too soon will I remember its cost,
a forgotten malaise

and the her, unhad.

The academics are right, albeit inadvertently so:  German is beautiful; the fault lies in those to whom its legacy is bestowed.

(D)er schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deustschland.

I’ve been looking at editors geared to little distraction for a while and considered the obvious - the obvious to me - such as lyx and vim but neither seemed to turn my Ubuntu running EeePC 701into the full screen editor / typewriter emulator I was looking for.  I remembered a recent Slashdot thread - recent being almost a year ago(!) - inspired by a New York Times article discussing this very problem.  Amongst the recommendations was a program called Writeroom, a stripped down full screen editor presented in green on black glory. Writeroom, however, is an OS/X program, which meant I was still without a solution.

Apparently, in the time between that story and my latest bout of scrivenery inclinations, an enterprising and kind soul released an open source Python based clone: PyRoom.  Even better, they maintain Fedora and Ubuntu repositories, sparing me from the annoying maintanence involved with tarballed binaries.  I’m just putting the program through its paces, but it looks to be precicely what I was looking for - a simple full screen keyboard oriented writing implement designed to minimize  distractions and maximize writing.

If you have been looking for a solution to the same problem, it is worth the few minutes it takes to add the repo and install.

Very useful.

- with sarcasm, suprise, and a hint of disgust -

“Oh look. Another computer.”

As a cautionary tale, it got even better - expanding on the chaotic complexity of interacting state machines:

Single Web Hit Led to UAL Glitch, Tribune Says - WSJ.com

The ridiculously overpriced DVDs ($20 per talk, $100 for ten) of the lectures are being ripped and tracked here.

Note that the video quality issues (poor color and contrast) are DVD issues, not a consequence of the ripping.

(If you don’t know what I am talking about, even after following the link, allow your mouse to hover over the comic image to display the alt text. As of FF3, the text is no longer truncated. Yay. Now go back and re-read all of xkcd.)