We added a feature this week to help solve the "where is everybody" problem:

1. Click "Read." (You're probably there already.)

2. Just below "Read," you'll see three buttons: "following," "network," and "public."

3. "Following" is your usual feed. "Network" is, basically, friends of friends - people followed by people you follow, but not by you, not yet anyway. Naturally it shows only public posts. And "Public" is the firehose: all the public posts in the entire OPWverse.

It won't be long before the "public" feed is impractical to keep up with, which is why we added "network." But "public" will probably always be a fun way to sample the zeitgeist.

I haven't posted in a little bit, so let me say a little about Wellfleet Oysterfest.  I look forward to this event every year and even drive 6 hours each way for the weekend just to attend.

It's an outdoor festival in "downtown" Wellfleet on Cape Cod and basically you go from vendor to vendor eating plates of fresh oysters on the half shell, drinking oyster stout beer, checking out nautically oriented crafts, and listening to NRBQ. There is also a highly anticipated shucking competition.

The lemon on the oyster (teehee) for me is that many of my friends from college convene every year in what has become somewhat of an annual tradition.

It was awesome and now...back to work.

So the new OSX operating system version 10.10 shipped recently. They're calling it Yosemite. It makes a lot of things better/nicer/prettier. More in line with my sense of style.

Except the system font.  (The system font is what "system" things are drawn with. Things like menu bars and buttons. Stuff you look at all the time.)

The system font in OSX used to be Lucida Grande.  Now it's Helvetica Neue. That's bad.

Here's an image that shows the difference, courtesy of 64notes.com.

Helvetica is a regressive step for text like system captions because it's harder to read at small point sizes. It runs a little narrower in width for the same amount of text, which can be good for screen space conservation, but that is partly due to the things that make the font harder to read. And I think we can agree that harder to read is a bad direction to go for any important typeface. 

Here's a list of things wrong with Helvetica, as compared to other typefaces in its genre, that make it a poor choice for a utility font.

1. The x-height is short.  X height is a measurement of the height of the x character, and is a shorthand metric for the overall height of lowercase characters. In general, the taller the lowercase characters are in proportion to uppercase characters, the easier a font is to read at small sizes. (Yes, there is a point where this effect reverses itself.)  Small type sizes call for a proportionally larger X height.  (Admittedly, Lucida Grande's x-height is slightly shorter than Helvetica's. I never said it was perfect, only that it was overall, better.)

2. The bowls are enlarged and almost circular. The bowls are parts of the letterform that need to be distinctly round; letter with bowls are a, c, o, p, d, b and so on. Big, round bowls take up more space and, with their large interiors, tend to make text look uneven. Some roundness is needed, but an exaggerated, almost circular roundness is a specific stylistic choice. Small type sizes call for a more oval bowl shape to allow balanced density.

3. The kerning is too tight. This is where Helvetica gains space efficiency, by jamming characters together. By and large, the tight kerning is a response to the big round bowls. With all that whitespace within the characters, the only way to optically balance a line of text is to push characters closer together, visually augmenting their black lines. Tight kerning is particularly dangerous at small sizes, when characters can appear to run into each other. Bad kerning leading to character collisions is amusingly called keming for this very reason. Small type sizes call for a modestly kerned font.

4. The characters are too closed. The degree of open-ness of a typeface is represented by how much whitespace there is between disjoint features of the character. A simple measure of this is how much space there is between the two endpoints on the letter c, or between the upswing on the lowercase e and the crossbar, or between the two ends of the s and the middle sweep. A tightly closed typeface like Helvetica is harder to read at small sizes because the whitespace that should flow through the letterforms is more closed off. Small type sizes call for a moderately open font.

Helvetica is not a bad font. It's fine at large sizes, especially when used in moderation.

But it's a bad choice for a computer system font where readability at small point sizes is critical, and I think Apple has made a real mistake here.

Unfortunately, I think we're stuck with it. Apple's made a huge deal about the typography in iOS7 (where we first saw Helvetica used as a system font) and iOS8, and now it's all over OSX in Mavericks.  Crap.

Here's an interesting thing, though. You'd think if Apple was really in love with Helvetica, they'd use it all over their website, too. After all, the website is the first impression any company makes on a new customer. But, they don't use Helvetica there at all: Apple.com's CSS font-family specifier is "Myriad Set Pro", "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue" , ...  in exactly that order. Which, interestingly, is about the order in which I'd like to see those fonts used.

I guess the folks behind the website still have some independence. I wonder how long it will be until Jony Ive whips them into conformance.

I'm reaching out to all my "more technically gifted" programming people with a desperate cry for help.

I'm trying to update a WordPress site for a client. I deleted the original home page because it wouldn't accept any edits, so now I've got the 7 pages he requested. They're done & visible when you visit his site. The problem is that the original home page still exits online - yet it's not available to me when I'm in the editor for WP. 

I've looked in different WP fora and all tell me to go to the "Appearance" tab or "Settings - Reading" but I'm discovering that my dashboard doesn't give me the any of the following options: Home/ Store/ Feedback/ Appearance/ Users. I'm running 4.0 and he updated to 4.0 also. My settings gives me virtually no options - and certainly not "reading."

I don't know how/ where to type in phpMyAdmin to try to change the site url or home values (and I'm not sure how to do that, anyway, but I read somewhere that it would help). I've cleared my cache, so it's not that the old page is lingering on my computer somewhere. I can't figure out how to get to the root install directory- or even if it's necessary.

Suggestions much appreciated!

I certainly like OPW better for the interface than certain other recently-launched blogging sites (although the small window for post creation could be bigger). I'm still not sure how this will fit into my overall social media ecosystem (which consists mainly of LJ, Twitter, and FB these days, although I've got presences elsewhere). For now, consider this a placeholder and a note that I am, indeed, here, with plans to post at least occasionally.

I'm very picky about beer. Through some experimentation, I've learned that the taste I don't like in beer comes from the hops. The hoppier the beer, the less I will enjoy drinking it. Apparently, there's a way to measure how much I will hate the taste of a beer, and it's called IBU. My three favorite beers are 19, 20, and 24, and all are malty, which apparently cancels out the IBUs somewhat.

But there's another thing about beer that makes me even more finicky, and that's the fact that it gives me a stomachache. There's a number for that, too, and it's ABV. The higher the alcohol content, the less likely it is to give me a stomachache. Only applies to beer! I can drink 5% ABV cider or Smirnoff Ice all night long, but one 5% ABV beer and I'll have a sour stomach for an hour. 7% seems to be the minimum for me to be able to drink a beer. How does this make a difference? How does  such a small amount make a difference? I don't know - and I'm rather unwilling to find out. Mostly, when I do drink, I just avoid beer.

All this is just to explain how there came to be a 4-year-old bottle of Maudite (http://www.unibroue.com/en/beers/17/product) in my possession. I was about to throw it out, when I figured I should check the Unibroue site to find out how long it would keep. Unibroue says: "Like good wine, Unibroue’s fine beers have flavors that develop with age." They suggest that it can age up to 8 years. So I kept it around. And then kept it around some more, never finding the right moment to open up what had suddenly become a potential treasure.

4 years later, I realized that a dream deferred is a dream denied, and now I am having far and away the best glass of beer I've enjoyed in my life. Unibroue, again: "Over time they become smoother, sometimes revealing notes of honey and candied fruit and developing a more assertive and lasting flavor." Yes, that seems about right. It's a 750mL bottle, and I'm enjoying half of it in a glass right now; I've corked it and put the rest in the fridge. And then it will be all gone. On the plus side, my habit of buying beer and not drinking it means that I have a 3-year-old bottle of Maudite maturing right now; only 5 more years and I can see how that one turns out!

I started making music as a young child, took the obligatory clarinet lessons in grade school, and then started to LOVE it. Through high school, I played four instruments (clarinet, sax, trumpet, and handbells), sang in two choral groups, was a drum majorette, I directed a small handbell choir at my school, and I toured for two weeks each summer with my church handbell choir (we were, I will say as humbly as I can, Very Good). I did not go on to become a music major; in fact my playing dropped off sharply in my 20s. I never did get far on piano, guitar (not for lack of trying), drums, or anything else one could reasonably expect to play casually as an adult.

Many years later, when the kids were babies, I began singing and ringing again, and it lit me up inside. My kids started piano lessons just over a year ago and my husband has set up his recording gear again and we've been slowly accumulating instruments in the living room which the kids can pick up and play with any time, and there is music everywhere and I am in heaven. Wednesday and Sunday evenings (choir and handbell rehearsal at church) are my weekly therapy.

When tendinitis in my wrists cut short my goal of becoming a halfway proficiant pianist, I had my clarinet refurbished, and started playing that again. Tried guitar lessons again too. Stupid RA had made my fingers stiff and sore, so those have been sidelined for a while as well.

Can't stop me from music now, though. Today I bought a (cheap, student) trumpet. Hey, if the kids are going to be well-rounded musicians they'll need a little bit of everythng, right? So I picked it up, 30 years since I've last played brass, and I did this:

http://soundcloud.com/tabinfl/angels-we-have-heard-on-high/s-N58fJ

It's still in there, somewhere! I can still music!

In early August, I agreed to sub-contract a cool program for Pearson's Wall Street English via a small LLC in New Mexico. My responsibility? To generate 1,000+ grammar and vocabulary exercises for a beginner-advanced online English course set to roll out in China some time next year. Start date for my part of the project? September 26.

The date came ... and went ... And I, who am trying to scrape together enough to pay the bills and not dip too deeply into our rapidy shrinking savings account, began to panic. Fortunately, a few larger clients for whom I'd done web copy revisions and additions paid me - and that covered September's mortgage, car payment and my little guy's preschool tuition (and a few odds and ends). 

And still I waited. I reminded myself each night and morning that I absolutely could earn a decent living freelance writing/ editing & adjuncting at Cedar Crest, and that a more nebulous income still beat the stress from my previous job - and the non-financial rewards of spending more than two hours a day with my 4 1/2 year old far, far outweighed the drawbacks.

I must say, however, that it'd be nice to have health insurance again.

So finally, New Mexico called, by way of Germany. Turns out the "middle" man needed to bow out. Where did that leave me? I determined not to panic - not an easy feat. Pan's floodwaters threatened to rise higher than my calves, but I trusted that everything would work out.

And so I waited, the start date now three weeks past due. On Thursday, a woman from Pearson's Content Creation divison called and followed up our conversation with a torrent of emails. Pearson's rewritten several scripts, realized more activities are needed to hit all unit objectives, and oh, by the way, the time to complete the project's shrunk by a month and doubled in scope.

Now the floodwaters reach mid-chest, but these waters teem with data, metrics, matrices, and a prototype deadline of October 24. Twenty levels with at least 100 exercises per level equals a minimum of 2,000 exercises to write between tomorrow and project end date- March 15. 

I determined several years ago that it was time to transition from full time to part time teaching and incorporate education writing into my life. 

And so it begins!

Today I'm grateful that;

Smart people like the podcast so far

I had it together to write a new sample article and apply for two freelance writing jobs

Vince cooked us a delicious healthy dinner 

Bebe and I went for a good fast walk in the beautiful fall weather

we can go to bed early.