chicago style

First of all, this is a day late because the internet connection (and my computer) were acting a little cranky last night. So, I’m thinking about broadband again (and we all remember what an exciting time that was a few months ago, but if you’ve suppressed those memories, you can remind yourself here). The fellow I spoke to today (at a company which is highly recommended) said that a) if Verizon’s DSL was lousy, theirs would probably be the same, since, “they’re the same wires” (which seemed reasonable); and b) cable internet would be $44.95.

$44.95 every month. Really more than I want to spend, I can tell you. So, we’ll see where this goes.

Anyway.

absolute beginners

More of the current chapter is posted. If you want to read it from the beginning, you can go here. If you want to pick it up after SarahBeth’s return, you can go here.

the chicago way

I seldom ask for anything to be bought for me at work (I asked for a chair, because mine is being held together by C-clamps, but no dice), but I have asked for an online subscription to the Chicago Manual of Style, and it looks like I may get it. It would be $30 a year, which isn’t much for a website where I could easily spend many happy hours.

(Plus doing work-related things, too, of course.)

I may buy the hardcopy version of the manual (you know, a “book”), but that I would pay for myself, since I would want to own it. I imagine it’s quite huge, or I would carry it around with me.

Not to imply that I follow Chicago style in everything. My rules on capitalization (detailed here and here) are not Chicago style, and the CMOS advises against capitalizing people’s titles when they’re in text, but I usually do capitalize them (when I’m at work), because (as my father taught me), people work hard to get promoted (or they like to think they did), and they like to see the title printed prominently (and not broken across two lines, of course).

The CMOS has convinced me (at work, at least), to put only one space after periods, colons and semi-colons, rather than two, though probably nothing is going to ever break me of the habit of typing two. But, thankfully, HTML will always compress that down to one. Which is a lot of the reason that one space is now the standard in a lot of places, of course, since people are much more used to seeing one space than two these days.

See how much fun this is?