Monday, June 29, 2009

Not much knitting done yesterday, either, but at least I have finished the back and embarked on one of the fronts of the cardigan, and knit a pleasant six rows of Princess border this morning.

So largely non-knit today.

Tennis

I tend not to get excited about affronts to one sex or the other, but I have been much struck with repeated assertions in the press that if Mr Murray should win Wimbledon this week (and he’s got a long way to go), it would be the first British win since Fred Perry in 1936. It would not. Ann Jones of Birmingham, a neighbour of ours at the time – although not an acquaintance – won it, and I think there may have been another English woman winner since the war. Ann Jones beat Billie Jean King in the final – a victory worth having.

I love the Wimbledon fortnight, but I also tend not to get excited about the latest British player, of either sex. Mr Murray is an exception. Four years ago, when he first made his mark on Wimbledon, the First Saturday coincided with my first cataract operation. I was concerned, throughout the operation, with the need to get back to the ward where I could, if not watch, at least listen to the tennis. Murray won his first two sets that day, and lost the next three. Our parallel ordeals created a bond (at least on my side) which persists.

Last year I thought, he’s never going to make it, he’s too scrawny. I gather his mentors thought the same thing, and have prescribed body building.

Documents to Go

One of my tasks in life is to keep a version of my husband’s magnum opus up to date on a Palm. The filter program, which can take files from Microsoft Word and massage them and squirt them into the Palm, is called Documents to Go. It won’t (in the version we have) do footnotes or endnotes, so part of my responsibility is to copy the endnotes for each file into the real text, and also insert real numbers for them.

I’ve got a bit behindhand with my husband’s recent revisions lately, and have resolved to do better. Yesterday I attempted a “hot sync” to bring us up to date, or nearer up to date than we were, and I failed. The program gets a certain way and then aborts, complaining that there are too many files.

I know how it feels (there are hundreds), but that’s silly. There are just as many files as there were last time – it’s only that some of them need to be updated.

So I am struggling. I am proceeding at the moment on a version of the old solution of turning it off and then on again – deleting all the files from Documents to Go, and re-identifying them to the program. It’s slow work, as each one is laboriously converted into a “handheld version”.

A 2009 version of Documents to Go will do footnotes – but it needs a 2009 Palm to squirt them into. We may be forced into that solution.

3 comments:

  1. I used to have a Palm, before my workplace switched to Blackberry and i had many many hotsync difficulties. Best of luck to you. And to anyone reading a magnum opus on the Palm!

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  2. Virginia Wade was another Wimbledon wnner. My husband escorted her to the Wimbledon Ball the year before we met - they used to play tennis together when she was a student at Sussex University.

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  3. =Tamar6:31 PM

    The image of the dedicated always-correct newspaper copy-editor is sadly out of date if it was ever true. It isn't only sports where they go for the dramatic myth over the boring reality; I've even seen it in reporting high-school National Merit Scholar awards here in the US.
    Corrections are in fine print on page 8 if they ever appear.

    You have my complete sympathy on the file conversion difficulty.

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