some-antics.com

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather this week, presumably because 1) the LA air quality (or lack thereof) has gotten to me and/or 2) (Nathan’s suggestion) that I have been away from the region long enough to have lost the immunities to the West Coast diseases that everyone else is already immune to. Tuesday I’d gotten some sore throat drops that ingeniously numbed the inside of your mouth so that you couldn’t feel any irritation (or anything at all!). Today I went and looked for something that might make this mysterious bug (it’s no cold or flu, it’s all the symptoms of an illness minus the me actually feeling ill part–just a sore throat and stuffy nose) go away sooner and I found this magical stuff called Zicam. It comes in either dissolvable tablet or chewy square form; I opted for the chewy square because it looked like a Starburst candy. It doesn’t taste like a Starburst at all; it tastes like someone just dumped a whole lot of grotty blandness onto your tongue. The worst part, I thought, was that you were instructed by the makers of Zicam to neither eat nor drink for fifteen minutes after having one of these disgusting chews. But, it turns out that that isn’t the worst part at all:

[from the Wikipedia article on Zinc gluconate]:

In September 2003, Zicam, the best selling brand for zinc cold remedy, had lawsuits that came against it for people who accused the medicine of ruining their sense of smell and sometimes, taste. In January 2006, they settled 340 lawsuits for $12 million. In early 2004, at the height of the controversy, Zicam countered that it was a small number of people who had experienced the problems and that the common cold is already something among many things, that can cause the anosomia (loss of smell). They also said that when zinc gluconate dissolves it forms zinc ions and gluconate, a naturally occurring compound found in all human tissues and that Zicam is a bufferred gel that is formulated to have a neutral pH. Others countered Matrixx Industries, the maker of Zicam, that many of the patients had experienced a strong and very painful burning sensation when they used the product, indicating damage to the nasal tissue. Nonetheless the nasal gel continues to be sold.

I think I’ll just opt for the standard sleep and soup formula now. And to think, I almost got the nasal gel.

emma :: Jan.04.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

Prescriptive grammarians would say that uses of “<any noun phrase> and I” as labels to pictures are completely ungrammatical; they should instead use “and me” in place of “and I”. /me wonders, though, about “the King and I”. Technically, it’s ambiguous as to whether or not this is prescriptively ungrammatical since the title could be referring to an act that both parties partook in. But it’s probably meant in the picture label sense, which is funny to me because I wonder how many people have stopped to wonder if they should be saying “and I” or “and me” and base their decision upon the title of that movie.

emma :: Jan.04.2007 :: misc, nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

Back when I was a PC-Mädchen, one of my favorite things about my Dell Inspiron 5100 was being able to click using the trackpad. I’m not really sure why I never enabled the trackpad click feature when I got my first PowerBook; I think it must have had something to do with the one-button clickpad or that the keyboard and the track/clickpad were just so darn close that there seemed to be no reason to used the trackpad to click. Over the years I’ve developed my own computing style: all track/clickpad related actions were exclusively the responsibility of Mr. Right Hand–Mr. Right Hand’s Thumb and Forefinger to be exact. When mousing, I hold my right hand so that the thumb is just hovering over the click pad while my index finger does all the moving around on the trackpad. I keep my middle finger nearby just in case I have to do some quick double-finger scrolling. The angle at which I hold the thumb and the forefinger is exactly the same as the angle they’re held at when typing, where the thumb is resting above the space bar and my forefinger above the first key in the home-row (that’s h for me since I’m using the Dvorak keyboard layout, but for the QWERTY user, it would be j); thus, rapid mousing is easy to achieve.

This way of mousing is not the most efficient on all computers, however, as is made clear to me when I use someone else’s PC, for example. Having had to reformat my old Dell recently and realizing just how inefficient it is to use the clickpad to click, I decided to finally enable the option to click with the trackpad. And while I was at it, I figured I might as well go all the way and enable drag and drag lock.

Now, it’s only been a few days, but already I’ve made the silly mistake of forgetting that I have these features enabled and accidentally doing things like drag iTunes playlists into Mail. I’m not sure if I’ll become anymore efficient if I get used to using only the trackpad, but I have become somewhat enamored with the drag lock feature. It took me a while to figure out how to actually use it. Overt double clicking just does what double click usually does in OS X: it hides the window. But when you gently and swiftly double click a window, drag lock is activated. It’s hard to explain just how magical it feels when you’ve locked a window down for dragging, but I think the reason why it feels so good is because it evokes a feeling of intimacy between you and your machine. You are hitting its sweet spot in just the right way, and it’s letting you drag your iChat window every which way.

Nathan once said that the reason why Apple products were so great was because when you were using them, it felt more like making love than mere button pushing (e.g. the iPod’s Click Wheel). Now I don’t know about that, but I might just be persuaded to agree if I drag a few more windows around…

emma :: Jan.04.2007 :: misc, nerdiness :: No Comments »