February 20, 2007.  I spent some time the last few days connecting a new receiver in an audio-video system.  This is definitely a love-hate situation.  I love the results when I get the system working the way it should, but I hate the confusing (and badly written) manuals and the glitches I have to troubleshoot along the way.  Some are caused by my own stupid mistakes; some are the result of fuzzy directions in the manual.

I suppose that the sound quality on most TV sets has improved tremendously, but I wouldn't know because I haven't used the built-in sound system in a TV for decades.  To me, a TV set is a video monitor, and nothing more.  No matter what the advertisers say, no TV set can deliver the sound quality that a separate audio system can.  Perhaps some top-of-the-line sets can simulate "Surround Sound," but I don't believe that any can come up to the standards of a good independent audio system.

Quite rightly, television manufacturers focus on video quality.  If they have to cut corners anywhere, it will be on the audio.  Besides, I think they realize that many serious home-theater enthusiasts are going to go for an independent audio system anyway, especially if they're intending to watch lots of DVDs with the spectacular sound quality that has been developed for the theaters.

I suppose I've always pursued this audio-video hobby in the reverse direction than most people do.  Because I'm very fond of music, I always had the best stereo system I could afford, upgrading components as newer technologies came along.  The TV was more like a toaster; one brought it home, plugged it in, and that was that.  Consequently, when we integrated our TV and the audio system, we found ourselves getting the audio on a five-speaker surround system while watching TV on a 19-inch screen.  It was more than a year before we upgraded to a 27-incher.  Even that was a something of a mismatch.

Several years ago – well before the explosion of flat-screen plasma TVs – we got a 42-inch widescreen monster.  It's as big as our family room can accommodate because we had to allow room for the cabinet containing the components:  receiver, satellite box, tape deck, VCR (this was still before DVD).  It is "HDTV-ready," but we still don't have high definition.  However, the recent upgrade to the audio system is the second major upgrade since we bought the widescreen set.  We've gone from five speakers to six (the newest receiver actually accommodates seven discrete sound channels) and added a subwoofer.

I'm beginning to feel that we're at the mismatch stage again.  The audio is terrific, but, except when we're watching DVDs, I feel as if I'm looking at 20th-century video while listening to 21st-century audio.  It's hard to imagine how the audio could get much better.  I far prefer it to the sound in the theater, which is often too loud and distorted, often making some of the dialogue hard to make out.  (I've sometimes watched the same film on DVD at home that I saw in the theater and picked up many lines that I missed the first time.)

Yes, it's getting near time to go to high-def, if not with a new flat-screen monitor, at least by adapting our satellite box and dish to receive a better picture.  But I will never abandon component audio for the sound system.  It may be a huge amount of trouble, with all the wires and connections, but it's certainly worth it.  If I'm going to have home theater, I want theater sound.

February 21, 2007.  Students are rarely any good at diagnosing why they have trouble expressing themselves clearly in writing.  One of the most common explanations that they give is, "I guess I write the way I talk."  When I'm meeting with a student who says that, or something like it, as I did yesterday, I will read back a few sentences the student has written and ask, "Do you talk that way?"  The student usually admits that he or she does not.

The only commonality between ordinary speech and student writing is that both are wordy.  Students either have no ear or eye for redundancy ("In my own personal opinion, I think") or are habituated to wordiness by having to write essays with minimum word limits – what I call "the 1,000 words or you die" approach to composition.  Or both.

Otherwise, their sentences are more awkward and tangled than anything they would say.  The vocabulary is unnatural, even stilted.  The student with whom I met yesterday had a number of such sentences.  When I asked why she had written something in a roundabout fashion (after getting her to state simply and directly what she meant), I asked her why she had been so indirect.  Her answer was, "I didn't want it to sound simple."

I don't know what this all means, but I would love to find the reason why they think that simple and direct is bad.  Perhaps, if I could find that out, I could get them to write natural prose that is clear and easy to understand.

February 24, 2007.  No matter how often I warn them, students persist in depending on spell-check to catch their errors.  Today, I read an otherwise okay essay that contained several examples of silly mistakes that fly right under spell-check's radar.

The student wrote "tang top" when she meant "tank top" and referred to "a consent reminder" instead of "constant reminder."  "Due to peer pressure" came out as "do to per pressure," and she wrote "one of the lending causes of death" when she meant "one of the leading causes of death."

The most puzzling error was "sexually transmitted dieses."  This one caused me to think that the student hadn't spell-checked at all – until I entered "dieses" in Word and discovered that it's the third choice if one types "diseses" (as the student probably did).  A diesis is a kind of dagger; its plural is dieses.  Both words are in Word's dictionary.

Watch out!  Spill-chick dose nut ketch awl you're mist takes.

February 26, 2007.  I am reluctant to load updates of software on my computer because I'm a great believer in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."  For that reason, I'm avoiding the Vista edition of Windows and probably won't get it until I need to buy a new computer with Vista already installed.  However, this weekend, I finally downloaded and installed, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), the upgrade of Explorer 6.  Some friends and several computer magazines said it was worthwhile.

I'm pleased to report that the installation went smoothly.  Although I had saved all of my favorites and other settings from Explorer 6, the new version of the browser automatically installed them.  I did find, however, that not all settings had been preserved.  For instance, the secure site that I log into to access a financial account wouldn't let me in until I reset one of the advanced security settings in IE7.

I also found that the new version is more diligent about removing unwanted cookies and temporary internet files.  I used to go into Windows Explorer or My Computer and clean up these folders periodically.  Now they seem to be virtually empty.  This is essentially good, but I'm wary of Microsoft's "Big Brother" approach, a tendency to block what I may want not to have blocked.  I prefer to have the choice.

The most interesting change in IE7 is the addition of tabbed browsing (long ago made available by Firefox, among others).  This feature enables the user to keep multiple Web pages open simultaneously and to move among them by clicking on tabs.  That's handy, for example, when I want to keep referring to a question on this site's message boards while I am composing a response.  However, I am finding that I do too little "multitasking" (my senile brain can't handle it) to make extensive use of this feature.  That may change as I become more accustomed to it.

I did find that not all computers with XP will accept IE7.  When I tried to install it on my wife's computer, I received a message saying that her operating system was not ready for the newer version of the browser.  The reason is, apparently, that we never installed Microsoft's Service Pack 2 for XP on that system because, when we tried, the whole thing crashed, and it took a day to get it back up.  Despite the advantages of IE7, I'm not about to go through that mess with Service Pack 2 again.

If anyone does decide to upgrade from IE6 to IE7, be prepared to spend an hour or so discovering where some commands are hidden and reconfiguring tool bars.  As usual, Microsoft has changed and renamed some things for no apparent reason.  For example, the "Refresh" command is relocated and has a different icon.  I'm sure that I will find other superfluous changes as time passes.  I appreciate any improvements Microsoft can make, but somebody should tell their programmers:  "If it ain't broke, leave it alone."