dhosek

In college during the late 80s, working at the campus computer lab, I remember telling one student that she needed to use the mouse to move the cursor. She lifted it up and waved it in the air.

Not quite Scotty in Star Trek IV, but close.

He grew up in Naperville. Wikipedia says he was born in Berwyn, which I assume just means he was born at McNeal, but I don’t think he ever lived there or there’d be a bigger deal made of it by the local gentry. But that voice is hardcore inner suburbs/southwest side. I had no difficulty believing Jimmy McGill grew up in Cicero.

And at least Odenkirk sounds like he’s from Chicago (because he is). Colbert’s time in Chicago was a short part of his life.

I’ve found that Claude is really helpful for finding patterns in my web logs and identifying bad traffic patterns. Meta was ignoring robots.txt on a wiki that I run and generating so much traffic that it was effectively DOSing the site until I blocked their crawler.

What’s been really handy is being able to identify “stealth” bot traffic by the request patterns (e.g., not requesting CSS/JS/favicon when loading the page).

Costco made a decision a few years back that they were going to only sell books as part of their Christmas seasonal offerings.

It’s worth noting that it’s not “paperbacks” in general but the mass-market paperbacks in particular (despite the headline). The print book market (excluding technical books and textbooks which are a whole separate thing) had effectively three segments: hardcovers, trade paperback and mass-market paperback. The distinction between TP and MMP comes down to price, production quality and to a lesser degree target audience. A trade paperback will have somewhat larger pages, typically the same size as the corresponding hardcover and often printed from the same plates as the hardcover. Mass-market paperbacks were typically smaller, on cheaper paper¹ with smaller margins. Back when there were racks of books in supermarkets and drugstores, these were all MMPs and while bookstores would sell MMPs, they are geared more towards TP and HC sales since the lower price also came with lower margins (hardcovers make the most money for everyone involved and MMPs the least).

Since a large fraction of MMPs sold were genre fiction and a large fraction of that has shifted to ebooks (romance readers were the biggest early adopters of the kindle), along with the decline of book sales outside of bookstore channels, the loss of MMPs isn’t the cultural cataclysm the article claims. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the trade paperback space has expanded. It’s not uncommon for a new writer’s first book to be released as a trade paperback rather than hardcover (Emily St John Mandel is one notable example of a writer who debuted in TP but had later books released in HC).

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1. It was typically pure wood-pulp paper with high acid content, leading these books to be described as “pulp novels” and since a large fraction of these were genre novels, genre fiction would be referred to as pulp fiction and yes, that’s where the movie gets its name from.

(Correction: Wertherian is in Barchester Towers which I read in a Signet Classics paperback. Most of the later books from the Barsetshire novels I read in Penguin Classics, although some I bought in cheap Oxford hardcovers.)

Nope, they destroy digital records as well, at least banks do. If you ever work for a financial institution, you’ll have mandatory training about data retention timelines.

I went on a big-time Trollope binge around 1990. The mis-hyphenation of “wertherian”¹ in the Penguin classics edition of one of his books led to my first contribution to the TeX hyphenation exception list.

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1. The OED gives him first prose² usage credit for the word which later appeared in Russian in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina which, I discussed over email with the translator of the edition I read and he said that Tolstoy was a big Trollope fan and likely picked up the word from him.

2. The first recorded usage was in a poem, whose name and author I forget and I’m too lazy to bother going through the steps to access the OED online via the Chicago Public Library to look it up now.

There’s a biography of Graham Greene published in the 90s which had a gross editing error where a section was copy-pasted from one part of a chapter to another but the original was left in place.

I’m reading a novel at the moment which aggravated me when in the first chapter the narrator talked about knowing when another character had after-school activities and then two pages later talked about how that character had no after-school activities. It made me much less forgiving about “AP Geometry” and “dual” for “duel.” Overall, the book is ok, but not great.

Although that omits the paper check era.

My guess for the top slot off the top of my head was actually #4.

I’m on the mailing list where errors related to TeX are submitted and the level of scrutiny behind submissions is truly mind-boggling.