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I use googledocs a lot. Recently they changed the default format for new docs to a horrible fixed-width page layout:

This wastes a ton of space and allows me to see far less text per screen. Also it’s ugly. I don’t need to see margins on a fake “page” when 99.99% of my documents will never be printed! And if I do want to see a page layout like this, I can just choose “view” -> “fixed-width page”.

I found a fix on this page of people complaining about this dreadful new “feature”:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=0cf3f67e3bde8a86&hl=en

1. Go to settings (upper right hand corner)
2. Select Editing
3. Uncheck: Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor

Now, reload googledocs, or close all its tabs and start over. New documents should be the old-style full-width layout, so just copy the text out of one of your fixed-width docs, make a new doc, and paste it in. Voila!

If google eventually decides to force everyone to always use fixed-width layouts, I guess I’ll have to find a new online text-editor.

My 41st birthday was yesterday, yay!

Dan worked from home so that was a treat right there. Henry went with me first thing in the morning to pick up the birthday cake that I ordered for myself. Got it from Flour Power. It was pretty good, though not lemony enough and with wayyyy too much frosting, but still it was tasty and festive!

Then we had breakfast (including birthday cake) and the guys gave me some lovely presents. Let’s see, I got two lovely Elizabeth Zimmermann hardbacks, The Opinionated Knitter and Knitting Around so now I have all of her books! And the new reprint of Betsy and the Great World/Betsy’s Wedding. And a pair of absolutely adorable cupcake print pajamas, the very same ones that Liz Lemon wears in 30 Rock. Cute, cute, cute!

Dan also gave me a CD recording of my favorite performance of Die Zauberflöte — 1964, Otto Klemperer conducts. Lucia Popp is Queen of the Night. My old LPs are quite worn out and warped, and now I can listen on my iPhone and through the good TV speakers! So exciting!

I took Henry to his Kung Fu lesson at noon, and then at 1 we picked him up and we all went to Chloe’s house for a few hours, which was such fun! They gave me a fantastic Breaking Bad t-shirt (ladies’ babydoll-style in lime green — better get one for yourself now before AMC shuts them down!). Heisenburg! Lordy, we have to wait until July 2011 for more new episodes.

Celia gave me the “Free To Be… You And Me” CD! We were hanging out a couple weeks ago and someone said something about a boy with a doll… oh, it was their cat we were talking about. He has a little lion toy that he thinks is his kitten. Anyway Celia and I both started singing William’s Doll, and it freaked me out that she knew it! And she told me she had the CD, and I asked if I could borrow it someday, and she remembered, and gave me my own copy! Kirsten and I must have listened to that record 8,682,392,734 times when we were little and it’s so much fun to get to hear it again, all clear and nice and remastered. Our record had a skip in the “Atalanta” story, so Alan Alda said, “So he told Atalanta, so he told Atalanta, so he told Atalanta, so he told Atalanta,” until someone got up and moved the needle. My new CD doesn’t do that, heh :)

Chloe drew me a picture that illustrates elements of 13 of our favorite iPhone games. She’s amazing! I’ll replace this with a better photo tomorrow, but you can get a pretty good idea. If you go to the flickr page you can see notes that tell the name of each game. I love it so much!

And then in the evening, after Celia’s mom had picked her up, we brought Chloe back over to our house by way of a good Mexican take-out place, and then Bob came over and we watched “James May at the Edge of Space” and then “Hud” (1963, Paul Newman) which I love but none of them had even seen and I think they all liked it as much as I do.

So it was a very happy day!

Here are the last two chapters of part 3 of This Country of Ours:

27 How The Quakers First Came to new England – 00:09:27
28 How Maine and New Hampshire were Founded – 00:08:27

Oops. Forgot :) This will catch you up with the podcast feed:

Episode 32: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 11, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 11, Part 2 (8:52)
Episode 33: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 12, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 12, Part 1 (9:59)
Episode 34: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 12, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 12, Part 2 (5:27)
Episode 35: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 13, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 13, Part 1 (8:02)
Episode 36: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 13, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 13, Part 2 (4:38)
Episode 37: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 1 (9:39)
Episode 38: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 2 (9:36)
Episode 39: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 3:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 3 (7:10)
Episode 40: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 1 (7:44)
Episode 41: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 2 (8:15)

And the very last part:
Episode 42: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 3:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 3 (8:30)

LOL! How I love the Bagthorpes.

If you use MacFusion on Snow Leopard, you may have noticed that it’s broken, heh. I hadn’t run it in a while but this morning I got this charming error message every time I tried to mount a host: “Could not mount filesystem: Remote host has disconnected.”

After a bit of googling, I found this solution:
http://rackerhacker.com/2009/08/28/fix-macfusion-on-snow-leopard/

And it worked! So I thought I’d post here to help others find an answer.

(In case you’re wondering why I use Macfusion, I use ssh and vi for daily podcast maintenance, but when it’s time to add a few dozen new items it’s just easier to edit the file locally with Smultron. And who wants to ftp things back and forth if you don’t have to? ;-) )

The longer I go without writing a real post, the harder it is to get started again. So I just thought I’d write a little something this morning to get myself going.

Today I’ll take Henry in for a checkup, and then I hope we get to hang out with Celia and Chloe a bit in the afternoon, and then in the evening it’s possible that Bob and Chloe might come over to watch “Hud” with us, which just arrived from Netflix yesterday and is one of my favorite movies.

I’m reading my very first Edith Wharton novel, “The House of Mirth”, and it’s fantastic. I’m almost glad I waited this long to discover her,’cause now I have a whole lot of wonderful books to look forward to, if “The House of Mirth” is any indication. I also re-read “The Three MIss Margarets” and “The Hills at Home” last week. Both were as good as I remembered from reading them years and years ago. I’d like to read the two books that everyone is talking about — “The Hunger Games” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” — so I ordered them from my library but it’s “wait time unknown” heh. But I don’t usually like to buy fiction unless I’ve read it once and know I’ll want to read it again.

Knitting — I’m working on a top-down cotton tank top which I’d like to extend down into a little dress-thing if I have enough yarn. Well, even if I don’t I can get a few more balls of Knitpicks’ Simply Cotton in a coordinating color and just keep working till it’s long enough. It’s actually a lot further along than this photo shows. I’m working the body in a sort of seed stitch rib, which is k9, then a panel of k1p1 seed stitch for three stitches, then k9 again.

Also making a pair of Aargh! gyle Socks for a certain boy’s 15th birthday. These are also further along than the photo shows. Hmm, time to take some more photos.

Yesterday, August 10th 2010, was LibriVox’s 5-year anniversary. I can hardly believe it. We cataloged our very first free, public domain audiobook (The Secret Agent) in September of 2005, and I finished my first solo, The Road to Oz, in October 2005.

We produced a total of 30 audiobooks in 2005, and I remember thinking that someday we might reach 100. As I write this we have 3659 completed audiobooks in our catalog — in 29 different languages! Amazing!

More important to me than numbers, impressive though they are, is our community. We have without doubt one of the friendliest forums on the internet. It’s always so pleasant to browse through our working threads and see the cheerful interaction of our volunteers as we all work together, making audiobooks just for the love of it.

You can read a post from Hugh, our founder, here:
http://librivox.org/2010/08/10/librivox-turns-five/

and listen to our amazing 5th Anniversary podcast here:
http://librivox.org/2010/08/10/librivox-community-podcast-114/

Hooray for LibriVox!

I had such a nice dream last night about an old penpal, Peer Völkner. In my dream he came to visit us and we chatted in bad German (me) and bad English (him) and he drank Scotch with Dan and we had nice visit.

Peer and I were penpals from, oh, 1986 or so till the late 90s, and it was my fault entirely that I lost track of him. A couple of moves, a divorce, a lost letter…

I google his name from time to time, trying to find any contact info. It’s an unusual name, so there aren’t many results. There’s a Peer Völkner who wrote a book on business — that could easily be him. But never any way to contact him. Last I knew, he’d married a girl named Christine, and had a daughter named Paula (I think). And he most likely still lives in Germany. He went to the university in Bochum but has probably moved away from there by now.

Peer Völkner, where are you?