Discovered via Jason Kottke.

The interview linked in the ‘About’ section of Typography for Lawyers is also an entertaining read. I didn’t catch it on the first read through (hey, it’s Monday morning and things are broken, man) but, according to the interview,:

Heller: On your website you list a number of books about law writing. Do any of these address typography?

Butterick: Bryan Garner’s books about legal writing touch briefly on typography. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has a great little guide to legal typography on the front page of their website. But I’ve recently signed a contract to turn Typography for Lawyers into a book, so the void will soon be filled.

it looks like Butterick is working on a print version of Typography for Lawyers which is good news since a dead tree version of anything loans credibility to the, um, man and might create some traction to get a text on typography added to law school curriculum.

My personal interest is long finished as I’m already five months away from my last job but, in the interest of making things more readable and less terrible, I’m excited for the potential of making specifically formatted printed matter less onerous to read.

Since I last posted I’ve also started a new job. When I say ‘new’ I mean that in location and pay grade only as what I do now is a slight variation of what I’ve been doing for the past eight years or so. Once again, I’m a system administrator of a largely Windows infrastructure that serves a ‘mixed’ environment. That means there are a bunch of Apple machines that graphic designers use. In short, other than being poorly maintained in the past, it is plain old boring. There is seldom any quiet time but it’s generally because the last person here was sleeping while driving for a long time. Long enough for major revisions of interconnected software to fall softly and silently out of date with one another. Again, I am King Turd of Shit Mountain with a slightly larger paycheck. It’s distressingly similar to how things were arranged at my last place of employment minus the blame I could lay on outside consultants who were responsible for most of the network and server work. Here, it was just a bunch of lazy fuckers. It’s powerful motivation to keep up the status quo of suckiness and just do oil changes instead of building new and more solid infrastructure. I just can’t care a whole lot.

Another thing that is new and unappealing about the new work situation is the amount of stress that it generates. In terms of structure, I basically manage an entire department that consumes a huge percentage of capital expenditures but I don’t technically have a management title (which I’m totally fine with) and I don’t have any employees other than a contract worker who may get shoved out the door by budget constraints at any given moment. Being responsible for a whole lot of money and remote offices, phone contracts, and other crap that I didn’t setup and need to administer on demand kind of freaks me out. I’ve also needed to remotely close an office in Chicago with less than a single weeks notice which was, um, less than optimal. I’m slightly in the market for better things but not enough to say update my resume or bother sending any out. It takes longer than four months for that degree of burn to really set in. It always does though, eventually. It’s a part of the process, I guess.

The saving grace of ‘running my department’ is that I can administer my MSFT network using a real operating system and no one can question me. Granted, I’m still using Virtualbox to take care of some Windows only applications but largely just doing a high percentage of what I need to do with RDC clients and guesswork. I’d nearly forgotten how instructive it is to torch a Windows install and start new in a predominately Windows network. P.S. Fuck you Cisco.

I also bought a new car in January. This would not be at all remarkable other than the fact that I’ve really owned a car much less a new one. I drove a totalled 1995 Civic around for a year or so but, excepting that, I’ve never had a completely unused car. It’s strange. On the upside of this aren’t you like 37 years old or something story is that I bought a hybrid that’s actually fun to drive and doesn’t randomly accelerate into fiery death. I got a 2010 Honda Insight EX with Navigation. I didn’t really want the navigation but I’ve learned to love it dearly when I’m trying to get to some fucked up place I’ve never been to before. I had to make a trip out into the here be dragons areas outside Denver today to drop my amp off for repair and would probably still be somewhere in Littleton, CO if not for the nice lady who tells me where to drive. Since I’m primarily a city driver, like on city streets and typically during the very worst part of rush hour, I don’t get stellar gas mileage but I’ll settle for the 38 I’m getting and try not to remind myself that I drive like a complete jackass who drives only in the city proper and has terrible and incurable habits that come from getting a driver’s license in high school, letting it expire for something like ten years, almost never driving again, and then going through the entire process again. All of that aside, I really like the little fucker because it doesn’t randomly dump me into battery operation, has stability control which has already saved me from any number of fiery/snowy deaths, and has a stupid amount of space for things that aren’t even people or trash which I’d previously been ill equipped to accomodate. I also enjoy the voice activation feature which allows me to do many things with my car without ever knowing how to do them manually and making me feel like Batman. When stamping on the gas becomes necessary the car will chirp its tires and take the fuck off. Plus mine hasn’t been recalled. Woooo.

Oscar will be two in July. That is pretty nuts. He becomes more fun all the time. He keeps surprising us by spitting out new words on a nearly daily basis and is apparently very keen on waking up before 6am every morning. Keeping with my policy not to discuss Oscar here, that will be all.

More to come when I’ve got time and inclination. Both are scarce commodities lately.

Liferea (1.6.1-1) used to be my default choice but its performance over the past couple of months has caused me a ton of frustrating downtime where my desktop is completely unusable while Liferea updates 130 feeds or so. It might be Arch‘s package or not but it isn’t really an option. I thought about building it from and then decided against it.

I also tried Akregator for a while and it was a lot less antagonistic towards my CPU(s). It also has some pretty buggy behavior, though, and instances like the below finally convinced me that it was a stopgap rather than a good replacement for Liferea. It’s also a KDE which makes it look pretty strange in Gtk-land.

I even fired up Flock with the intent of using is just for feed reading. It doesn’t work so swell these days — a bit too monolithic and tuned for its own purposes rather than mine. I toyed with it for awhile and then shuffled it off to /dev/null.

So, anyone have any good suggestions for me? I like lightweight, GUI (preferably Gtk+ but I can deal with whatever for the sake of working), and capable of importing OPML. Thanks