Will It?

 Seated at the airport gate not far from us early Monday was a young woman with a sweatshirt obviously from a well thought of university. On the back were Aeneas's words "haec olim meminisse iuvabit", from Book I of the Aeneid, line 203. Theodore C. Williams translates the full sentence, "forsan et haec meminisse juvabit",

.... It well may be
some happier hour will find this memory fair

 My first thought was that this made the university experience sound a bit dire: the memory of which Aeneas speaks includes near shipwreck, certain loss of one ship of his fleet, and apparent loss of others. One could argue that the omission of the first two words of the sentence "forsan et"--perhaps even--turns the sentence from a tentative encouragement to a positive statement. But in the years when all students arrived at the university knowing their Latin, wouldn't they have at once thought of the context? Perhaps I underrate their sense of irony, though.

My second, somewhat later thought, was that No, I would not relate with pleasure the annoyance of a four-hour delay. It is less than Roman virtue to say so. But we were not out to found a city, only to take a vacation.

The Cost of Running

 A few weeks ago, I received a notice from a local store stating that the registration fee for the DC Half Marathon was about to go up. I am not in condition to run the race, but I thought I would see what the price was. At the time, it was $100, now it is $110.

That seemed to me pretty steep. I haven't entered many races since the mid-1980s, and I am unable to say what registration costs were then. I'm guessing that I usually paid about $20 or $25 for a race. Back then, that would have been about a third of the price of a pair of good running shoes. This suggests that the fees have outrun inflation, for running shoes costing more than $250 are unusual.

The one race that I have run since 1987 is a local 5-kilometer race. I find that this year's fee is $20. At $4/kilometer, that isn't much lower than the price per kilometer of the DC Half. But were shorter races less expensive to enter than marathons in the old days? I just don't remember.

In fairness, there are some features now expected that weren't imagined in 1980s, notably bibs with microchips and the timing mats to record one's finish time and splits. Finisher's medals seem to be expected now, at least for marathons: then I think I got just one, for finishing in the top n of the Richmond Newspapers Marathon. Perhaps some races offer other swag as well, beyond the tee shirt one got in the old days.

Focus

At work I spend a good deal of time logging into this or that system. Often these days such a system requires more than a username and password, uses what is called multi-factor authentication (MFA). In many cases I use Google Authenticator on my phone for this--I find that I have nine applications using it, plus one application that we no longer use, and for which I should remove the entry. Google Authenticator will provide a six-digit code for an application, which code changes at short intervals.

A couple of the applications that require MFA will bring up a page where one may enter the code, but then do not set the "focus" to the input box. This means that one can confidently type the six-digit code, look at the box, and find that there is nothing there. In such cases, one clicks in the box, waits for the numbers on the phone to change, and types in the new code. I find this annoying, out of proportion to the real inconvenience.

One of the applications for which I get authenticator codes is Okta. An Okta login sequence always sets the focus properly for the code. Now, Okta's whole business is to centralize authentication for its customers, so you would expect them to have put thought into these matters. Anyway, good for them.

It is not only in HTML inputs that developers neglect focus. Recently I have been adding comments to some database objects, using Oracle SQL Developer. Once in ten times I will click on the comment tab of the window and start typing, having failed to remember that the focus is still with the object name above the tabs, and so wiping that out. It is hard to do damage this way, for a comment will not match the allowed format of an object name. Still, one must close the window without saving and start over.

Deaf Sentence

In Brief Lives: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of David Lodge as his favorite novelist, as having covered the various phases of Kenny's life in fair synchrony, from troubled English Catholic (The British Museum is Falling Down, How Far Can You Go?), to academic (Changing Places, Small World, etc.), to older man hard of hearing (Deaf Sentence).  On hearing, Kenny writes of learning from the radio that an Oxford historian had been convicted of murder, trying with his wife to guess who might be the victim and who the murderer, and his wife suddenly understanding that he must have heard "Oscar Pistorius", not "Oxford Historian".

My own hearing is not what it was, or anyway not what it should be. I thought that I should follow up on Deaf Sentence, and have done so. On the first page, I learned of

what is known to linguists as the Lombard Reflex, named after Etienne Lombard, who established early in the twentieth century that speakers increase their vocal effort in the presence of noise in the environment in order to resist degradation of the intelligibility of their messages. When many speakers display this reflex simultaneously they become, of course, their own environmental noise source, adding incrementally to its intensity.

(American restaurateurs love to produce the Lombard Reflex; I loathe it.)

 It is the conviction of Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics that blindness is tragic, deafness comic. Lodge does get a good deal of comedy out of Bates's difficulties with noisy rooms, batteries that fail in hearing aids, and so on. I found myself grateful that I have rather more hearing left, and and am slightly older than Bates. On the other hand, the depiction of hearing aids is not encouraging.

Ultimately death does come into the novel--as part of history, as a wife's, as a father's.

I am glad to have read the book, and grateful to Kenny for having mentioned it.

Tech Support

 Going on forty years ago, I worked in tech support for a copy that made typesetting systems on Data General minicomputers. The typesetters would have have special-purpose green-screen terminals, but general communication with the system--to boot it, back it up, install new software--happened usually through a teletype. We called it the Dasher, which I think was the name of an earlier variant.

It often happened that the dasher was up close to one wall, and the telephone hung on another wall, well out of reach. It was then that I noticed the asymmetry of telephone handsets. Whether someone had the phone in hand or or not, I could hear their room loud and clear. But if the handset wasn't to an ear, anything I said, even a howl of "No! No!" was lost, a whisper a big room.

Computers have shrunk in size and grown in power, and technical support now has tools we didn't dream of. Still, the other night I was trying to help an older relative through some computer difficulties. Her phone was across the room from the computer, which led to intervals of silence while she went to try out an instruction. We did not get very far, which I think partly owed to a confusion of terms. It is frustrating to spend half an hour not accomplishing something I could manage in five minutes if on-site.