Word Endings — -ible vs -able

Ashley Bischoff21 Comments

I was talking with my friend Liz the other day and she mentioned that someone had asked on the Glen Mitchell show about whether there was any rhyme or reason behind why some words end in “able” (such as “comfortable”) while others end in “ible” (such as “horrible”). Before I get to the answer, though, here’s the scoop on the Glen Mitchell Show for readers who aren’t in Dallas — the show airs on Dallas’ local NPR affiliate and each Friday show features call-in questions which other audience members are invited to help answer. It’s a bit like Ask.MetaFilter but on the radio (HHOS).

Anyhow, you wouldn’t think that there’d be any reason behind such word endings, but there actually is (well, mostly).

  • If the root is not a complete word, add -ible. (aud + ible = audible)

  • If the root is a complete word, add -able. (accept + able = acceptable)

For example, “laugh” makes sense on its own, so that becomes “laughable”. On the other hand, “elig” can’t stand on its own, so that one’s “eligible”. Then again, English just isn’t allowed to be that easy ;), so there are some exceptions, such as “irritable” and “inevitable”.

Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1" LCD For About $400

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I’ve been keeping tabs on Dell’s 2005FPW 20.1" LCD ever since I first heard about it on Engadget. Other than price, the big problem with most LCDs — as I see it — is that most of them have a fairly paltry resolution. I mean, sure, a 19" LCD may sound nice but what good is it if it can only handle 1280x1024? But, that’s where the 2005FPW comes in. It’s 20.1 inches and has a resolution of 1680 x 1050 (with a 12ms response time, if you’re curious).

I also found a comparison between this monitor and Apple’s 20" Cinema Display at AnandTech. Apparently, they use the same LG.Philips panel and, unsurprisingly, they perform about the same. Granted, Apple’s display may have the edge on aesthetics but AnandTech concludes by saying that the “UltraSharp 2005FPW is the display that we have been waiting for”.

This was sounding pretty good so far, but then I found an item on DealNews which further sweetened the deal — you can get the 2005FPW for about $400 + tax through a series of coupon codes:

Once again, the Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1" Widescreen LCD Monitor costs $749 at Dell Home. Add any item to bump your order over $750 (e.g., this CD-R media) and apply coupon codes “S0BDZ6HBTFDPSL” and “79VT3767HP833W” to drop the net price to $396.85, not including the cost of the extra item. With free shipping, that ties last week’s listing for the lowest total price we’ve seen. The 2005FPW sports a native resolution of 1680x1050, 600:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness, an integrated 4-port USB 2.0 hub, and S-Video, composite video, DVI, and VGA inputs. Offer ends May 23 at 7 am ET, but these coupons will likely hit their limits sooner.

Though the item appeared on DealNews on Friday, I only saw it today. I wasn’t sure if the coupons were still valid, so I just tried adding the LCD to my cart and applying the coupons — it worked! But, at this point, I had other matters to consider. Firstly, did I really need a new LCD monitor? ;) I already have a 19" CRT at home and at work and it dawned on me that a one-for-one replacement wouldn’t give me much. Just to be sure, I Googled for some “LCD vs CRT” comparisons and came across this Monitor Buying Guide at C|Net.

As I can see it, it basically works out like this. LCDs are thinner, have no refresh-rate flicker and a crisp image; but, they’re also more expensive and their color rendition may be inconsistent. CRTs, on the other hand, are relatively inexpensive, have good color rendition and they can easily display varying resolutions; however, they’re energy inefficient and it’s apparently barely impossible to get perfect screen geometry.

Looking over the pros and cons, the upshot appears to be that I could get perfect screen geometry without convergence problems but that it’d cost me $400. And, at this point, I think I’m going to pass. Don’t get me wrong, this LCD from Dell looks pretty sweet and I’d almost surely buy one if I didn’t have a 19" display but, of course, I already have a 19" display.

Maybe I’ll just wait for Dell’s 24" UltraSharp 2405FWP? Its 1920 x 1200 resolution would be definitively larger than what I have now. However, its $1200 price tag — which is cheaper than the $1500 for Apple’s equivalent-resolution display — is still a bit out of my reach.

Prevent Lost WordPress Posts

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

You may recall an entry from a couple weeks ago about pretty URLs in WordPress. As it turns out, I ended up writing that entry twice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the first version, but I just accidentally closed that tab in Firefox at the time (oops). I meant to click on the right-most tab in my browser but I instead clicked on the “close tab” button right there instead. Poof!

I was a little bit annoyed but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I wrote the entry a second time and I later looked around to see if there were any utilities which might help prevent that kind of thing in the future. One that I thought to look for was some kind of “undo close tab” extension. Well, ask and ye shall receive — a guy named Dorando created an extension called Undo Close Tab (how apropos). And, if you'd normally be wary of downloading an extension from a forum post, rest assured that he has a home page for his extensions as well, though the bulk of the information on Undo Close Tab is in his forum post.

I then took aim at the second thorn in my side, that dumb close-tab button which foiled my plans earlier. After all, even though an undo-close-tab extension would have saved me from the predicament last time, I wouldn’t have even been in that scrape if it wasn’t so easy to hit that button ;). Fortunately, that’s easily done as well. This MozillaZine Knowledgebase article writes about moving the tabbar (to the bottom of the browser or elsewhere on your screen) but it also includes the steps on removing the close-tab button (regardless of whether you want to move the tab bar as well). In short, you can remove your close-tab button but shutting down your Firefox and adding these lines to userchrome.css:

/* remove the close-tab button */
.tabbrowser-tabs > stack {
display: none;
}

Your userchrome.css file goes in your Firefox profile directory but the file doesn’t exist by default. Rather, there’s an example file called “userChrome-example.css” which you can Save-As to userchrome.css and make use of that. And, that previous link on the profile directory offers some tips on where your profile directory is located; that information is fine, though you may find it just as easy to just search your drive — starting from C:\Documents and Settings\ — for “userChrome-example.css”.

I felt better after getting those Firefox bits in order, and I then came across a WordPress plugin which also looked helpful. Gregory Wild-Smith wrote a plugin called Twilight AutoSave which “uses cookies and JavaScript to save the data you are typing and allow you to restore it (or delete it) later”. With that and the Firefox goodies in place, I should have a lesser chance of losing my posts next time. Not that I’m going to tempt fate, but I do have some peace of mind about it now.

Review — Kicking and Screaming

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Kicking and Screaming; I participated in that offer.

I saw Kicking and Screaming on Tuesday night and I rather enjoyed it. In case you haven't seen the trailer — which appears to be just about everywhere these days, including as a promotional spot on my TiVo — the movie stars Will Ferrell as a reluctant soccer coach of his last-place kids’ soccer team.

It’s hard to pass up a gratis pass to a movie screening and, at the time it was offered to me, I didn’t know much about the film. Well, I knew that Will Ferrell starred in it and that it was about a kids’ soccer team. And, really, that’s all you need to know. It's a sports movie — so all the standard sports-movie clichés apply — and it’s also a father/son movie — so all those clichés apply too. Just to name a few:

  • Don’t read these if you’re really scared of spoilers
  • The coach of a father’s son’s soccer team drops out, so the father has to take over
  • The father is pretty bad at coaching, at first, but gets much better at it with practice
  • The team is a bunch of misfits in last place and, miraculously, they make it to the championship game
  • And, of course, there’s the obligatory cute-kid-with-glasses for comic relief (gee, where have I seen that before?)

Having said that, though, the movie was enjoyable from start to finish. Sure, not all the jokes were home runs (or “gooooals”, I suppose) but I had some good laughs in there. In particular — and I don’t want to ruin the punchline — the scene where Will Ferrell’s character tells his son that his son’s grandfather traded to another team has a nice twist after Ferrell’s character Phil ends up getting more worked up about the situation than his son. Oh, and apparently (if my eagle eyes don’t fail me), his son Sam uses Safari for his web browsing ;).

(Minor spoilers in this paragraph.) I’d recommend the movie to just about anyone if this genre is your bag. My only gripe, I’d say, is that the flick tended to fall back on its formula towards the end. So, Phil ends up being an effective coach but he’s just too mean and he wants to win at all cost, even to the point of benching his son who isn’t one of the better players… blah. blah. blah. His son feels discouraged and doesn’t even suit-up for the final game. Of course, Phil realizes the error of his ways, emotes an apology to his son and — how convenient — Sam’s mom happened to bring along Sam’s uniform “just in case” he decided to suit-up.

All the while, though, the filmmakers are beating us over the head with the supposed compassion of the scene through the old trick of the swelling strings. And, it wasn’t just a little bit here and there — they really poured it on and I felt like I was bobbing in a swimming pool of violins, gasping for air. Really, I could have imagined any one of these quotes spurting from the from the mouth of the director as they edited that scene:

  • “I’ll be honest… fellas, it was sounding great. But… I could’ve used a little more swelling strings.”

  • “I got a fever! And the only prescription… is more swelling strings!”

One last thing. Maybe it was me, but it seemed like there were an inordinate number of songs within the soundtrack which were also featured in iPod commercials. The song from the new rollerskating commercial (“Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz)? Yeah, that’s in there. And that older one from the commercial with the hipster and the dancing posters (“Ride” by The Vines)? That too.

So Much for Autocross

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I regularly go autocrossing with the Lone Star Chapter of the BMW Car Club of America. In case you haven’t heard of it, autocrossing is a timed driving event; the club sets up a course of orange cones early one Saturday each month at Mineral Wells airport and each participant drives around it as fast as he/she can. It’s a lot of fun and I look forward to it each season (they hold about 8-9 autocrosses a year during the warmer months).

The first one this year was in March which I ended up missing since I was in Austin that weekend for SXSW. And, I couldn’t make the April one either for some reason. So, today — May 7th — was supposed to me my first autocross of 2005. I had everything lined up and I was ready to go. Sunscreen? Check. Bugspray? Check. Protein bars? Check. Cooler with Fruit2-0? Check.

The usual sequence is that I’d meet up with some other drivers at the McDonald’s at MacArthur & 635 at 6:30am on the morning of the autocross. And, from there, we caravan to the event. It’s not always the same bunch of guys that meets there but there has always been at least a few people that would drive down together. So, this morning, I had my alarm clock set for 5am and I was out the door by 6am. I drove to the meeting place and waited a few minutes, and then a few minutes more. No one showed up — I guess everyone decided to eschew the caravan this time.

Since I had always driven with the caravan, I never learned how to get there. And, while the group would normally head off around 7am, I waited until 7:15 in case anyone showed up. At this point, I was kinda stuck — there was no one else to follow and I didn’t know how to get there on my own. Figuring that I might be able to drive home, print directions, and still make it in time, I headed back to my apartment. I got there by around 7:45 and checked MapQuest which gave me directions but confirmed that it was about a 1 hr 40 minute drive to get there. Considering that Mineral Wells is roughly 100 miles west of Dallas, I wasn't terribly surprised. But, as the registration cut-off time was 9am, I soon realized that I couldn’t make it :(.

That really bummed me out since I was thinking about this first autocross since the beginning of the year and I was looking forward to it all week. My coworkers were even joking with me about it as I left the office yesterday — “Drive carefully!”, Leia said with a smile as I walked out, to which I cheerfully replied “I’ll be sure not to!”. Well, so much for that idea. It’s about 9am now so I guess I’ll go back to bed for a few more hours sleep and figure out the rest of my day after that. Blargh.