tech manual obsession

An especially ugly toad that we encountered on a hike.
The photos on today's Blatherings were taken by Jeff
on his new camera.
(click image for larger version)


Jeff and I were both secretly (or maybe not so secretly) joyous when we woke up this morning to a gray and rainy morning. In moderation, these kinds of days are wonderful excuses for staying indoors in front of a crackling fire with a good book...or, er, maybe a laptop with Buffy episodes. ;-)

If it is gorgeous and sunny outside, one feels compelled to spend it outdoors doing something active like going hiking or building a cabin or wrestling grizzly bears, etc. Today it is blustery and cool and drizzly outside, so Jeff and I suffer no qualms of guilt about sequestering ourselves indoors.



Jeff and I were scouting out the site for our new cabin.


I finished A Single Shard - an excellent read. I'm currently reading How To Repair Food by Marina and John Bear (a birthday gift from Dave Clement) and The 60 Second Novelist by Dan Hurley (a loan from Rand Bellavia). I met the author of the second book while working for Xlibris in Philadelphia. Nice guy.

I'm also checking out AppleScript, which I'm hoping to use in conjunction with ViaVoice to help further automate some computer tasks. Jeff copied a PDF AppleScript Language Guide onto my laptop, which I'm excited about reading. Yes, I said excited. I've always enjoyed reading technical manuals for software I use, unless they are horribly written, in which case I would rather hurl the thing out my window and spit on it.

I'm not exactly sure why I find technical manuals so appealing. I actually do feel like jumping up and down and clapping my hands with joy when I find out that my new software comes with a juicy fat manual. How weird it is that?

Are any of you out there as weird as me that way? Or are you more like Jeff, who shuns manuals except as a last resort?

(This entry was written with ViaVoice, a voice recognition program which comes with a terrible manual, and sometimes has its own sense of humor. Please forgive any spelling or grammar quirks which Debbie has missed while editing. Thank you. )



There was still snow one of the hiking trails we explored recently.

May/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ