XyWrite, PostScript, an inflatable sailing dinghy, & ...?

Circumnavigating the frozen zone: Five fortnights walking the perimeter

photo: Terry Schmidt

The Winter Garden and 1 World Trade Center, 11 September 2001

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(This is the site formerly known as www.escape.com/~yesss/)

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the XYZone: xyWrite, NotaBene, & related resources

You love xyWrite 3 but your wish list runneth over? You want to do all your Web authoring with xyW3 or xyWrite or NotaBene Windows releases? You'd like to remap your Windows keyboard layout as freely as your xyWrite kbd? What you write is destined for a new office printer xyWrite doesn't support? ... xyWhat? ... Quick! Follow that link!

Economics specialist/editor Robert Kuttner
states the case for xyWrite-- especially as a writer's tool--nicely.


If you've ever messed about ... ... in small boats, you'll savor Wolfgang Bechstein's salt-water adventures--usually aboard Gonbei, his cherished inflatable. If you haven't, find out what you've been missing. A longtime Tokyo resident, Wolfgang has moved with his family to New South Wales, where he's already taken Gonbei on a whaling expedition: "Thar she squirts." "Rigmarole" chronicles Gonbei's transformation into a sailing vessel. Wolfgang posted the pieces originally to a Tokyo mailing list he runs. Enjoy the r"e-prints." By Wolfgang Bechstein "Rigmarole" "Thar she squirts" "Lights across the bay" "Sailho" "There was chirping, too"	photo: Wolfgang Bechstein
When Wolfgang added a stinkpot to his fleet, my heart sank. How could tooling about in a glass power boat be consistent with this site's spirit? But Ui is venerable and in a race now might be matched fairly with a sailboat. Read both parts of "Flotsam" and see what you think.

Near the frozen zone: Notes, 11 September 2001

: xyWrite (& text editor) stuff
extend your site's reach
keyboard stuff (non-xyW)
salt-water adventures
about this site
offgrid

Indispensible cursor
Steve Gilliard

"[W]hat's wrong with a [Supreme C]ourt that drops to eight or seven, or six members? The Constitution does not ordain a nine-member court." --Theodore J. Lowi, "A Bracing Dose of Partisanship," New York Times Op-Ed article, 3 December 2000

"Look, we--after two World Wars and the holocaust and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after the Roman games and after the Spanish Inquisition and after burning witches, the public--shouldn't we call it off? I mean, we are a disease and should be ashamed of ourselves. And so, yeah, I think we ought to stop reproducing. But since we're not going to do that, I think the planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us." --Kurt Vonnegut to David Brancaccio, "NOW," PBS, broadcast 7 October 2005

[GRAPHIC: "USA: Ask yourself why NY (hearts) Kerry"]

"Why is it that New Yorkers, who are the people in our country most at risk for terrorism, overwhelmingly support Kerry? That ought to be a question that all these people flying into New York ask themselves."
--Genevieve Christy, quoted in "For red-state visitors, a touch of Kerry blue," The New York Times, 8 August 2004

(To greet Republican National Convention delegates approaching by air from 30 August to 2 September 2004, Christy organized a campaign to cover Brooklyn rooftops with construction tarps painted with slogans expressing typical New York City political sentiments.)

photo: Charles Libin
"See What You've Done,"
Park Slope, Brooklyn, August 2004

"My mother [...] says, `Everybody is really weird, once you get to know them.'" --Mark Bowden, Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 June 2003
</SIDEBAR>

Nice timing! Microsoft goes too far with Windows XP, and Apple comes up with a BSD-based OS that seems to me to be what linux can only dream of being when it grows up. Using xyWrite with any new OS requires dos emulation, much of the software I use is unix- or Mac-native, Robert Cringely's speculation about an OS X port to Intel sounds to me like PC heaven but pie in the sky, and the Bush DoJ has given MS a go to stay on course. So, many reservations and nearly two decades of exclusive Intel use notwithstanding, I've bought a dual-USB white Mac iBook. I hope never to look back; we'll see.
[photo]

Two months later: Nice enough laptop and OS--graphical rendering is indisputably superior to my PC notebooks' --a "classic" browser loads graphics so much faster with dialup it's almost

photo: adpFisher
Through a door, lightly: workman prone overhead (and reflection
of building opposite) the day before a new Apple Store opened                       ;
18 July 2002 in the old Soho post office building on Prince Street.

like getting instant broadband, and luminosity does indeed make "eye candy" of what's on the screen--but I just can't come to terms with iBook stingy i/o options, and this touch typist considers pinball a helluva lot more fun as hand-to-eye coordination exercise than non-stop practice demanded by a computer interface. ... So what am I bid for a barely used dual-USB white Mac iBook with win98/MS-DOS VirtualPC and a couple of *nix clients installed? I'm dead serious. ... 18 March 2003: Offer withdrawn. As long as <don't click this unless RealAudio is installed in your PC> WKCR is broadcasting (apparently) only to the Columbia campus and my apartment continues to be a wifi hotspot (instant broadband indeed!), the Airport card that was bundled with my iBook is of incalculable value. 14 July 2003: offer renewed (PC wifi installed). See "about" page wifi section. <28 September 2003: KCR is back!--two years and a day after the attack. First piece I've read anywhere in that time that fills in some blanks: "WKCR gets signal in midtown: A new tower at Times Square follows two years of station controversy," Jennie Morgan, Columbia Spectator Online, Columbia Daily Spectator, 9 September 2003. ... 3 October 2003: Rebecca is back!--and within a week of my rediscovery of KCR's signal! "The most beautiful boat I've ever seen," said a guy who'd also pulled up his bike at North Cove to admire the awesome ketch. More on Rebecca too on the "about" page.>

TTG gone? Seems safe to say that xyWrite was orphaned in fall 2001. The NotaBene spin-off survives.

"XyWrite is already hopelessly out of date. That is why we use it in preference to everything else." --Nathan Sivin, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, to the NotaBene mailing list, 9 August 2001

Is !BetterThanAverageTaggingTool the xyWrite Web authoring magic bullet? Try the port to Windows releases of NotaBene and xyWrite

or the !xyWWWiz xyWrite 3 original and decide for yourself. !BetterThanAverageTaggingTool inserts beginning and end tags and attributes in one pass, commands your browser to render the page, and does other neat things to hasten uploading.

Also for xyWin and nbWin: GetBack, a port of the !xyWise !OutBack module that transparently buffers every character you delete or backspace. Retrieve them one by one with the GetBack insert key to repair accidents or effect small edits.

And for classic !xyWWWiz, !4www, a utility that converts xyWrite 3 formatting to html tags.

"Anyone who slaps a `this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." --Tim Berners-Lee, Technology Review, July 1996

Ah, remember the good old days. How benign browser pitches seem in the era of "This site requires Javascript" and "Unsupported URL scheme" msgs. You'll find some tips on simple steps you can take to make your pages accessible to more surfers. Gui-subliminal tags, anyone?

chart expanded 7 February 2001 new! 1 january 2001

!xyWWWiz's color consciousness has caught up with the xyWrite 3 Web assistant's other improved features. You now can tag

the Web's safest colors easily and, so you can make harmonious choices among all standard colors, the !xyWWWiz and nbWin/xyWin !BetterThanAverageTaggingTool can load the quick-reference html color chart in your browser. Preview now: click the chart link on the !xyWWWiz page. You also can download the chart independent of the !xyWise/!xyWiz/!xyWWWiz and nbWin/xyWin packages.

"We DOS diehards are a stubborn lot, however, and will give up our DOS applications when they uncurl our cold, stiff fingers from our keyboard." --Paul Andrews, Seattle Times, 13 February 2000

This site best viewed with a browser

photo: John Parente

photo top [Chris Morse
at tiller of Yankee Doodle]:
from Stephen Morse's collection;
photographer unknown

... That's all she wrote.

adpFisher nyc 31 march 2013

Welcome to low-tech country ...

the XYZone: xyWrite, NotaBene, & related resources

If you've ever messed about ...