Adventures In Editing

The strongest drive is not to love or hate. It is one person's need to change modify revise alter rewrite amend chop to pieces change another's copy.

I've always found this little truism (featured in Arthur Plotnik's The Elements Of Editing among other works) funny, but never before today had I appreciated how true it is.

While editing a reporter's story this morning, I was driving myself batty trying to find a better way to say "glossy." After about 15 minutes of branching through various synonyms -- and synonyms-of-synonyms -- I finally stumbled on the exact word I was looking for. So I went back to the original sentence to replace it. Chagrined, I realized that my masterstroke was the reporter's original word: "glossy."

Some post-Valentine's Day humor

The U.S. Central Command's war plan for invading Iraq postulated in August 2002 that the U.S. would have only 5,000 troops left in Iraq as of December 2006, according to the Command's PowerPoint briefing slides, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and are posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org)

Too bad it's not supposed to be a joke.

Source: National Security Archive

Gadget addiction

Some words of wisdom from a former tech (blog) writer:

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.

I'm better about not buying stuff than I used to be, but maybe I should impose a mandatory 1-year waiting period on myself for most technology-related purchases.

Source: Gizmodo

Windows Mobile Roundup

ActiveSync 4.5 is official, but if you've already migrated to Vista, you'll want to use Windows Mobile Device Center instead. And don't forget this Daylight Savings Time update. The page has DST updates for Outlook and Windows, too. The usual Windows update should take care of the issue from a Windows perspective, but I don't know whether Office automatically updates.

And while I'm on the topic of Windows Mobile, here are a couple of potentially useful map/search applications: Google Maps and Windows Live Search.