howarth, I'm sure you think you're doing good, defending the honour of women the way you did. On the other hand, I don't like you using aggressive language to me, such as "pre-emptive strike" and picturing me struck dead. I also don't like you characterising my comments as "careless&...

(Had to happen, I guess: a female archaeologist examines the remains of an ancient people and spends most of her book talking about what they wore.) Pre-emptive strike: care to reconsider that judgement, before lightning strikes you dead? Besides, I imagine that textiles reveal an enormous amount o...

Margaret wrote:I know, I could sort on the modified date, but I'd rather be lazy and leave them in name sequence.

Um, I sort on modified date, because I'm too lazy to re-name them.

Ditto for me on the LaCie external drive, which connects via FireWire or USB. I have two of them, and they've never failed. As for printers, I have two Brother HL-1440s and their performance has been flawless. One gets worked hard all the time and the other not much at all. It's best to buy the exte...

A recent unsigned article in Slate invites authors to describe their favorite fonts. "Courier was the clear favorite among our unscientific sample, but Times New Roman, Palatino, and something called Hoefler Text had their champions as well. (It seems to come down to whether a writer's formativ...

Antony, thanks for the tip. I will try it out. Maybe after Apple gets done issuing security updates and the complaints about stability ease off.

I found out why Safari 3.0 won't load on any of my machines: it wants to find Safari 2 standing by itself in the Applications folder. That is a throwback to old requirements. In Tiger, it's permitted to store applications in folders, labeled by type. Guess I will wait a while longer.

I learned a fantastic lesson for life and writing. It was my job to make sure I had the box top before I started out on a big project, such as writing a film script. If you work in a group or collaboratively with another writer, you have to work from the same box top. With respect, I have a differe...

I found that the greatest difficulty I had, as an academic writing historical fiction, was that I had to turn off my professorial tendency to explain . Years of lecturing and interpreting for students had turned me into Didactic Bore. My accounts of the past were logical, sequential, and dull. In fi...

I can't wait to get Leopard. I'm already liking Safari 3.0 where I can resize this window. You are one of the few lucky ones, according to TUAW. Many folks are having huge trouble with the beta. I tried to install it on both a PPC and Intel machine, and each time the installer said the volume was n...

I am trying out Scrivener as an alternative, but I am disapointed that there are not grammar tools or thesaurus. To me, these are integral to producing a quality draft. I realize that Scrivener was designed to create a draft that could be polished in a word processor, but having strong grammar tool...

I have some expository elements that involve the main character's wife and her interpretation of events that have already transpired. If I could find a way to shoehorn in a shift in narrative, not only would this move the story along more naturally, it would give me a chance to develop a character ...

A piece by Rachel Donadio, "Get With the Program," in today's NY Times describes how several established writers have used (gasp) software to write popular books. All are Windows programs and here's the breakdown: Richard Powers: Mindjet MindManager and Microsoft OneNote. Vikram Chandra: M...

I work with Entourage, but that process is fairly simple: (1) select the attachment and drag to Desktop, (2) select the file and drag to Scrivener. A script might make that quicker, but how would it know where to place the file? I guess I'm wary of automation that cuts into thought and decision.

We've kicked this topic around quite a bit in previous threads, so you might look there for specific advice. I use DT Pro as a filing cabinet. The main folders are drawers and the sub-folders are file folders within, grouped by projects. To me, its main advantages are storing URLs and other files, m...