Day 111: Money money money money! MONEY!

In class today, one of the presentations was about an engraver named Bewick. Before Bewick, detailed illustrations in books were done with engraved metal plates, while only childrens' books were illustrated using wood blocks. This was because the grain of wood blocks meant that illustrations could only reach a certain amount of detail before you would just splinter the grain and ruin the image.

However, Bewick had the great idea of turning the block on its end and carving in the end of the grains rather than along and across the grains on the side of the block. This meant he was able to make gorgeously detailed wood block prints. He was actually able to make such detailed engravings in wood that they were able to use them to print money.

He also created the book "A History of British Birds", entirely illustrated with his gorgeous engravings, and really providing an everyman's guide to ornithology.

Lesson 111: Wood block printing was preferred to metal plate engraving for printing money.

This was because when a wood block was made of a super hard wood, like cherry wood, you could make millions of prints before the block couldn't print clearly anymore. Metal plates lost the ability to print clearly much much quicker.

The reason they used metal plates instead of wood blocks was because the extra detail you could get was very good at discouraging counterfeiting.

However, with Bewick's new method, you could get the detail needed to stop counterfeiters with the durability to print in more economical batches of money.

Everybody wins!

He also did the most adorable engravings of bats... Bats for Bats 2012!

Day 110: The Origin of Blogging?

I had wanted to make my own Hallowe'en costume this year. I was going to go for Batgirl, or a Weeping Angel. But ultimately, lack of resources and man hours nipped that plan in the bud. So I ordered a slammin' Batgirl costume online. But still no Hallowe'en costume. No sign of it.

I think this is going to wind up being another inpromtu costume Hallowe'en.

But the show must go on!

Speaking of, today's lesson is one of those realizations I came to rather than a lesson I was actually explicitly taught.

Lesson 110: Vanity Presses can be viewed as a pre-cursor to modern blogging.

In the 1700s, wealthy aristocrats with too much time and money found a new hobby in this interesting new toy: The Printing Press.

They didn't necessarily have anything they wanted to print, no writing of their own, or particular author they wanted to be a patron to. They just knew that this printing thing was catching on, and they wanted to print something. So they made so-called Vanity Presses and printed beautiful books just to print something.

One of the most well known was called "Strawberry Hill Press". You may remember last year, I mentioned one Horace Walpole who's credited with bringing the term serendipity into use as we know it. He also opened one of these Vanity Presses out of his estate, Strawberry Hill. He had all sorts of grand designs about the castle, the press and his collections, etc.

But isn't that basically what we do with blogs? Lots of people don't know what they want to blog about, but they want to blog. We don't know what we want to say, but we want to say it. We have a new technology, and we want to use it, we want our voices to be heard.

I would totally run a Vanity Press out of my basement... Anyone know where I can buy myself a printing press?

Wait a minute, I live in an apartment... anyone know where I can get myself a basement?

Day 101: Back to School!

So here we are... everyone else's "last first class" is my "first class" of the year. Creates kind of an odd disconnect, but there you have it.

Today was History of Books and Printing, and while I'm really not a fan of the standing-around-tables-for-two-hours format for a class, I can already tell I'm going to learn a lot from this class! A lot of really interesting and arcane factoids; my favourite flavour! Lets start this school year off with a bang, shall we? Multi-lesson first day post!

But where do we start with the numbering? It's such an arbitrary numbering system to begin with; do I continue and make this lesson 101? Or do I serialize and make it 2.1? Maybe just start straight from 1 all over again? Bah humbug, I hate decisions.

Lesson 101: Italics presuppose eyeglasses.

Kind of an odd, almost throw away line from my professor. Italics were developed by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, who was kind of a big deal. While we now use them to bring attention to important segments in a text, they were first used to fit more printed words onto a single page so you could have smaller, more compact volumes. However, since the type is so small, it assumes that anyone with less than stellar eyesight is having it corrected by lenses.

Lesson 102: Books printed as someone raised in a Western context expects them to look are printed in the Venetian style, that is: each page containing one column of full justified text, often filling the page to margins which are slightly larger at the bottom and outside edges

There's a long thread in the history of printing that leads back through a few idealistic revivals and notable presses, and when taken right back, it's those printers in Venice who printed books more or less as we now expect them to look.

I was trying to find a good picture to illustrate what I mean, and I found someone has written a great post about Aldus Manutius and his printing, and rather inexplicably taken a few pictures with one of his books in a bathtub. You can see that here.

Old books are just so cool!

Day 59: Droppin' the knowledge bombs up in here!

So much for McGill's IT Knowledge Base. Count this as a win for me then!

IT services maintains a pseudo-wiki of answers to every technological issue you could ever have. How-tos, troubleshooting, information... it's really very informative and quite useful.

Because of it, I learned how to not only access the school's VPN from home, and my iPad, but also how to print to their uPrint system directly from the comfort of my own home. They're also very good about updating and adding new issues as they appear/are reported, like WebCT's inability to display PDFs properly on an iPad.

However, when I was on campus, wanting to connect to my P: drive (the personal drive, each student has their own) from a computer I could not log onto with my own McGill ID, it looked like I was out of luck. They only had instructions for setting up a connection so it appears on your computer as a remote drive. Honestly, I don't keep very interesting things on my P: drive, but I still don't want just anyone using that computer to have access... who knows what they'd put on it!

But then I noticed how they were instructing you to connect... They wanted you to put a specific URL into some annoying Windows wizard. But...

Lesson 59: Going directly to the website https://webfolders.mcgill.ca/students/[insert short username here] allows full access to your P: drive through your web browser! No annoying set up, no opening your drive for the world to see, you just need your short username and your password. Exactly what I needed!

Which makes me wonder...

Why don't they just list that as an option?