the problem was that my manager started dropping hints like "you know, you should drive because it looks more professional," or "biking to work is really affecting your performance review." As soon as he started getting that attitude I started looking for another job that paid about 40% more and did not have to put up with the crap. Wonder how he is doing? He drove a sports car that sucked gas like crazy (midlife crisis?) and now I am completing a phd at a UC where my commute is either 12 minutes on foot, or 5 min on bike. Changing one's habits is not only an internal struggle, but one that is enmeshed with very complicated networks of power relationships. Obesity is not only the failings of the individual, but more so the society the individual lives in. Somethings like free soda at work might seem like a nice perk, but with what we know today, companies should restrict it if they care to have healthier workers. In its place, workplaces should provide things like coffee (good quality, not the typical swill), tea and other non- or light-caloric alternatives. To gain a pound of weight, one needs to consume about 3300 calories. An 8 oz. can of Coke (I am sure their bulldogs will be all over this) has some 45g of sugars or something like 180 calories. While that might not seem like a lot, the problem is that sweet foods and drinks stimulate overeating. On average someone who consumes 4 cans of soda (or one large fountain soda from the QuickyMart... something like 32 oz.) will eat an additional 600 to 900 calories a day, which adds up to an additional 1400 to 1700 calories per day (half if you drink sugar-free, but the stimuli to eat more still there, so you tend to overeat regardless the amount of calories in the soda). So not only is the exercise important, but what you eat. Unfortunately, we geeks tend to eat easily available highly processed foods that are making us gain weight like crazy. If you want an impartial source of data, Just look at office furniture catalogs from the last four decades (say Herman-Miller and Steelcase, two respected US corporations). There you will find a steady increase in the widths and depths of chairs to accommodate those of us who have consumed a bit too many sodas and similar "foods."
In the early 90s I worked for a company that helped standardized the recessed keyboard with the pointing device in the center on laptops (or powerbooks to be more exact). There were many ergonomic examinations of input devices made and one of the things that came up over and over again was the additional stress that was introduced on to wrists, shoulders and upper back by the constant switching of the horizontal plane of activity for the hands (something that most large trackballs would require you to do, as well as many early input devices... those add-on mouse trays were/are ergonomic nightmares).
Today I am an anthropologist and while my work is not on ergonomics (there are a number of anthropologist working in that area), something that I have been thinking about as I read the literature on tool making (flint knapping and other pre-industrial technologies) is that the main area of for precision activity (say something that your grandmother might have done like embroidery, or your grandfather as a cobbler... not all of us are decedents from royalty) takes place in a space in front of the thorax with the head slightly bent down and the hands are mostly facing each other on an angle. The main activity takes place in an arc of movement defined by elbow's movement. The wrist, while used for a number of repetitive tasks, is not typically held in a strained position for long, spending most of the activities time in a "natural" rest position (even while wielding a hammer or other percussive tool).
This is not to say that there were not problems with overworking the hands, fingers, etc. but the types of injuries were quite different than what was introduced with the industrialization of labor, where not only was the body governed to work in a repeating motion at high speeds, but it was molded, quite often orthopedically, to fit the design of the machine, to fit cartesian grids--right angles, etc. While we might think this way (like the modern city layout... e.g., Manhattan, which is in a regular grid) our bodies including our hands, wrists, etc. are not their most efficient and unstressed in these configurations. One of the things that I have tried to teach myself and suggested some students, is to type on the keyboard at angles where the wrist are not bent sideways. In contrast to how "secretaries" were taught (or molded) until the 1970s to use typewriters, as if they were holding lemons while typing and sitting at 90 angles with the feet flat on the ground, one slightly in front of the other. Today there are a number of studies showing that sitting in such a position is not at all good for you and that the slouch with elevated feet... there was something on this not long ago on Slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/2 8/1742222&from=rss and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/06112 7112844.htm.
Hope this confused the issue... try to keep the input device in the same horizontal plane as your keyboard, and don't wield a hammer to it (at least not repeatedly prior to a deadline). Be thankful I did not mention QWERTY.
(oh yeah, my favorite off the shelf keyboard is the old Microsoft natural... I wish they made one without the side numeric pad--I suppose I could hack it. I also use an old Logitech stingray trackball... hacked to make the buttons smaller and feel more natural).
nice dream--I have one and used daily... to clean I a cheap colander to catch the grounds then I dump them in a bag and compost. If you like the Bodum, I would also suggest you look at the Yama vacuum brewer, I seem to like their filter over the Bodum's nylon mesh.
And there are a lot of people that think Paris Hilton is "hot." I don't care how much one pays for poopochino, it is still gross. Most other high end coffee is worth the price, see www.cupofexcellence.org/ for trully amazing coffees. ($27 for a pound of La Esperanza might sound like a lot, but you can brew about 30 cups... so it is still cheaper than SBUX grog).
Coffee... after eight years of research on different aspects of coffee (mainly as a social scientist, but also on quality standards), how to prepare and store coffee gets asked over and over...
Here are a few websites that have very reliable information: www.coffeegeek.com and www.sweetmarias.com are two that come to mind, also look at www.scaa.org (Specialty Coffee Association of America) as they are the authority on coffee quality.
aside from that you have to ask yourself what you are starting with.
You need good water, not too hard (maybe a simple water filter is all you need) The references in the US are San Francisco and Seattle water.
Instant, then just close the lid of the can (though the flavor won't really change much if you don't)
Preground coffee from the big four (Folger's, Maxwell House, Nestle, etc.) or flavored coffees (do you know what kind of solvents they use to retain the flavor through roasting?), then just close the lid and keep in a dark cool place (cabinet that is not above a stove is a fine place).
Preground coffee from a coffee shop, then buy small amounts (a pound or less) and just close tightly and store in a dark cool place, not in the freezer or refrigerator since humidity will affect the flavor. An airtight container that is not too large should do fine
Of course, the best possible way to drink fresh coffee is to roast it yourself and consume it within three weeks.... this might be a bit much for most, but the second best thing is to buy freshly roasted coffee from a reputable coffee shop (need not be expensive), that prints the date on the package. The few I know that are distributed nationwide are Green Mountain Coffee and Tully's. There are smaller ones that are amazing like Intelligentsia (Chicago and soon in L.A.), Groundworks (L.A.), Barefoot Roasters (Sunnyvale, CA), Stumptown (Portland, OR) Counter Culture (Durham, NC), and many others I have not included due to space, but if they roast locally, they are bound to be great. All the ones I mention print the date of roasting (not the date that they are good until).
Why don't I recommend Starbucks or other well known coffees? Well, they are good if you like the way they roast (and a good many people do. They are after all the largest specialty coffee company in the world. I don't buy their coffee because, 1) too dark for my taste, 2) no roast date on package -- no other reason, and the same goes for others who do not print the roast date on the package).
Packaging only does so much, whether it is vacuum, co2, nitrogen, etc. Coffee is a very complex thing that has something like 600 or so identifiable components after roasting. Not all of them remain stable for the same amount of time, and most of the flavor in coffee, like anything else, is in the smell. Roasting is a process of controlled destruction and most of the smell of coffee is trapped in microscopic gas pockets inside the bean, out-gassing will occur, oils and similar substances will sublimate, etc. this process cannot be undone with any known technology today (no magic crystals, no fancy gases, nada). Coffee should be ground right before consumption with a good grinder (burrs and not blades) and coffee should not sit around too long... a month or five weeks tops (I prefer three weeks... you can tell if a coffee is fresh if when you brew it, a foamy crust forms, the thicker-- the fresher. The crust is a combination of emulsified gases and oils. As the components evaporate, sublimate, or deteriorate, the foam becomes thinner or non-existent).
Brewing... there are a number of methods, but most do not bring the best out from the coffee. Some of the best ways to prepare coffee are not that expensive at all. French pot (Bodum is nice, but you can easily find some for $14 or so that work just as well) is quite good. Boil water and add it to the ground coffee, steep for four minutes and it is done (water should be around 200F or so, which is what water will be off the stove a minute or so after boiling, if it is t
you are brave... I never have worked on such a large document in Word... nor would I like to (and I don't think I will have to).
30 pages is what I am writing now, but in the past I have worked on API guides and other similar technical documents which would end up being something like 600 or more pages (page per call, plus extensive diagrams, code samples, appendixes, index, TOC,... the works).
I have never met a pubs manager who would trust such a lengthy document to Word... unless they were in Redmond (or got a paycheck from them). There are those who like to live dangerously, but I have lost my drive to do that, so no more Word.
Funny story: many years ago I did meet a Microsoft tech writer who told me that they did not use Word for many of their more extended documents--I believe it!
I have and while the interface is "sexy" I find that OO is faster and more stable (using it right now). I am sure that if I was using the latest quad-core wizbang Intel machine with tons of memory it might not be much of an issue, but I only have a 2 Ghz G5 with 1.5 Gigs of Ram... hardly adequate to run such a large Java based application (or MS Office... which keeps saying that it is out of memory and unable to save docs... never mind that the hard drive has over 10 GB free).
(To think that I used to use WordStar at one time on a machine that had a 5MB hard drive and 512K of Ram)
I've been using OpenOffice for almost a year (mainly on Kubuntu, but almost exclusively on a Mac for the last few weeks). After using Office for many years I am dissapointed that OpenOffice does not mimik in full the several versions of Office I have had to use in the last few years.... not once has it crashed and destroyed hours of work (incremental backup does not always work properly in Office... you get hours of backed up garbage. Sometimes even the "save as" backups would be corrupted). Microsoft Office seems to have a peril sensitivity routines which detect when the need for a document is greatest and the time is the shortest--then it decides to let you know who runs the universe.
For too long I have had to put up with very unstable software (I mainly use Word and PowerPoint, though now I use Keynote for presentations and love it). Word does not seem to like working with tables, footnotes and graphs. Nor does it seem to like documents longer than 30 pages, or paste and copy within a document, or work nicely between it and Excel (almost 100% crashes on my machines and I have tried all kinds of remedies... not looking how to fix it, don't even suggest it as I don't have it installed anymore).
My writing is rather boring, Times New Roman, 12 pt. double spaced, an occasional simple table and an image or two. I try not to use footnotes, but do so once in a while. The documents are nothing extra ordinary, yet Office consistantly crashes, not only on one machine, but on three. I have used both 2004 and Vx--same thing.
OpenOffice finally is to the point where I can use it and not miss much (wish it had better EndNote integration, but I am ok with it as is as long as it does not crash and wipe out my document). So far it has proven to be very stable and I have been using 2.04 on a Mac for several weeks.
While I can understand the reluctance to switch, Word in its last few major revisions was never too stable and very few technical writers (of which I was one for several years) would use it for anything but the simplest of tasks. Back then (and still today, though it is showing its age... Adobe are you reading this?) FrameMaker, even with its archaic UI, was the choice based on its stability and the fact that it could handle very large documents without much problems (something I would never consider on Word... and hopefully never have to again--Good riddence to Microsoft!! And thanks all of those who have made OpenOffice what it is today).
Finally 100% free of Microsoft!! (Mac OSX 10.4.8, and Kubuntu on PIII laptop)
I know that Adobe won't let go of it and that it is already obsolete for the most part (heck, when I was using it daily it had a cumbersome HI. Yet, I feel there is no other application that has the stability to deal with large (I mean "LARGE") documents... say API guides of 500 or so pages (I know that is small be some measures, but either is impossible for Office to handle... and document linking? Please! It never worked well and was more frustrating than doing the renumbering by hand (page numbers, ok, but figures, footnotes, etc. What a pain).
For one job, where I had an incompetent and micromanaging supervisor who insisted on us using Office, I started keeping track of hours spent recovering from Office crashes. Today I am considering how to write a dissertation and I am either contemplating putting together a PC with Windows NT to run FrameMaker (or better yet, using Virtual PC on my Mac), or getting a faster Mac and using OpenOffice. I expect the doc to be 350 or so pages long and to have many footnotes, citations, etc. No way am I trusting it to Office (I have looked at other apps like Nisus, but while they are more dependable than Word, they are not as reliable as I would like).
Hummm... wonder if I should do it like in the old days, with VI and LaTex?
Yes, it would. For the Mac there is Neooffice (neooffice.org). While it is not as fast as using the Microsoft products, it is fast enough and does not seem to crash as often (I hate using word with document that have more than a couple of footnotes, tables, etc. Almost always Office will crash... been through all the checks on fonts, etc. Office is a crappy product. What I would like to see is an update of FrameMaker for the Mac, come on Adobe, you know it is a good product if only you were to maintain it properly and give it a current GUI... or release it to the open software community).
in a recent story on NPR where Pres. Carter is talking about the recent elections in Nicaragua (where they use paper ballots) he was asked if the US needed the same kind of election monitoring that his organization, the Carter Center, was conducting there. His reply is quite interesting:
"... there's no doubt in my mind that the United States electoral system is severely troubled and has many faults in it. It would not qualify at all for instance for participation by the Carter Center in observing...."
This is coming from a former US president (albeit one that is greatly vilified by the GOP--if only he was an actor or cheerleader we would think he was a good president).
In another post I did mention that archaeology is a subfield of anthropology "in the US" which tends to follow the Boasnian tradition.
Is it the proper place? Who knows? The assumptions being made of the disciplines shows how little understanding there is out there for what these two disciplines are.
One of the things that we tell our intro to cultural anthro students is that anthropology is "the most humanistic of the social sciences, and the most scientific of the humanities." In many ways anthropology defies a fixed definition and that is how I like it. It overlaps with history, mathematics, comparative literature, philosophy, visual studies, etc. If you are really interested in knowing what anthropology(-ies) is(are), look at the definitions the association has for itself. See http://www.aaanet.org/ (American Anthropological Association--there are links to associations in other countries on their website).
Anthropologist... and electrical engineer
In the future (30 seconds after I hit "submit" if not sooner)social scientist, including anthropologists and archaeologists, will look to Wikipedia and other online content for useful information. If they have a little bit of training, they will look well beyond a single source. Your comment(s) shows a common misunderstanding as to what is anthropology and archaeology.
Anthropology is the study of culture in its broader sense. What people (nominally) do, say they do, understand, and act on this understanding. (Half way jokingly I say that it is the study of "everything").
Archaeology is the study of culture through material remains. Its time horizon is not 150 years or other arbitrary length of time; it is principally one of methods. Also, in the United States archaeology is a sub-field of anthropology (the others are sociocultural, physical or biological, and linguistic). Unlike what you see in movies, the main tool used by archaeologists is statistics, they spend more time running statistical analysis than ingesting dust while shoveling dirt--in fact many never play in the mud. What they look for are patterns in material remains (garbage mounds are a fantastic source of data!) to make inferences about practices of a given culture (place, time, etc.) and often this is at odd with written or oral accounts. An often cited study in contemporary archaeology is the work done by Dr. William Rathje now at Stanford University where he analyzed "garbage." One of the things that comes out of this work is the difference between what people say, and what they actually do: people claim to eat more expensive meat cuts than they actually do, and drink more than they say--in garbage (material remains) one can count liquor and beer bottles, as well as bones and supermarket packaging for meats.
For an interesting account of how archaeology is practiced in the United States see James Deetz' "In Small Things Forgotten" (1996). It is quite readable and available at most public libraries (and it is not heavy in statistics as most "real" archaeology is).
Indiana Jones? Fun by fictional. Making deductions on a single data source (like Wikipedia)? Bad science!! Always need to use a multitude of sources. If you can't repeat and/or reverify, in never happened or does not exist. This is the case in particle physics, chemistry and... archaeology.
if you are looking to get hired as clerical staff at a low wage, then you do need to be competent in Microsoft Office suite. For any other real life job, you need to have broader skills that have nothing to do with the computer programs you are running.
The US economic problems cannot be easily explained by what kind of software one uses (wish it was that easy). Facile and cynical comments like that are the ones that are making lever on the "old toilet" easy to pull.
I had a similar problem over the summer, with the exception that this was not a high school in the United States, but in a town some four hours away from the capital of a Central American country (can't be dealing with going back every time there is a problem).
Anyway, I installed Kubuntu (kubuntu.org) which is one of the Ubuntu variants (there is also Edubuntu, a version specifically for the education sector as the name implies). It is fast to install; can easily be installed next to Windows XP, so that you do not have to permanently convert all the machines (in case there is an administrator or other bureaucrat who thinks that computer=microsoft--they are the most difficult group to convince. I would first set up one machine if they need convincing... it took me about 3 hours to get the first install done with the printers, network, etc. after that it was about an hour, but they can run in parallel. The other six were done in a couple of hours since I fiddled with netinstalls); so far immune to viruses, spyware, malware, etc.; and it is easy to setup user accounts. No one seems to have been able to hack into the root or sudo level (I check the logs once in while, as I am able to login from afar to perform updates, manage accounts, etc. I am shifting this to a local person).
Since installing in the summer, there have been no problems with modifying the machines by users (and they are clever...) Linux, and *ubuntu in particular, are quite robust with very good security features. They can be setup remotely and even setup as thin clients (which I did to some of the machines since their hard drives were toast... and work well over a 10mb ethernet connection).
OpenOffice, KOffice, Firefox, Acrobat Reader, Real Audio, Skype (only on a P4 with 512MB) etc. are some of the software running mostly without any hitch. I find OpenOffice on PCs (PIIIs/256MB) to be just as responsive, if not more so, than Office and it is almost 100% compatible (presentation is quite usable, but might be the only thing where Powerpoint might be superior... if only Apple made Keystone for Linux). Firefox is by far superior to IE, regardless of the platform (and better than Safari on a Mac).
So, easy to install, manage, secure, great community support, don't need to throw away Windows (but you will want to anyway), and it is free!!! It should also appeal to the more serious computer users/future IT students as there is a great wealth of development software (any language you can imagine).
Hope this helps.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, while it is true that the US has condemned the coup, the US' State Dept. personnel in Latin America often seem to operate with a mind of its own. It is possible that there was a difference of opinion with the people on the ground and Washington. Many of the people in Latin America came to their jobs in the waning days of the Cold War and considered their mission to contain and prevent another Nicaragua/Cuba or the victory of the Guatemala and Salvadorean guerilla (of course, Chavez is the new Devil and he has been used effectively to mobilize opposition against many of the "new left" governments in the region. For many of the US State Dept. personnel, and for much of the Honduran elite, they are still fighting against communism (now reincarnated in Chavez) and believe that having a strong tie with the military and the "trustworthy" business elite is the best way to prevent this from happening. I would not be surprised if in the corridors of the different embassies and at Foggy Bottom the comments are along the lines of "Obama is new to this, soon he will realize who are the real friends of the US..."
consider that it might need to be cut if there is a small accident. I looked at something similar in the past, we were thinking of Titanium, but on the advice of a firefighter and an ER nurse, we went with gold instead. The reason, gold can be cut and repaired quite easily, where as a very hard material like titanium (in our case) would be quite difficult to cut and could result in irreparable injury to the finger.
Do something unique with the gold, make it have some interesting patterns or shapes, but keep the metal soft enough to deal with possible accidents (the other idea we were given was to have hairline cuts fused with gold or similar material, like that it could be cut if needed.)
ok, I was a bit off... while the information is on the side of the can, trying to find it online is not so simple (also, I am lousy at english measurements. Still, I should have looked it up).
Biking is great, but not always possible (not only because of distance). A few years ago when I was still working in high tech, I had a job that was some 45 miles from home. The drive on 880 (if you know the Bay Area, you will know immediately what I mean) was horrendous. So when I found that I could take the train and bike 14 miles a day, I hoped on the bike... the problem was that my manager started dropping hints like "you know, you should drive because it looks more professional," or "biking to work is really affecting your performance review." As soon as he started getting that attitude I started looking for another job that paid about 40% more and did not have to put up with the crap. Wonder how he is doing? He drove a sports car that sucked gas like crazy (midlife crisis?) and now I am completing a phd at a UC where my commute is either 12 minutes on foot, or 5 min on bike.
Changing one's habits is not only an internal struggle, but one that is enmeshed with very complicated networks of power relationships. Obesity is not only the failings of the individual, but more so the society the individual lives in. Somethings like free soda at work might seem like a nice perk, but with what we know today, companies should restrict it if they care to have healthier workers. In its place, workplaces should provide things like coffee (good quality, not the typical swill), tea and other non- or light-caloric alternatives.
To gain a pound of weight, one needs to consume about 3300 calories. An 8 oz. can of Coke (I am sure their bulldogs will be all over this) has some 45g of sugars or something like 180 calories. While that might not seem like a lot, the problem is that sweet foods and drinks stimulate overeating. On average someone who consumes 4 cans of soda (or one large fountain soda from the QuickyMart... something like 32 oz.) will eat an additional 600 to 900 calories a day, which adds up to an additional 1400 to 1700 calories per day (half if you drink sugar-free, but the stimuli to eat more still there, so you tend to overeat regardless the amount of calories in the soda).
So not only is the exercise important, but what you eat. Unfortunately, we geeks tend to eat easily available highly processed foods that are making us gain weight like crazy. If you want an impartial source of data, Just look at office furniture catalogs from the last four decades (say Herman-Miller and Steelcase, two respected US corporations). There you will find a steady increase in the widths and depths of chairs to accommodate those of us who have consumed a bit too many sodas and similar "foods."
Today I am an anthropologist and while my work is not on ergonomics (there are a number of anthropologist working in that area), something that I have been thinking about as I read the literature on tool making (flint knapping and other pre-industrial technologies) is that the main area of for precision activity (say something that your grandmother might have done like embroidery, or your grandfather as a cobbler... not all of us are decedents from royalty) takes place in a space in front of the thorax with the head slightly bent down and the hands are mostly facing each other on an angle. The main activity takes place in an arc of movement defined by elbow's movement. The wrist, while used for a number of repetitive tasks, is not typically held in a strained position for long, spending most of the activities time in a "natural" rest position (even while wielding a hammer or other percussive tool).
This is not to say that there were not problems with overworking the hands, fingers, etc. but the types of injuries were quite different than what was introduced with the industrialization of labor, where not only was the body governed to work in a repeating motion at high speeds, but it was molded, quite often orthopedically, to fit the design of the machine, to fit cartesian grids--right angles, etc. While we might think this way (like the modern city layout... e.g., Manhattan, which is in a regular grid) our bodies including our hands, wrists, etc. are not their most efficient and unstressed in these configurations. One of the things that I have tried to teach myself and suggested some students, is to type on the keyboard at angles where the wrist are not bent sideways. In contrast to how "secretaries" were taught (or molded) until the 1970s to use typewriters, as if they were holding lemons while typing and sitting at 90 angles with the feet flat on the ground, one slightly in front of the other. Today there are a number of studies showing that sitting in such a position is not at all good for you and that the slouch with elevated feet... there was something on this not long ago on Slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/2 8/1742222&from=rss and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/06112 7112844.htm.
Hope this confused the issue... try to keep the input device in the same horizontal plane as your keyboard, and don't wield a hammer to it (at least not repeatedly prior to a deadline). Be thankful I did not mention QWERTY.
(oh yeah, my favorite off the shelf keyboard is the old Microsoft natural... I wish they made one without the side numeric pad--I suppose I could hack it. I also use an old Logitech stingray trackball... hacked to make the buttons smaller and feel more natural).
nice dream--I have one and used daily... to clean I a cheap colander to catch the grounds then I dump them in a bag and compost. If you like the Bodum, I would also suggest you look at the Yama vacuum brewer, I seem to like their filter over the Bodum's nylon mesh.
enjoy
And there are a lot of people that think Paris Hilton is "hot." I don't care how much one pays for poopochino, it is still gross. Most other high end coffee is worth the price, see www.cupofexcellence.org/ for trully amazing coffees. ($27 for a pound of La Esperanza might sound like a lot, but you can brew about 30 cups... so it is still cheaper than SBUX grog).
Coffee... after eight years of research on different aspects of coffee (mainly as a social scientist, but also on quality standards), how to prepare and store coffee gets asked over and over...
Here are a few websites that have very reliable information: www.coffeegeek.com and www.sweetmarias.com are two that come to mind, also look at www.scaa.org (Specialty Coffee Association of America) as they are the authority on coffee quality.
aside from that you have to ask yourself what you are starting with.
You need good water, not too hard (maybe a simple water filter is all you need) The references in the US are San Francisco and Seattle water.
Instant, then just close the lid of the can (though the flavor won't really change much if you don't)
Preground coffee from the big four (Folger's, Maxwell House, Nestle, etc.) or flavored coffees (do you know what kind of solvents they use to retain the flavor through roasting?), then just close the lid and keep in a dark cool place (cabinet that is not above a stove is a fine place).
Preground coffee from a coffee shop, then buy small amounts (a pound or less) and just close tightly and store in a dark cool place, not in the freezer or refrigerator since humidity will affect the flavor. An airtight container that is not too large should do fine
Of course, the best possible way to drink fresh coffee is to roast it yourself and consume it within three weeks.... this might be a bit much for most, but the second best thing is to buy freshly roasted coffee from a reputable coffee shop (need not be expensive), that prints the date on the package. The few I know that are distributed nationwide are Green Mountain Coffee and Tully's. There are smaller ones that are amazing like Intelligentsia (Chicago and soon in L.A.), Groundworks (L.A.), Barefoot Roasters (Sunnyvale, CA), Stumptown (Portland, OR) Counter Culture (Durham, NC), and many others I have not included due to space, but if they roast locally, they are bound to be great. All the ones I mention print the date of roasting (not the date that they are good until).
Why don't I recommend Starbucks or other well known coffees? Well, they are good if you like the way they roast (and a good many people do. They are after all the largest specialty coffee company in the world. I don't buy their coffee because, 1) too dark for my taste, 2) no roast date on package -- no other reason, and the same goes for others who do not print the roast date on the package).
Packaging only does so much, whether it is vacuum, co2, nitrogen, etc. Coffee is a very complex thing that has something like 600 or so identifiable components after roasting. Not all of them remain stable for the same amount of time, and most of the flavor in coffee, like anything else, is in the smell. Roasting is a process of controlled destruction and most of the smell of coffee is trapped in microscopic gas pockets inside the bean, out-gassing will occur, oils and similar substances will sublimate, etc. this process cannot be undone with any known technology today (no magic crystals, no fancy gases, nada). Coffee should be ground right before consumption with a good grinder (burrs and not blades) and coffee should not sit around too long... a month or five weeks tops (I prefer three weeks... you can tell if a coffee is fresh if when you brew it, a foamy crust forms, the thicker-- the fresher. The crust is a combination of emulsified gases and oils. As the components evaporate, sublimate, or deteriorate, the foam becomes thinner or non-existent).
Brewing... there are a number of methods, but most do not bring the best out from the coffee. Some of the best ways to prepare coffee are not that expensive at all.
French pot (Bodum is nice, but you can easily find some for $14 or so that work just as well) is quite good. Boil water and add it to the ground coffee, steep for four minutes and it is done (water should be around 200F or so, which is what water will be off the stove a minute or so after boiling, if it is t
you are brave... I never have worked on such a large document in Word... nor would I like to (and I don't think I will have to).
... the works).
30 pages is what I am writing now, but in the past I have worked on API guides and other similar technical documents which would end up being something like 600 or more pages (page per call, plus extensive diagrams, code samples, appendixes, index, TOC,
I have never met a pubs manager who would trust such a lengthy document to Word... unless they were in Redmond (or got a paycheck from them). There are those who like to live dangerously, but I have lost my drive to do that, so no more Word.
Funny story: many years ago I did meet a Microsoft tech writer who told me that they did not use Word for many of their more extended documents--I believe it!
Good luck to you and your docs.
I have and while the interface is "sexy" I find that OO is faster and more stable (using it right now). I am sure that if I was using the latest quad-core wizbang Intel machine with tons of memory it might not be much of an issue, but I only have a 2 Ghz G5 with 1.5 Gigs of Ram... hardly adequate to run such a large Java based application (or MS Office... which keeps saying that it is out of memory and unable to save docs... never mind that the hard drive has over 10 GB free).
(To think that I used to use WordStar at one time on a machine that had a 5MB hard drive and 512K of Ram)
Version 2.1 is available, but as a developer's version (which has so far been pretty stable, but not ready for production use.) See http://download.openoffice.org/680/contribute.html ?idx=0&os=mac
For too long I have had to put up with very unstable software (I mainly use Word and PowerPoint, though now I use Keynote for presentations and love it). Word does not seem to like working with tables, footnotes and graphs. Nor does it seem to like documents longer than 30 pages, or paste and copy within a document, or work nicely between it and Excel (almost 100% crashes on my machines and I have tried all kinds of remedies... not looking how to fix it, don't even suggest it as I don't have it installed anymore).
My writing is rather boring, Times New Roman, 12 pt. double spaced, an occasional simple table and an image or two. I try not to use footnotes, but do so once in a while. The documents are nothing extra ordinary, yet Office consistantly crashes, not only on one machine, but on three. I have used both 2004 and Vx--same thing.
OpenOffice finally is to the point where I can use it and not miss much (wish it had better EndNote integration, but I am ok with it as is as long as it does not crash and wipe out my document). So far it has proven to be very stable and I have been using 2.04 on a Mac for several weeks.
While I can understand the reluctance to switch, Word in its last few major revisions was never too stable and very few technical writers (of which I was one for several years) would use it for anything but the simplest of tasks. Back then (and still today, though it is showing its age... Adobe are you reading this?) FrameMaker, even with its archaic UI, was the choice based on its stability and the fact that it could handle very large documents without much problems (something I would never consider on Word... and hopefully never have to again--Good riddence to Microsoft!! And thanks all of those who have made OpenOffice what it is today).
Finally 100% free of Microsoft!! (Mac OSX 10.4.8, and Kubuntu on PIII laptop)
I know that Adobe won't let go of it and that it is already obsolete for the most part (heck, when I was using it daily it had a cumbersome HI. Yet, I feel there is no other application that has the stability to deal with large (I mean "LARGE") documents... say API guides of 500 or so pages (I know that is small be some measures, but either is impossible for Office to handle... and document linking? Please! It never worked well and was more frustrating than doing the renumbering by hand (page numbers, ok, but figures, footnotes, etc. What a pain).
For one job, where I had an incompetent and micromanaging supervisor who insisted on us using Office, I started keeping track of hours spent recovering from Office crashes. Today I am considering how to write a dissertation and I am either contemplating putting together a PC with Windows NT to run FrameMaker (or better yet, using Virtual PC on my Mac), or getting a faster Mac and using OpenOffice. I expect the doc to be 350 or so pages long and to have many footnotes, citations, etc. No way am I trusting it to Office (I have looked at other apps like Nisus, but while they are more dependable than Word, they are not as reliable as I would like).
Hummm... wonder if I should do it like in the old days, with VI and LaTex?
Yes, it would. For the Mac there is Neooffice (neooffice.org). While it is not as fast as using the Microsoft products, it is fast enough and does not seem to crash as often (I hate using word with document that have more than a couple of footnotes, tables, etc. Almost always Office will crash... been through all the checks on fonts, etc. Office is a crappy product. What I would like to see is an update of FrameMaker for the Mac, come on Adobe, you know it is a good product if only you were to maintain it properly and give it a current GUI... or release it to the open software community).
in a recent story on NPR where Pres. Carter is talking about the recent elections in Nicaragua (where they use paper ballots) he was asked if the US needed the same kind of election monitoring that his organization, the Carter Center, was conducting there. His reply is quite interesting:
..."
y Id=6439233&sc=emaf&sc=emaf for transcript and link to the audio.
"... there's no doubt in my mind that the United States electoral system is severely troubled and has many faults in it. It would not qualify at all for instance for participation by the Carter Center in observing.
This is coming from a former US president (albeit one that is greatly vilified by the GOP--if only he was an actor or cheerleader we would think he was a good president).
see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
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Oh yeah, I voted absentee since at least there is some paper trail (though not entirely unproblematic).
Is it the proper place? Who knows? The assumptions being made of the disciplines shows how little understanding there is out there for what these two disciplines are.
One of the things that we tell our intro to cultural anthro students is that anthropology is "the most humanistic of the social sciences, and the most scientific of the humanities." In many ways anthropology defies a fixed definition and that is how I like it. It overlaps with history, mathematics, comparative literature, philosophy, visual studies, etc. If you are really interested in knowing what anthropology(-ies) is(are), look at the definitions the association has for itself. See http://www.aaanet.org/ (American Anthropological Association--there are links to associations in other countries on their website). Anthropologist... and electrical engineer
In the future (30 seconds after I hit "submit" if not sooner)social scientist, including anthropologists and archaeologists, will look to Wikipedia and other online content for useful information. If they have a little bit of training, they will look well beyond a single source. Your comment(s) shows a common misunderstanding as to what is anthropology and archaeology. Anthropology is the study of culture in its broader sense. What people (nominally) do, say they do, understand, and act on this understanding. (Half way jokingly I say that it is the study of "everything"). Archaeology is the study of culture through material remains. Its time horizon is not 150 years or other arbitrary length of time; it is principally one of methods. Also, in the United States archaeology is a sub-field of anthropology (the others are sociocultural, physical or biological, and linguistic). Unlike what you see in movies, the main tool used by archaeologists is statistics, they spend more time running statistical analysis than ingesting dust while shoveling dirt--in fact many never play in the mud. What they look for are patterns in material remains (garbage mounds are a fantastic source of data!) to make inferences about practices of a given culture (place, time, etc.) and often this is at odd with written or oral accounts. An often cited study in contemporary archaeology is the work done by Dr. William Rathje now at Stanford University where he analyzed "garbage." One of the things that comes out of this work is the difference between what people say, and what they actually do: people claim to eat more expensive meat cuts than they actually do, and drink more than they say--in garbage (material remains) one can count liquor and beer bottles, as well as bones and supermarket packaging for meats. For an interesting account of how archaeology is practiced in the United States see James Deetz' "In Small Things Forgotten" (1996). It is quite readable and available at most public libraries (and it is not heavy in statistics as most "real" archaeology is). Indiana Jones? Fun by fictional. Making deductions on a single data source (like Wikipedia)? Bad science!! Always need to use a multitude of sources. If you can't repeat and/or reverify, in never happened or does not exist. This is the case in particle physics, chemistry and... archaeology.
if you are looking to get hired as clerical staff at a low wage, then you do need to be competent in Microsoft Office suite. For any other real life job, you need to have broader skills that have nothing to do with the computer programs you are running. The US economic problems cannot be easily explained by what kind of software one uses (wish it was that easy). Facile and cynical comments like that are the ones that are making lever on the "old toilet" easy to pull.
I had a similar problem over the summer, with the exception that this was not a high school in the United States, but in a town some four hours away from the capital of a Central American country (can't be dealing with going back every time there is a problem). Anyway, I installed Kubuntu (kubuntu.org) which is one of the Ubuntu variants (there is also Edubuntu, a version specifically for the education sector as the name implies). It is fast to install; can easily be installed next to Windows XP, so that you do not have to permanently convert all the machines (in case there is an administrator or other bureaucrat who thinks that computer=microsoft--they are the most difficult group to convince. I would first set up one machine if they need convincing... it took me about 3 hours to get the first install done with the printers, network, etc. after that it was about an hour, but they can run in parallel. The other six were done in a couple of hours since I fiddled with netinstalls); so far immune to viruses, spyware, malware, etc.; and it is easy to setup user accounts. No one seems to have been able to hack into the root or sudo level (I check the logs once in while, as I am able to login from afar to perform updates, manage accounts, etc. I am shifting this to a local person). Since installing in the summer, there have been no problems with modifying the machines by users (and they are clever...) Linux, and *ubuntu in particular, are quite robust with very good security features. They can be setup remotely and even setup as thin clients (which I did to some of the machines since their hard drives were toast... and work well over a 10mb ethernet connection). OpenOffice, KOffice, Firefox, Acrobat Reader, Real Audio, Skype (only on a P4 with 512MB) etc. are some of the software running mostly without any hitch. I find OpenOffice on PCs (PIIIs/256MB) to be just as responsive, if not more so, than Office and it is almost 100% compatible (presentation is quite usable, but might be the only thing where Powerpoint might be superior... if only Apple made Keystone for Linux). Firefox is by far superior to IE, regardless of the platform (and better than Safari on a Mac). So, easy to install, manage, secure, great community support, don't need to throw away Windows (but you will want to anyway), and it is free!!! It should also appeal to the more serious computer users/future IT students as there is a great wealth of development software (any language you can imagine). Hope this helps.