Monday Meandering - 1.21.2012

I got a letter from Xavier University, inviting me to attend my 50th anniversary reunion. I admit that my memory is not what it was, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't attend Xavier. Oh, wait! That was in the 50's wasn't it? Never mind.

The digital world has reached Learning Ally - the reading for the blind and dyslexic organization that I work with. Of course, the end product of our reading is a digital (audio) product, but now the source is also digital. They now get many of their books in e-format; the text appears on the same screens that we use to control the pagination. We read it off the screen, marking every paragraph now instead of just every page, and transform the digital page into a digital audio file.

It's an interesting transition; by and large our readers are of an... well, older generation. Some have been at it the old fashioned way for many, many years; a couple of ladies for more than 30 years! Change is hard. I'm all for it because thus far, all the books are straight text - no charts, graphs, illustrations, dingbats  or gadgets. That will probably come to pass, but for now it's very straightforward. And fun! Last week I read from "The Life of Pi."

Spent half a day last week ridding my computer of sort of a virus. It was not destructive, but changed all my browsers to use the Babylon search engine no matter what you set the default to. I really griped about my virus detection software letting this get through until I dug deep enough to discover that I invited this malware aboard with a (free) program that I downloaded and installed myself. I guess you get what you pay for.

Now I ask you. Why would I want a pillow that lights up?