Grammar games

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Ok, I’m behind… So here is a quick thought.

One of the things you will hear often if you hang out with editors is the question: Is such-and-such word open or closed? By this they mean is a word/phrase like ‘black face’ spelled out as two words (black face), hyphenated (black-face) or closed (blackface). The rule of thumb is usually how common has the word/phrase become. If it is relatively new or unused it remains open. If it is starting to enter the common language as a compound then hyphenate it. And if it is so super-common that people don’t bother to read it as two separate words that describe a concept then it becomes closed. Yes, yes, I know. I did say it was a rule-of-thumb (see what I did there?).

Anyway, by closing words, we can lose the original meaning and it can sometimes result in a duh moment. For example, a character in a novel I am reading stopped by his brother’s townhouse. I pictured a multi-story connected housing unit in the city. And for what its worth that was pretty close to what it was. But since the setting is Elizabethan London, where the character was going was actually his brother’s town house. You know, the smaller home that he maintains in the crowded city as opposed to his sprawling country house.

Since we still have homes in that style and have for hundreds of years, common usage has decided we close the compound: townhouse. And as a result the meaning has shifted form one of location, to one of construction. Since very, very few of us have country houses or even think in those terms, we don’t close that compound. In the case of the novel, the editor chose to close townhouse as we do in modern English, but I think that was a mistake. To them (the characters) it was simply the house in town or the house in the country.

A 30 Sec Poem

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A man and bear
Wrestled with care
So no one was hurt
Although said bear was soon curt

After the blows were complete
And all rose up to their feet
The ursine sat upon his chair
And lamented the missing patch of hair.

On occasion of wrasslin’ design bears…

Revisiting KMLs

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So I am still not happy with my various methods of posting KML files (tracks from my Navionics chartplotter) to the blog while on a cruise. The last method involved using FTP Manager to upload the files from my phone which is a bit clunky and likely to break down in areas of bad internet—which hopefully I encounter lots this summer :-).

Brainstorm

It occurred to me that the Navionics app allowed me to post my tracks to Facebook directly, so there must be a way to leverage that for my WordPress blog. Then I remembered the Post by Email function built into WordPress. What this does is generate a complex email address and any email sent to it automatically posts to the blog. I checked it out again (haven’t looked at it for several versions) and it was vastly improved and no longer needs a specified mail server.

And it allows the use of a great set of shortcodes to provided most of the functionality I normally use.

[category d-autres]
[delay +2 days] [delay +1 hour] [delay 2015-12-01 11:30:00 MST]
[comments on | off]
[status publish | pending | draft | private]
[slug some-url-name]
[title Your post title]
[end] – everything after this shortcode is ignored (i.e. signatures). Make sure it’s on its own line with a blank line above it.

So if I combine my newfound use of Markdown and its shortcuts (previously detailed ) with the email function of the app, I could post directly to my blog with all the text for the blog entry, a thumbnail of the track and a link to the original KML file all in one swoop. Then I could come back later and reset the KML files using the ftp method so they stuck around for posterity.

So, write the blog post in a text-editor using markdown & shortcodes, copy it into the Navionics app on the appropriate Track, and hit send. Simple as pie!

The posts would look like this:

Day 4 Sailing Ho

To day I set sail and sailed the ocean blue in my sailboat powered completely by sails. It was grand!

Track recorded with Navionics App.
View it: http://tinyurl.com/pyp7fsh
Download it: http://tinyurl.com/o863o6f

Now all I need is to get back out on the water…

A good day.

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In case you are wondering, this is what sets my standard for a good day.

The St. Albert Yard

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When we bought the house in St Albert we got the biggest yard we could find and started from scratch. I loved it for almost seven years before my interest wained and it got away from me. This is 2003, about year three.

Simple Communications

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Simple, to the point and, hopefully, effective. As much as I am opposed to legislating people to death (helmet laws, seatbelt laws, etc.), I am wholly and completely in favour of education and spending tax dollars in teaching rather than punishing. #whowillyouhelp

This is awesome!

 Kathleen Wynne is changing the way Ontario treats sexual violence and harassment.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/ontario-releases-powerful-new-anti-sexual-violence-ad-1.2984460