Author: Peter

Anti-keywords

I have several pages on my site that get hit by search engine queries that are mostly unrelated to the content. (Most frequently found is a previous post about search terms… determining why is left as an exercise for the reader.) Rather than mark the pages uncacheable or remove them entirely, I’d prefer to add anti-keywords that search engines could use to remove the pages from their results for those queries. There’s a short discussion on this at Webmaster World, but no real solution. Anyone have any brilliant ideas?

Cover story

Arthur Byron Cover is a pseudonym. That much should be obvious. That it’s not a pen name for the authors I thought is a relief… but what would you think reading this in the introduction to a media tie-in novel:

The author would like to thank J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Rising Stars, and Harlan Ellison for putting their heads together and thinking of me….

Anyway. Cover’s novelization of the first 8 Rising Stars comic books annoys me to no end. It’s not particularly bad–it’s extremely faithful to the original, which is one of the best series I’ve read–although the first-person style and obscure-cultural-references-​for-the-sake-of-​obscure-cultural-reference are annoying to say the least.

Nope. What bugs me most about the book is that it’s so poorly edited. Misspellings are common, particularly of proper nouns (MalotovMolotov cocktail and Christian BernardBarnard in the first eight pages). Words are missing everywhere; one general theme appears to be that forms of to be are verboten. (I’m not exaggerating, either: page 1 contains the sentence The job wasn’t going to any safer just because he’d taken it.) There’s also a preponderance of comma misuse–look at Fowler or one of the many online resources to find out the difference between a comma and a semicolon, and where and how to use each symbol–and various other grammatical and usage errors.

I don’t know enough about mass-market publishing to say whether these are the fault of the credited editor–who’s also thanked in the author’s introduction–or somewhere else in the process, so I won’t name names. I will point out, however, that I recently finished a similar job for a pre-pub fantasy novel, so I may be more sensitive to these errors than I would be otherwise (but probably not).

Still in my stack of books to read are three more volumes from ibooks, publishers of the RS novel. They’re all Alfred Bester books, and I’m hoping they’re of better production quality.

Sickening

john@townend.com seems to take issue with a simple question I posed several months ago. To date 79 distinct requests have been made for that page, all via search engines looking for the words smoking and singing, and none have elicited a response, let alone a venomous one like his.

(The question–why do singers perform at venues that cause them harm–is a valid one, according to Dr. Douglas Hoffman, yet I’ve still to receive an answer. Financial need is the only explanation I can come up with.)

Given his witty rebuttal to my question, John seems to me to be an individual who… posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. There’s a word for such behaviour, and it’s generally recommended that one doesn’t feed his sort.

Congratulations, John. You’ve wasted five minutes of my life. Enjoy the snack–you won’t be getting any more–and Happy New Year.

Music ed

Went out this evening with my sibs and my sister’s boyfriend to Maggie’s, a jazz lounge, art gallery and restaurant about which I must write more later. While listening to three sets by John Noubarian (piano) and Ben Heywood (guitar), we got to talking to a couple of attractive, similarly-named women (Tamara and Tammy) about… well, all sorts of things, as conversations with strangers are wont to progress… but for the purposes of this entry, I’ll focus on a certain topic related to music.

The comment arose that a lot of musicians are teachers. I missed the exact details, because I was sitting at the wrong end of the table, but I believe Tammy’s a teacher and less-active musician, and Tamara’s an active musician who used to teach. (Could be wrong on all counts, though.) The rest of us are somewhat active musically–Chris belongs to a band, my sister’s in a choir and seems to know most of the members of the Winnipeg music scene, my brother plays baritone and piano from time to time, and I play trumpet occasionally and basically enjoy the abilities of others–but none of us teaches in any way. I’m not sure I agree with the statement as presented, but the inverse is true in my experience: I know a lot of teachers who are musicians, but only a few musicians who teach. (Granted, my view may be tainted: more than half of the members of the big band I used to perform with are teachers.)

I’m subscribed to two weblogs that regularly discuss teaching or playing, Teacher: Year One and scottandrew.com, but neither has mentioned the other topic except in passing. (dive into mark deserves mention here too–while not explicitly about teaching, it’s the site from which I’ve learned the most, most often how to push the envelope and use HTML the way it’s meant to be used.) And a number of the musicians and teachers I know don’t have any particular talent in the other field.

So all of this makes me curious: are there more teachers who are musicians, or musicians who are teachers? Subject taught is irrelevant, but order is important–an English teacher who plays violin may consider herself a musician first, and a pianist who teaches music may consider himself a teacher first.

Comments are welcome, as always; you can post directly to this entry or send your thoughts to me via e-mail.

Aliterate

I saw Rebecca Blood’s comment on reading and didn’t think much of about it–I read what I enjoy, and it so happens that some of what I read could be considered should-read material. But then I read the Globe and Mail article she referenced and realized that it’s true: I have become aliterate. I have that stack of books by my bed (and on my bookshelf, and on my coffee table) that I’ve been meaning to read, some for a couple of years, and it just keeps getting taller; like my writer friend, it’s a rare occasion when I don’t walk out of a bookstore with at least one volume. I’m reading her pre-publication novel right now which is quite good, but the 300-odd pages have languished by my bed for a week and a half now–not without a second thought, because I’ve wanted to pick it up a couple of times and I’ve promised the author feedback, but I wind up getting distracted or putting it off or not having the time or using any and all of the other excuses in the article.

It doesn’t help that my brother, who’s finished the last exam of his undergrad university career and is riding the train towards home as I type, messaged me yesterday about Life of Pi. I told him I had it on my shelf and would lend it to him, but realized later that I had no idea what he was talking about–I was going to give him The Joy of π (which is interesting, but hardly the same).

This disturbs me more than I can express. What am I doing right now? Writing about not reading, instead of picking up a book and doing something about it.

If I don’t show up here for a while, it’s partially because I’m home for Christmas and New Year’s, but with any luck, it will also be because I’m hip-deep in a pile of books that I’ve finally gotten to.