Why don't ebooks have indexes?

Must admit, this is a sore spot for me - I create book indexes part time as a freelancer.

I'm one of those people who enter a non-fiction book from the back - from the index! If I know what I want, and I can find it in the index, I will dive into the book... if it's not in the index I can save myself a lot of time by just finding another book. But if the index is missing - or in a lot of ebook cases, it isn't linked to the text... page numbers just won't work for an ebook - using search just makes the effort tedious.

I'm currently using Adobe InDesign to help an author publish his book, and he wants to go ebook, rather than print, to start with. For print publication InDesign does have a rudimentary index generation function - nothing like my professional indexing software, Cindex, but useful when I've already written the index in Cindex, and can just input it into InDesign. But for an ebook... I've been Googling for how to translate the index into a functioning - click an entry and go into the text - index. If I can figure it out, it doesn't look like it will be easy.

So it looks like the available software to create ebooks is not up to the task of creating an index. I think this is a big gap that should be filled. I hope more people will realize this and start asking for indexes on ebooks.

Does a water tornado mean sushi rain?

Waterspouts or water tornados are a truly awesome thing to see. With the huge number of land based tornados in the US this year, it doesn't seem to be so odd that there are water ones around Australia as well.

But what about the fish?

Do fish get caught up by these water tornados? Well, yes, it seems they do! See this news article from the UK Daily Mail on the subject.

So what would you do if a whole lot of fish started falling on your head? They're probably dead from their flight... but they are fresh. Is it sushi time or not?

And what about the fish's take on this... just swimming around, minding their own fishy business, and whoosh, they're airborne! Flying fish. They probably think those silly fish that started walking millions of years ago were nutters, but now they're flying in the air.

There are fish that leap out of the water by themselves and attack people in boats in the US. Intentional flight, not just a gust of swirly wind.

Does this mean the fish are trying to take the next step on the evolutionary ladder? Is Nature trying to help? Should we sit them down and have a talk about this... is it really a good idea?

How distracting can Google get?

I think it's wonderful that Google changes its logo for special occasions, but this is getting to be a bit too distracting isn't it?

The logo from one day a month or so ago that was actually a little movie of a Charlie Chaplin impersonator when you clicked on it was very distracting.

The Earth Day logo that had different moving parts on it when you moused over the different parts of it - the swimming fish, flying birds, moving water, jumping frogs, etc. - was so distracting I completely forgot what I was going to Google on. I spent quite a bit of time playing with that logo, trying to remember what I was supposed to be searching on!

But today: "the 76th Birthday of Roger Hargreaves: Little Miss Shy" has many different logos. Every time you go into Google, you get a different picture! Wait, let me reload that page! Oh, that's a cute one.

Honestly, anyone not completely focussed on their task is going to find it very difficult to concentrate today.

This is fun, but is it really a good thing? Maybe I should Google on "distraction" to see if "Google" is part of the definition. Oh, that's a cute one too!

Why is the poll so late in reporting results?

I worked as a poll clerk at the federal election on Monday. It was an extremely long day. Many people on the outside were grumping that it took a long time to get the poll results in from our area. Apart from bad organization on the parts of most of the people in the room after the poll closed and we started counting the votes, the poll was also late because there is only one handicapped washroom stall in the typical public washroom.

Yes, the counting couldn't start until everyone was locked into the room to count, and I was in the washroom, delaying everyone.

But was it really my fault?

I must use the handicapped stall. I need to use the bars in the stall to help me stand. Another woman - physically fit and fully abled - was in the handicap stall. So I waited for her to finish. And everyone waited for me to finish.

Angry about delays? Welcome to the world of being handicapped.

I think everyone should spend one day in a wheelchair. Try it, you'll see the world from a different perspective.

So do you really need to use the handicap stall in the washroom? Ignorance can be a handicap, but you can get over that one.

Did someone decapitate my Mii?

As you can tell from the image in the "About Me" box on my blog, I have a Wii.

I have an image of me in my Wii called a Mii. That's the image in my blog. I watch my Mii playing games as I move on my Wii Fit balance board, which I use pretty much daily.

My hair has grown quite a bit since I made that Mii, so I changed the Mii to have longer hair. And now that Mii looks disturbingly like it's a decapitated head.

The scores in the Wii Fit game come up with images of my Mii beside the score, but just the head shows up, not the body. Now that I have longer hair, you can see the hair under my head. No neck or body, but hair under the chin. It looks like a body-less, ghostly head floating about.

It didn't look like that before, when the hair was shorter and none of it showed under the head. But now... it's quite disturbing.

Is the surf really up?

It's been the coldest April on record here on the west coast of BC, but I was just watching my favourite webcam of Tofino - on the west coast of Vancouver Island - and there were two surfers walking on the beach with their surf boards! Even in the middle of the summer surfers need to wear wet or dry suits to surf Tofino, so that water is always cold, but it must OK for surfing now.

I've been hoping that summer would turn up sooner than later, so I guess this is good news!

Surfs up!

Is life really in full colour?

It has been such a slow Spring... I was wondering if my favourite webcam from Tofino, BC was actually still in colour, or if it had gone to black & white & a million shades of gray. This screen capture from a few moments ago shows actual colour on the right hand side! It's in colour! The world is in full colour again! Let the Celebrations begin!

Update: The screen shot I captured yesterday disappeared! And today we're back to monochrome... as you can see from the screen shot that I just put on this post (unless it disappears as well).

But there was colour, I saw it.

Of course, this shot is kinda cool because you can see little tiny people close to the waves about 1/3 of the way in from the left side of the picture. It's a big beach.