To Gift or To Give

 General  2 Responses »
Dec 202007
 

I’m usu­ally a bit of a stick­ler for try­ing to use lan­guage cor­rectly. I real­ise that one of the beau­ties of the Eng­lish lan­guage is the way new words and phrases are coined, and I will defend the right of people to do so, but it does­n’t mean I need to like all of them. Like the cur­rent use of gift as a verb. To me it seemed obvi­ous that you should always use give instead, until I real­ised that the mean­ing is actu­ally to give as a gift. Which isn’t as tau­to­log­ous as it sounds, since the verb “give” has many mean­ings, only some of which have to do with the giv­ing of gifts.

It seems to be mainly used in one of two contexts:

  1. To give as a gift some­thing that the giver made (or could have made), such as knit­ted or baked items. Per­fect for bak­ing and gift­ing, for example.
  2. And the notori­ous regift­ing, the giv­ing of a gift to someone else that the giver was giv­en. There seem to be whole treat­ises writ­ten around how to do this at this time of year.

I’ve nev­er heard gift used as a verb in spoken Eng­lish, but it crops up a lot on blogs and email lists writ­ten by Amer­ic­ans. I’m sure the usage will spread and fig­ur­ing out the subtle dif­fer­ence in mean­ing to give makes it easi­er to take. Mind you, I still don’t like it much.

Toddler Books

 Books, Family  6 Responses »
Dec 172007
 

Our tod­dler daugh­ter (18 months old) likes hav­ing books read to her. Some of them are def­in­ite favour­ites, to be read as often as pos­sible, while oth­ers are the ones she likes when she’s told to go and get anoth­er book. They’re not neces­sar­ily books I would choose myself, but it’s not my taste that counts <grin>. The ver­sions we have are mostly board­books, well worth­while at this age since she often sits on the floor and looks at her books on her own, and she can turn the board­book pages eas­ily enough that she does­n’t get frustrated.

Her top favour­ites cur­rently are We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxen­bury (Pow­ell’s link), I Love You With All My Heart by Noris Kern (Pow­ell’s link), and Moth­er, May I? by Grace Mac­car­one (Pow­ell’s link).

The next bunch of books also hold her atten­tion for a bit, but she tends not to bring them over to be read as often as the books in the first group. Sandra Boyn­ton fea­tures heav­ily here, and her books are small enough that the girl can hold them while she’s being changed. They’re fun to read as well, as they lend them­selves to silly voices. We have Hip­pos Go Ber­serk (Pow­ell’s link), Barn­yard Dance! (Pow­ell’s link), and Moo Baa La La La (Pow­ell’s link). Round­ing out this are A. J. Wood’s Hubble Bubble, Cauldron Trouble (Spooky Tales) and Nina Laden’s Grow Up! (Pow­ell’s link), where she really likes the chick­en page for some reason. 

Of course, by next week the favour­ites might be a com­pletely dif­fer­ent set of books.

Facebook Privacy Settings

 Identity and Privacy  No Responses »
Dec 072007
 

I’ve writ­ten in this blog before about Face­book’s pri­vacy issues, and the import­ance of mak­ing sure the pri­vacy set­tings in your Face­book pro­file match what you want to have hap­pen to your per­son­al data. Bri­an pos­ted on this same top­ic and has some good points and detailed instruc­tions; the com­ments are also worth reading.

I went and checked my set­tings and found they looked a little dif­fer­ent to what I remembered, so it’s prob­ably a good idea to check your set­tings on a reg­u­lar basis; as Face­book changes what they do they may change which options exist. And think about what you want, about that bal­ance between let­ting out enough inform­a­tion so old friends can find you again (as lots of people want) and mak­ing sure that not too much inform­a­tion gets out. I changed most of mine to “friends only” from the default “my net­works and friends”; maybe at some stage I’ll change some of them back again but for the time being I feel more com­fort­able this way. 

Canadian Copyright

 General  No Responses »
Dec 072007
 

It looks like the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in Canada is plan­ning on chan­ging the copy­right law. If you’re con­cerned about the issue of copy­right, and par­tic­u­larly if you’re liv­ing in Canada and want to do some­thing about this issue, read the details on Michael Geist’s blog. He has a whole series on why he thinks the pro­posed new bill is not neces­sary (includ­ing items such as arrests being made under the cur­rent Copy­right Act, which would there­fore appear to give the police all the powers they need, and the need for more con­sulta­tion).

Hibernating Ubuntu

 Technology  2 Responses »
Dec 072007
 

I’ve had Ubuntu on my laptop for a while, and it nev­er hibern­ated. I’d do what looked like the right things, but it just did­n’t work. So a couple of days ago I decided I should try to track down the prob­lem. I was par­tially suc­cess­ful; hibern­at­ing a laptop prop­erly seems to be dif­fi­cult. Here’s what I did to track down (some of) the problem.

When it comes back after fail­ing to hibern­ate, the sys­tem politely tells you to check the help file for com­mon prob­lems. So you bring up the help file and it con­tains a defin­i­tion of hibern­ate, with no hints as to what might be going wrong, but a point­er to the Ubuntu sup­port for­ums as well as to laptop test­ing pages which sup­posedly con­tain ideas of what to try. The laptop test­ing page claims that hibern­ate works for the Toshiba Tecra M2 that I have, so that did­n’t help much.

Watch­ing closely the next time I tried hibern­at­ing revealed an error mes­sage flash­ing by about not enough swap space. Search­ing for this reveals that the swap space the installer gives you by default may not be enough to man­age hiberna­tion. You need the same size swap as RAM, which I did­n’t have. OK, out with the gpar­ted livecd to recon­fig­ure my par­ti­tions. For­tu­nately I had some spare unused room next to the swap par­ti­tion to grow it into. The next error mes­sage I saw flash­ing by on hibern­at­ing (read­ing it involved hibern­at­ing mul­tiple times, star­ing fix­edly at the right point in the screen, hop­ing that the last mes­sage I saw might be of some use; why can­’t these error mes­sages by default be put in a nice error dia­log box so I can actu­ally read them?) was that the sys­tem could­n’t find the swap space. Pok­ing around the Ubuntu sup­port for­um reveals that each time the machine is rebooted, the swap par­ti­tion gets a new UUID, thereby killing the con­fig files for any scripts that were set up to use the old one. More details here; fol­low­ing the steps in that post­ing finally made hibern­ate mostly work, albeit with a ton of error mes­sages about the USB device (the mouse, I pre­sume, since that’s the only USB device I have con­nec­ted) which I’m ignor­ing. The mostly refers to the fact that the sys­tem often won’t actu­ally come back to life after being in hiberna­tion until I hit the power but­ton and restart from scratch. I have yet to fig­ure out what’s going on there; any hints are welcome.

Yearly Rethink

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Dec 062007
 

One of the reas­ons I like going to North­ern Voice is that it always gives me lots to think about, in terms of what to write about on my blog, what tech­nic­al tricks to try out, and how to write bet­ter. Oth­er people choose their blo­giversary, or maybe New Year’s Day, but I find North­ern Voice to be bet­ter. One reas­on of course is the num­ber of enthu­si­ast­ic people there talk­ing about blog­ging and social media and how they use them.

All of which is a long way of say­ing that this year I’ll be look­ing for more of that spark, that enthu­si­asm in the speak­er sub­mis­sions. What talks will make me happy to be blog­ging, will give me incent­ive to make my blog bet­ter, will tell me of inter­est­ing things to try? What talks would make me want to start blog­ging, if I wer­en’t already? The dead­line is Monday, Decem­ber 10th, so you don’t have long to pol­ish those ideas (and we can­’t take late sub­mis­sions as we’re select­ing talks that same week and we do need to read them first). For oth­er views on what we’re look­ing for, check out Dar­ren’s post­ing, or Bri­an’s. Bri­an also has some pho­tos of the party spot for the Thursday even­ing as an added incent­ive to go there and read what he has to say. Once you’re ready, sub­mit your idea while it’s fresh and before you forget.

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