I Will Not Skim Instructions

Remember that test in grade school where you were supposed to carefully read an entire page of instructions and then act on them? Remember how a good giggle could be had watching the kids who didn't follow instructions walk 'round their desks and do other silly things, because the final instruction was to forget all the others and sit quietly?

I was one of those kids. And oh so many moons later, I still haven't learned. In plain sight in the middle of Jim Ray's instructions for making intelligent Movable Type archive filenames was the step, "Click Save, but do not rebuild your site yet."

I didn't click Save, and now I have an archives subdirectory that itself contains like one quadrazillion subdirectories, none of which I can delete because I get a "Can't Delete: ... It could be locked, open or in use by another application." To make matters worse, I can't seem to CHMOD the file permissions on the subdirectories and individual files.

Now my long-delayed Web server spring cleaning has gone straight to pot. And just after I'd gotten rid of that pesky PostNuke directory ... :-)

"Decimated" Means One in 10, Consarn It!

We language-loving types tend toward the tizzy when thoughtless people verb nouns ("Kinkos: The New Way to Office") and especially when they violate verbs.

Frequent violence around the world has made the latter language crime especially prevalent. "Decimate," a wonderfully specific word that originally meant "to kill one of every 10," has slouched into a synonym for "destroy." So when NPR, one of the last bastions of intelligence on the radio dial, reports "the blast decimated a taxi," we English Elves go ape. Destroying one-tenth of a taxi, after all, hardly seems newsworthy.

The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed

From "The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed" by David Dvorkin:

We have been cured of the sin of snobbery. It was very minor snobbery, really. It was limited to the conviction that name-brand items are superior to those sold under supermarket house brands. ... But, say, that house-brand food tastes pretty good! And the house-brand toilet paper, er, holds up better under use! ... Yes, sir, solid values, suitable for normal daily use. Or every-other-day use, if you feel the need to make the item last a bit longer.

One hopes David hasn't been reduced to using the latter house-brand item every other day.

Why Couldn't Graham Give Us Music Instead of Grass?

Some university administrators like to leave a legacy before they drop everything and head for a bigger school and higher pay. Watch out, Penn State: Your president may be on the move, because he's giving you music when all he gave Nebraska students is more grass.

Not fondly known as "Grammy Spammy" while chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Graham Spanier decided to build his legacy by replacing perfectly good parking with a grass field students couldn't use for about a year while the tender green blades took root. Connoisseurs of irony may appreciate his legacy more; after he left, a student union expansion project replaced a good quarter of "Grammy's Greenspace" with spankin'-new concrete.

Why, oh why, could he not have given us music? Spanier's inked a deal to provide Napster music service to all Penn State students, paying a discounted rate out of their student fees.

Maybe if there had been free legal music after Spanier left, we Huskers could have been spared the next chancellor's legacy: the unsingable, fingers-on-a-chalkboard "Alma Mater" co-written by the Unholy Trinity of (thankfully former) Chancellor James Moeser, inexplicably popular synthesizer king Chip Davis and historian Robert Knoll (whom I'd have no reason to dislike, if not for the Alma Mater).