I am such a Geek

I am a geek and what is more an untalented one, but I don't care.

1. My 34 charters are each in a separate file for ease of manipulation. The longest of these files is 23 pages, I think, so if I put them all together it would be unpleasant to handle. However, I occasionally need to do a global find and replace or search, or some such. For example recently the woman who really knows about charters told me that brackets mustn't be italicised even when they come inside a run of italicised text. (This occurs frequently in the boundary clause discussions so I had a lot of italicised brackets that needed changing over a lot of files.) I made a little macro to find and replace open and close brackets. However, unlike the latest Office for Macs, the latest Office for PCs doesn't let you do things to all open documents. So I decided to risk it and make a Master document in which all my charters appear as subdocuments. I've heard that Master documents are not reliable, so I'm only going to use it to handle occasional global searches, not for editing. The problem is that now all the paths to find all those subdocuments need to be stable, i.e. I can't move things from folder to folder. And that meant the end of having things in folders relating to their condition. However, I have just tagged things instead and worked out how to save searches as folders. So instead of a folder called Edgar I now have a saved search for all files tagged Edgar; it looks like just the same thing on my desktop but allows me to leave files where they are, plus they can appear in more than one "folder" now, e.g. both in Edgar and Incomplete. This is making me very very happy. It's how things ought to be -- we should all discard the hierarchical structure of folders and just tag relationships and save searches. It will be much more useful when I get on to working on non-charter material. A lot of the stuff I do is associated with large digital images, perhaps 300 Mb each, and these can't all live on my little laptop hard drive. They have to be on external drives, where naturally charter images live in one folder and manuscript images in another, ordered by repository. This means I can't keep everything associated with one project in one place. But by tagging and saving a search I can now make it look and work like everything's together. Hurray! Of course I should have sorted all this out ages ago, probably in Linux, but I make no claim to be a proficient geek.

2. My birthday present to myself has arrived; it's the whole of Buffy on DVD. How geeky is that? I have 144 episodes and I may just give up on the remaining charters. I have one Æthelred the Unready, an Edward the Confessor that needs revision, an Alfred the Great, two Edward the Elders, and three Æthelstans. So far I have watched the first seven episodes of Buffy and it's a good deal more appealing. I don't know that early Buffy isn't my favourite, before it gets so dark and broken-hearted. Though the fact that Buffy occasionally goes a bit evil when it all gets too much, rather than just suffering and suffering like something out of Shakespeare, is one of the major things it has over that other geek-fest, Alias. (Sydney should have gone evil at least once, just briefly, instead of just crying bravely.) Anyway, I've been revisiting episodes with summaries like "Buffy starts dating a classmate but is interrupted by a vampire plot to lead her to hell" and "Buffy and Willow discover that all men are animals when Xander and the other boys from school are possessed by bloodthirsty demonic hyenas". The last one is where they eat the school principal.

3. Even geekier is the fact that Buffy and co's inventiveness with language is reminding me of tenth-century hermeneutic Latin, of the sort so popular in charters. This might be a useful way to stop hating hermeneutic Latin.

4. I've been listening to the Cloetta Paris album. This might be too good to count as geeky. It's the sort of pop that makes you feel perversely sad not to be broken-hearted. As such it should probably be banned for anyone under 25 or so -- the idea that having your heart broken is romantic is a pernicious one and ought to be exiled from popular culture. Probably more authentically geeky is BWO; here at their own site and here at myspace. Let's dance all night with the bourgeouisie!