There’s no place like home–unless it’s a tent. Yes, I’m back.

Here’s supper. Tuna with lemon squeezed over it. A scrambled egg fried in olive oil with a little sea salt mixed in. Good hobez from the Arab bakery, no preservatives, taken from the freezer and warmed in the toaster oven. [Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts. --Joyce's Ulysses] Then you break a piece off the bread and use it to scoop off a piece of egg or tuna.
A Heineken is discretely off camera in deference to Ramadan. The laptop, yes, it’s new. Unfortunately, or as it turns out fortunately, I forgot the power cord to my netbook at home when I went on vacation and was compelled to shop for a new one. Well, you can’t just walk into Best Buy and pick one up, so I ended up browsing the laptops. I have always wanted an HP Pavilion DV3 2155mx, but they only came in white, which means they will look clean for the first two weeks you own them, or you can also get some goofy bubble pattern. It will be a cold day for the Shaitan when I carry a computer with bubbles on it. But suddenly I see my dream laptop with a livable pattern. Not just livable, but pleasing, a sort of Shepard Fairey-esque pattern.  And not just on the cover.  The pattern is repeated on the inside of the laptop, and even on the touchpad. Yes, it has a Core 2 Duo chipset; yes, it weighs less than 5 pounds;  yes, it has a 7 hour battery.  But the pattern!  Someone went to some trouble with this laptop’s detail.  The computer feels solid, and it looks pleasingly professional.  But it’s also nice to touch and to look at.  That’s the difference between a laptop that’s just a laptop, and a laptop that’s your baby.

I can never find these when I want them.

Dictionaries and English Tools

Memidex dictionary and thesaurus
OneLook (1024 dictionaries)
Online Etymology Dictionary
Perdue Online Writing Lab
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
Webster’s New World College Dictionary
Wikipedia Manual of Style

TV shows

Firefly (a space western) wikipedia|episodes (often broken)|Chinese language phrases (mostly Mandarin) (incomprehensible by real Chinese people)
Firefly first five episodes (now they have five rotating episodes)
La Femme Nikita episodes (starring Peta Wilson)
The Prisoner free online (Patrick McGoohan)

Bible portals

Today’s New International Version
Revised Standard Version
Arabic translation (Bible Gateway)
Q Bible (Hebrew & English)
Parallel translations (commentary and cross references)
Codex Sinaiticus (earliest known Bible–in Greek)
Bible Gateway (a dozen English versions including TNIV but not RSV, plus languages including Arabic but not Greek or Hebrew)

Koran portals

Al-Tafsir (Jordan)
Shakir (U. of Virginia)
Shakir (U. of Michigan)
Yusuf Ali, Pickthal, Shakir (U. of Southern California)
Online Quran Project (60 trans. + Arabic)
Ayat al-Kursi (Throne Verse) [2:255] Tutorial
Open Quran (9 reciters + Arabic text)
“Wahhabi” translation
Koran Today (side by side comparison of translators Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Zohurul Hoque, T.J. Irving, T.U. Hilali & M. Khan, M. Pickthall, and M.S. Shakir)
(For prayer times)
mosque: Bridgeview
mosque: Adams (DC)

Language Dictionaries

Computer downloads for new computer setup

Portable Firefox (for flash drives)
100 plugins from Mycroft Project (Urban Dictionary)
FoxLingo toolbar
American English spellcheck dictionary
Irfanview image editor
Zoombrowser EX (camera)
Zoombrowser EX (But where’s the install file? Can’t find it on Vista.)  Sure Canon gives you a disk, and they are said to be very proprietary about their software, but what are you supposed to do if you have a netbook with no CD player? Do they really think someone would want to use the program if they didn’t already have a Canon camera? Something to think about when it comes time to upgrade the camera.
Zoombrowser Canon A560 (and others) update from Canon (must have EX installed first)
Ad-aware
Spybot Search and Destroy
Bitdefender
(AVG now with annoying popups and demands for system restarts)
Canon printer utility
Quicktime and iTunes download
iTunes 64 bit Vista download
Realplayer download
How to enable Arabic on Vista: Start button->Control Panel->Classic View; select Regional and Language Options->Formats tab (set format to language i.e. “Arabic Egypt”); Location Tab (make location match setting for current format “Egypt”);  go to Keyboards and Languages tab-> click on “Change Keyboards”
Picasa 3 Image editor for photos

Jordan

The Jordan Times
Jordan news RSS feeds
Petra News Agency

Middle East

Asharq Al-Awsat (London)
Search for world newspapers by country
James Zogby on Huffington Post (archives on Washington Watch)

Audio (see also Language)

music:
Cohen, Leonard: Official YouTube channel,  2009 Tour (albertnoonan’s high quality YouTube), DrHGuy blog, Speaking Cohen link page
Giovanni
Holst, Planets
NPR Music (click live concerts for Neko Case)

Leonard Cohen WebRing

Blogs

Leonard Cohen Photo Blog (haunting images from someone in Iran)
The Leonard Cohen files (I get quoted here for the Chicago concert–in windows use edit, then find for “camel”)
Speaking Cohen

Videos

“The Darkness” new song video, Nashville Nov.5
“Feels so good” new song video, Chicago Oct.29; San Jose Nov. 13; Las Vegas Nov. 12  (Thank you, thank you, Albert Noonan); lyrics and more video links from Drheck

Languagehat WebRing

Languagehat
A Bad Guide (AJP and his goats in Norway)
Bulbolovo (bulbul in Slavakia)
Desbladet (tracking Dutch Snökaos and Gavle goat burnings)
Idiocentrism (Emerson in Oregon)
Martian Spoken Here (French) (Siganus in Mauritius)
The Old Hack (Paul in France)
Poemas del Rio Wang (Spanish, sometimes) (Studiolum, a Hungarian)
Voidplay (a mathematician named Ø-pronounced “empty”-in Boston)

I’ve got those broadband internet AT&T red light blues.

July 2
I request telephone service changed to my new address. After 40 minutes on hold, someone takes the information and promises service in the new place by 8 p.m. The phone in the old place goes dead within hours.

July 3

I take everything to the new address and plug it in, but there is no internet. When I call AT&T, I find out I am calling from the same phone number as my landlord downstairs.

July 4
A cheerful young man climbs the telephone pole in the back alley. I call my phone number on my cell phone and my phone rings, but still no internet. For that, I will have to call during office hours.

July 5

Closed.

July 6

Once again I call AT&T. Even though the phone has been disconnected at the old address, the internet is still connected there (!!??#@*!) They tell me I have to order internet changes separate from telephone changes. It will take one day to disconnect the internet and another day to connect it at the new address.

July 7

Oopsie, the internet still isn’t disconnected from the old address.  Um, call back tomorrow?

Bottom line–I will spend 6 7 8 10 days looking at this:

I wonder if I should have just gone with Comcast.

Update:

July 8

Orders says it has to to to provisioning.  Provisioning says it has to go to maintenance for an order.  Maintenance says it will be back on in 30-45 minute, or should call tech support.  Tech support says there is an order for the 10th, so I should talk to maintenance again, but somehow i get connected to status.  Status says I can talk to sales.  Sales says I can use dialup in the meantime, and she can get me the  number, but her phone starts to fade out and goes dead.  Maybe she needs a company that knows something about phones.

/snark

Here’s a thought.  For every day I have no service, they have to make an adjustment on my bill.  Can I pit one department of the phone company against another? Time to call billing and make sure they know I have no service and will need an adjustment on my bill–and that the date I’ m supposed to have the problem resolved keeps getting pushed ahead.

UPDATE:Yes, my internet is still down, thank you for asking…

Here’s a shout out to all my very special new friends at AT&T:
The lady at Retention Team whose name I didn’t write down, Selena, Ray Dawn (or was that the one person I talked to at Net10 who got that problem straightened out with one phone call), Ken, Houston who climbed my telephone pole, Pete, Philip, Shonda at provisioning (?), Val with DSL maintenance in St. Louis, Fabian at tech support, Cynthia in status, Stephanie at sales.

another UPDATE:

Day 10.
A very special hello to Meagan, Ron, and Rosa, my newest very special BFFs at AT&T.

Also: Sheila, my absolutely very very very BFF from AT&T. I have just found out that with a modem I don’t need a router.  Now why didn’t anyone from AT&T ever tell me that before?

UPDATE: My internet is back up. I also managed to replace a couple of outlets while it was daylight, and although it took longer than I thought it would, I now have microwave and refrigerator.

I will probably be able to blog in another day or two, but I’m thinking about whether I want to.

First things first. So I don’t have refrigeration, shower, or telephone in my new place yet (I figured out how to turn the gas on the stove last night) and what do I do? Return the netbook that was giving me so much grief. It wouldn’t click to open icons, it would cut but not paste, and every time I wanted to open a new page I had to do a CNTL ALT DEL sequence to release the last page. Not to mention not being able to use the spell check editor and seeing the Blue Screen Of Death three times.

How did I like the MSI netbook? Not. Okay, it was great for my camping trip. I could pull off the road and catch my email quite effortlessly from the rest stops, which are mostly equipped with WIFI these days, especially on the toll roads. But typing was a problem. Using the left shift key invariably triggered the caps lock above it, and the double quotation mark was positioned above the right shift key in a way to cause a sprain of the bird finger with repeated use.  I never was able to enable Arabic (no Service Pack 3)  and forget even trying to put on the utilites for my Canon camera and printer. The CD’s are worthless–no internal CD drive.

Returning the netbook was simple (thank you, Target). Just a matter of printing out a receipt (okay, I had to go to the library for that, since the netbook was too far gone to print) then returning the defective netbook to my local Target store for a refund to my credit card. Then a quick trip to BestBuy seconds before closing time for the last netbook in the place, a deep blue ten-inch Asus Eee (how do you pronounce that?) with a battery that’s supposed to last seven hours. Already I hate the mousepad, with its bumpy surface that makes the cursor stick, and have plugged in a laser mouse, but the rest of the EEeeee is just fine so far.

Now all I have to do is install all my favorite programs on the new netbook. The links to my favorite Firefox addons and Irfanview are here. I enabled Arabic with a few quick clicks–Windows XP Service Pack 3 is already on it.  The screen resolution took slightly longer and I had to reboot the system to get all the changes to take effect.  Now all I need is the Canon zoombrowser (Zoombrowser EX and the latest update from Canon for my specific camera) (and to resize the 10″ monitor resolution  so the file can be unzipped) and my printer utility.  And the spyware (Ad-aware and Spybot Search and Destroy) and antivirus (Bitdefender) (AVG) programs (woops, AVG has just added some very intrusive pop-ups that constantly demand you update the program and restart you computer–AVG is now uninstalled).

By now anyone who has been reading this has seen pictures of my new toy, an MSI Wind Netbook.  When I dropped into OfficeMax to look at their netbooks, the guy there told me he would never buy a netbook becuase there is no drive for CD’s.  What if you want to take your Microsoft Office disk and install Word on your Netbook, he said.  Then you would have to buy a removable disk drive (about a hundred bucks).  Maybe so.  But I thought the netbooks were sexy, and I wanted one.

I ordered it from Target, with an upgrade of a 6 cell battery and 2GB of memory. Target did send me an email notice that the package had been sent, but no tracking info like Newegg and Dell provide.  Still, the package showed up after one or two days via UPS, uneventfully, in spite of my consternation.

The machine has a 10-inch screen and an internal hard drive, unlike many netbooks with 8 inch screens.

Here is how the netbook works with my other toys:

YouTube–no problem, plays videos just fine.

Microsoft Office 2007–installed on system with a trial offer. If you like it, you can buy it. Whether this resolves to Office 2003 if you don’t buy it (like my Toshiba that blew up) has yet to be seem.

Language support.  Arabic–Huge problem.  On every other system I have had, you can merely enable any language you want.  This machine wanted Service Pack 3. The only upload I could find said it was only for advanced programmers.  Finally I found a writeup that said you could just use it anyhow.  So I downloaded the Service Pack #3 and then it wanted the installation disk.  Great. Will I have to buy a $100 external disk just to enable Arabic on this system?  This problem I will have to call support for–I do hope it is solvable.

Keyboard–everyone remarks on this for all the netbooks.  I am always hitting keys I don’t want–caps lock above the left shift key, page up by the right shift key.   And the quotation mark is really hard to use, the way it’s positioned in relation to the shift key.  I’m always getting knocked out of some program or blog because of this.

It would be nice to have a user manual with this too.

Logitech Z5 USB speakers. The speakers that are in the machine are silly sounding little rinky dink things; the Logitech speakers sound great, but the volume is not very high.  This might not work very well with a large class.  I first just plugged in the speakers and nothing happened, but after closing and reopening the music program I was playing, got it to switch to the USB speakers.  But when I was done playing the music, the program hung and I had to CTNL ALT DEL then kill the program manually.  I have now downloaded the proper driver from Logitech–very easy–and we shall see if that helps.  UPDATE: With the proper speaker drivers downloaded, the program does not hang or crash like it does with the generic speaker driver.  I do love these Logitech speakers.

Canon digital camera.  Canon is known for being very stingy with its camera software.   So, what if you bought the camera but want to use it with your new netbook? The netbook does have a camera utility that does work, but not like the Canon zoombrowser.  Unfortunately Canon only provides the updates on their website, not the zoombrowser itself–some proprietary issues?  After much aggravation I was able to find another source for downloading the zoombrowser that worked all right.  I never did get Photostitch to work, but I don’t know what I would ever use that for.

Laser Mouse–Microsoft mouse worked perfectly once the battery was fully charged.

External hard drives and USB flash drives. No problem.

All in all I’m pretty satisfied with the netbook–except for the problem with enabling Arabic. If you want a computer notebook that zooms, the Intel atom processor  isn’t it. If you get the identical memory–2GB–with core 2 duo technology, THAT will zoom, with either VISTA or Windows XP. This netbook machine is just extremely portable and extremely cute.

Let me add my voice to the blogosphere echo chamber of outrage over the actions of Alaska representative Mike Doogan.  Mike Doogan stalked and outed the anonymous author of the popular Alaska politics blog, Mudflats. Not only did Doogan publish her name, he did so at taxpayer expense in the House Democratic legislators official newsletter, where it still appears. (No, I’m NOT going to give a link.) I guess they must not have any lawyers on their staff to advise them about that.

She also published the “Are you people nuts?”  letter received by some of his constituents on Christmas Eve.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1) Bloggers are entitled to free speech, 2) Bloggers have the right to political speech, 3) Bloggers have the right to stay anonymous.

Yet another example of liberals eating their own.

So your friends want you to start a blog.  And yourself, not so much.  Maybe.  Depending.

A lot of work, right? You have to post regularly and keep thinking of new topics, right? You have to deal with personalities and readers, right?…build up a core of readers who are interested in your topics?

No.  Forget all of that.

You don’t have to do anything.

You don’t have to have any comments at all. You can close comments on individual posts or for the whole blog. You can have just a title page if you want. Some blogs are nothing more than a resume or a collection of frequently used links. Some bloggers post once a month, others even less, and some just post pictures.  Their  blogrolls are gold mines for the right enthusiasts and the blogs serve as an introduction to the person’s way of looking at the world.

Okay, so you’re convinced.  You want your own blog.  What do you do? First you need a domain name. There are several blogging services that will give you a free one. Blogspot and Livejournal are popular, but the best one is WordPress. You can do a lot with their format and it’s very intuitive. The utilities for dealing with images are very easy to use and they give you enough space to upload almost limitless photographs. The only drawbacks to WordPress are 1) You can’t use your blog for commercial purposes (like Google ads). 2) If someone views your blog with Internet Explorer, they may see it with ads that WordPress puts there.   Still, I like WordPress better than the others.  Or, if you want to spend money, you can get your own domain.

If I had a friend, purely hypothetical of course, who wanted to do a quick blog that would give him an identity page to link to and make his friends deliriously happy, I would recommend a WordPress blog. This type of blog is totally free and could have anything in it from goats to architecture to cruise ship lavatories to just photographs.  Did I mention goats?

How to get started?  Go to WordPress.com and register for a blog.  You will need a unique name that no one else has. If you want to blog anonymously you might also want to set up a separate email account just to register, so your real email address isn’t visible if you comment on a blog with the wordpress format.

Here is a website that will tell you who is reading your blog.

Quantcast is a new breed of audience service, focused on helping buyers and sellers quantify the real-time characteristics of digital media consumers against which they can activate addressable advertising solutions. Quantcast provides publishers, marketers and agencies unmatched capabilities to measure, organize, discover and transact based on directly-measured traffic and inferred audience data.

Inferred audience data, huh.  So who do they infer is reading my blog? Here is the chart for www.camelsnose.wordpress.com.

The information is a bit counter intuitive.   A percentage is given, then a number that compares your blog with the internet average.

So in the above graph, the readership–the inferred readership–is 54% male and 46% female. But on the scale of 100, it’s skewed to male readership at 109 in comparison to the rest of the blogosphere. I’m also amazed to find that there are so many younger people reading me.  I claim to be child-friendly, but a full 10% of readers–inferred readers?– are under the age of 17, and many more are younger than me.  I also draw a readership that has a higher percentage of ethnic minorities than other blogs, readers with no kids, and, ahem, less affluent readers.  Only 52% of my readers make more than $60K. At least my readers are more educated than is typical.  People who visit me are also more likely to visit science and nature blogs, or political blogs.  In spite of spending the majority of my blogging time on educational/university related blogs, my educational readership comes in at sixth place compared with other interests.  Every month I get 3,782 page hits form the U.S. and 5,756 from abroad.  32% of my readers are regulars and 68% are just passing by.  My rank equivalent is 463,713, whatever that means.

I have no idea what all of this means, but I do find it interesting. I suppose that blogs with advertising might find a more practical use for it.

Worried about the latest Internet Explorer security bug?  Don’t have Firefox at work?  Try installing Portable Firefox on your flash drive.

The download process: When I started to download this, I didn’t see a way to save it to the flash drive, so I downloaded to the default hard drive.  It didn’t put an icon on the desktop, so I went to the download manager and double clicked to open it from there.  This opened a dialog box that gave an option for where to install the browser and I directed it to the flash drive.  At the end of the installation, you get a folder that says FirefoxPortable; inside the folder will be a few folders plus the orange, round  Firefox logo that will start the Firefox browser.

Now for the add-ons.  One of my favorite Firefox add-ons is Urban Dictionary. If your knowledge of the latest leading edge slang doesn’t go beyond “LOL”, you can quickly copy and paste a word into this search engine bar to look it up on the fly. It’s available at the 100 most frequently downloaded plugins page at Mozilla’s Mycroft Project.  While you’re on that page, adding the YouTube search engine can save you a few mouse clicks as well.

My other favorite  Firefox Add-on is the FoxLingo toolbar for quick translations.  Machine translations have their drawbacks, but FoxLingo keeps getting better and better.  I have started using this one in class instead of the slower dictionary.com translation tool to communicate with students who speak absolutely no English. I also like to have an American English spellcheck dictionary installed for on the fly spelling lookups.

While you’re at it, why not install Irfanview image editor? I couldn’t get it to copy from my hard drive to the flash drive–only the shortcuts would copy, which of course means the program itself isn’t there and it won’t run if you move your flash drive to another system.  All copies of Irfanview are portable, so you  can download or unzip it to your portable or thumb drive.  Here is one of numerous free Irfanview download sites.

And how does the Firefox portable browser work?  Just fine. This post was written with it.  On installation you get two options, I chose the faster option that doesn’t save your current session. I notice very little difference in speed from using the hard disk version of Firefox, although the flash drive is a bit slower–it doesn’t really zoom like Vista usually does. Your browsing history from your home computer isn’t available of course–you start over with browsing history.  And if you click on your desktop Firefox icon to open a second window, it will open the portable version, not the one already installed on the hard drive, so you can’t switch back and forth between them.

(Thanks to bulbul via languagehat.)

Update: Opera has a portable version of its browser for USB.

A while back on Charlie Rose’s show, someone was talking about tryouts for hiring musicians for some major orchestra.  The tryouts used to be in front of the people who were doing the hiring, but then they decided to do the tryouts with the musician invisible to the listeners.  You’ll never guess what happened.  When they couldn’t see the gender of the musician, they rated women higher.  And they started hiring more women.

The internet makes things interesting in the same way because you can’t see the person writing.

A while back I was amused when someone linked to me and called me a Jordanian.  Hey, maybe it’s true.  The Arabs have a saying, when you live with a people and eat their bread (or is it salt?) for 40 days, you become one of them.  There are worse things that could happen.

Now there are more ways to rate your website.

Blog Personality

Typeanalyser (Via Riverdaughter) will give your blog a personality test. It’s based on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory,  (you can take the test as an individual here) which is based on Jungian psychological theory, and measures personality according to 4 dichotomies: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/iNtuition, Thinking/Feeling,  Judging/Perceiving.  Here’s how they envision me:

INTP – The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Blog Gender

Moving onwards and upwards, the GenderAnalyzer tests your blog for gender.

We have strong indicators that http://camelsnose.wordpress.com is written by a man (91%).

Hee, hee.

Should I tell them? They have a little poll set up, and the results reported now are 54% accurate. But in at least one blog thread, the accuracy of the results is running more around 25%.

Browser Gender

So much for your writing habits.  But what about reading?  This Social Analyzer has a Java script that will analyze your gender based on your browser history.

Even better, the author of the script tells how he gets his numbers.  Gender neutral is 1.0. Higher numbers are masculine, lower numbers are feminine.  As far as political candidates’ websites, the male/female ratio for

hillaryclinton.com is 0.6

barackobama.com 0.68

johnmccain.com 1.27

For politics:

realclearpolitics.com 1.82

dailykos.com 1.56

drudgereport.com 2.08

nytimes.com 1.13

politico.com 1.7

huffingtonpost.com 1.35

Shopping is a bit more intuitive:

victoriassecret.com 0.68 (a no-brainer)

circuitcity.com 1.2 (now in bankruptcy)

target.com 0.67

bestbuy.com 1.11

Is a high male score for shopping an predictor of financial difficulty? Hint: keep an eye on Radio Shack.

Technology sites tend to rank more male, except for cellphone corporate websites, which run more towards female.

So, what am I?  On the PC I’m 61% female.  On the laptop, I’m 98% male. Go figure.

UPDATE: 11/30/08 Camel’s Nose is now testing 100% female, but is still INTP Thinker, and the laptop history is still 98% male. That was a pretty quick gender switch for the writing– a 180 degree turn in just ten days–but good to know the thinking and reading are rock solid…I guess.