response 446 of 480:

Dec 19 16:56 UTC 2003

Realone (realaudio) comes with a music CD maker that offers three settings
for realaudio quality, one of which was 160 (168?) kbps and was chosen as the
default.  So we could also make our own .ram instead of .mp3 files. I think
they also offer mp3 and wav.  Does ram sound different from mp3 and do you
know how that is encoded?    I presume what they are transmitting at 20 kbps
is encoded that way too.  Some stations send at 64K (half of 128) or 48Kbps.
Hard to tell if the cheap speakers or the encoding are what make it sound not
so good.  We might hook up a receiver and good speakers.  

This morning I woke coughing at 7:30 and got lots of blood on one of my
improvsed hankies but then no blood on the next two, which suggests my
platelets have gone up and maybe neutrophils will be numerous enough now too
to shake off this cough.  This particular virus appears to depress the immune
system though, since Jim has had mouth sores and an infected fingernail that
won't heal.  Must be how viruses help cause cancer - they stop your body from
fighting things off.  Some of them also cause mutations.  

I keep getting emails from concerned translators and agencies, most recently
from one in Texas where I used to do lots of medical translating.  She says
another of their translators died suddenly of cancer and she knows several
other people dealing with it.  The new epidemic. A library book said 43% of
men will get cancer in their lifetimes and almost as many women.  Lung,
prostate, and colon are more common than lymphoma.  You can reduce chances
of some common cancers by eating properly, not being obese, and not smoking.
This is a book on exercise that says exercise is good for the immune system
(except when you have a fever).  A library magazine suggested that you try
to get exercise while doing chores, in order to lose weight, by wearing a 15
pound vest.  Jim suggested gaining 15 pounds instead.  Chores used to imply
exercise.  Another suggestion was to pace while on the phone - it finally
struck me that the phone must not be attached to the wall likes ours are. 

SOmeone in the basiclinux mail list posted a link to WORD 5.5 for DOS,
available for free download now from MS. 3.5MB.  Supposedly makes smaller
files than WP, but since it is gui I don't know if I can use it on a TTL
monitor to translate with a gif on the VGA monitor of a 2-monitor system. 
With dosemu if I can figure out how to mount DOS drives to dosemu.  Last time
I tried to mount the C: drive under /usr/jim/ it acted like /tmp instead -
listed me all the files in /tmp but in 8.3 format.  There is a SUBST command
- how does this work?  
http://download.microsoft.com/download/Word97win/Word55_be/97/Win98/EN-US/W
in5
5_ben.exe
I have no idea why WORD 5.5 for DOS is filed under Word97 for Win98  or what
is be(n).  Someone says if you omit the help files it fits on one floppy disk.
Without dictionary.  

I will try WORD first in plain DOS, VGA and then HGC.  

response 448 of 480:

Dec 19 18:49 UTC 2003

Re resp:446: RAM probably is a different encoding scheme than MP3.  I
can't say whether it sounds better or worse at the same bitrate because
I haven't tried it.

response 450 of 480:

Dec 19 23:55 UTC 2003

I apparently need to install lpd - what then?  

Today things no longer taste odd, they taste bad and my tongue is sore and
there is still slime on my teeth.  In just six weeks things will start getting
better for good.  We are playing Beethoven's 9th Symphony and someone sent
me a short translation (about bronchial asthma) to distract me.  Jim is bug
hunting because his little text editor does not scroll properly on wide files.
First things first.  

response 452 of 480:

Dec 20 02:44 UTC 2003

So if I do that (pipe to lp) will it automatically print?
The format is gs -sDEVICE=deskjet -r300x300 filename.pdf   
I wish people would send me gifs instead of pdf files as they are easier to
display and move around in and I don't need to print them.  There is no point
that I know of in making an image into a pdf file when there is no text in
it.  

response 454 of 480:

Dec 20 14:44 UTC 2003

Thanks.
Today I only woke up twice coughing and then slept 6 hours straight without
waking for anything but hot flashes and then even sneezed!  This is the day
in the cycle that they used to test my blood and discover my blood counts were
back to normal.  They could have been back for three days before that - no
tests then.  So I am still hoping the cough will go away soon.  My tongue
feels less slimy than it did.  I noticed yesterday that there is a largish
area of numb skin where they did the spleen biopsy.  I wonder if anesthetic
can have lasting effects?

I am told there is some disagreement between grex's vt100 and the vt102 used
by my xterm, which makes lynx display links double.  Where might I go for 
definitions of the two of them?  When I run kermit from xterm lynx is not
usable, when I run it from console it is.

response 456 of 480:

Dec 20 14:57 UTC 2003

Hmm, interesting. what's a "vS100"?

response 458 of 480:

Dec 20 15:07 UTC 2003

The xterm is defined with -tn vt102 - should I change to vt100?  I am using
one that was supplied to us with a few modifications to make it full-screen
and have a scrollbar.  I tried vt300 and it made things even worse - Pine
displayed the cursor one line or two lines down from where it should be.

In order to see things at grex without them wrapping I needed -geom 78x25,
anything narrower made it wrap.  But 78 cuts off the vertical right line of
the terminal, not that I care.  I can see all the characters.  The scrollbar
takes up a space or two but I need it to scroll back when using kermit. 
Kermit works fine without xterm but no scroll buffer that way.  

A friend offered to drop us off some Christmas cookies, on the porch.

response 460 of 480:

Dec 20 15:22 UTC 2003

I suggest reading the man page for xterm, Sindi.  You can probably find the
command line options you need, like "-geom 78x25".  (I'm surprised your screen
can't display an 80-column terminal, though.)

response 462 of 480:

Dec 20 18:43 UTC 2003

If I use -fn 10x20 the bold parts (links) in lynx are doubled.
If I use -fn linux8x16 lynx is okay but bbs is scrambled.
Someone suggested setting -fb (bold font).
I could not find 10x20 bold but I did find 9x15 bold and set
-fn 9x15 and -fb 9x15bold and it all works now but the print
is awfully skinny.  I will keep experimenting.  Maybe I can mix
10x20 and 9x15bold or some other bold?

response 464 of 480:

Dec 21 15:56 UTC 2003

Cough seems somewhat better this morning!

response 466 of 480:

Dec 21 22:47 UTC 2003

It has changed into sneezing, hooray!  I guess my immune system does not work
instantly.  If it gets better by Tuesday we may take the risk and go to Jim's
sister's annual family get-together in Warren on Thursday.  Jim is also
sneezing and he is supposed to have a normal immune system.  

Today we went for a walk in the slush and looked at tree trunks.  There was
a burr oak with some unusual thick bark that was peeling off it from the
bottom up, and the trunk of a huge willow (the branches fell through the
nearby roof and were removed) with large round gnarly areas all over it and
short skinny branches growing off the top in all directions.  The lucky owners
put a bench in front of it.  Two birches.  A variety of evergreens.  One
neighbor out shoveling slush for a 3-way shared driveway because one of the
other neighbors (that we know) was in the hospital with a really bad sinus
infection.  We did not find the rubber thing to go over electric cords but
Jim brought home a somewhat droopy abandoned poinsettia plant.  The adjustible
flagpole was still there next to it.  

I have been translating, one page at a time because it still hurts to sit.
I think that is the symptom I would most like to go away, but it requires
eating more so I guess I need my taste buds back first.  Jim kindly ate the
whole 2 half gallons of chocolate ice cream when I complained the first bowl
tasted funny (it was the rice crispies in it not the ice cream). It took him
under 48 hours.  Not bad for a vegan out of training.  

I am reading Chaucer in modern translation (all about sex and violence and
religion, with some drunkenness thrown in for laughs) and a good book on
medieval art.  Clothing styles closely paralleled architectural styles. 
People in the Romanesque period wore rounded hats, in the Gothic period very
tall pointy ones, and they tried to pose in ogee shapes, and then in the
Renaissance they tried to look short and squat and square with flat topped
hats and squared shoes and super-wide shoulders.  I also noticed a lot of
parallels between 30s glassware and sweaters in two other books - both were
relatively plain shapes decorated with narrow stripes or other fine patterns,
as opposed to bicolor designs in the fifties.

response 468 of 480:

Dec 22 00:18 UTC 2003

The shape of the top part of a Gothic arch, somewhat S-shaped.  They would
pose with their torsos bent backwards and their heads bent forwards.