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LibreOffice Writer — Cursor Position

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If you use the free, open-source word-processing program LibreOffice Writer, and have discovered that the program does not save the last cursor position when you close a document, I can confirm that noxious behavior.

If you have searched for relief you may have come across a variety of proposed remedies, including claims that the last cursor position can be recovered by pressing the Shift+F5 key combination. You may also have tried that solution and found it did not work, or read responses from others indicating that Shift+F5 does not move the document view to the last saved cursor position.

When I press Shift+F5 on my keyboard as configured by default, that solution does not work. Like many keyboards, however, my keyboard requires that I press what is literally labeled the ‘F-Lock’ key to enable the functionality of the ‘F’ keys. If I do that — effectively turning on the ‘F’ keys on my keyboard — then Shift+F5 does indeed move the cursor and document view to the last saved position.

If you try this solution yourself — turning on the ‘F’ keys (which may also turn on an indicator light on your keyboard), then pressing Shift+F5 — I would like to know whether it does or does not work, and which version of LibreOffice you are using. And if it doesn’t work, keep reading.  [ Read more ]

Flying North for the Winter

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Despite the fact that I not only enjoy winter, but have always thought of its furies and merciless silences as sacred and central to my own sense of annual renewal, I am not going to lapse into a rant about how this year’s non-winter makes clear that we have destroyed the planet. Instead, allow me to simply point out that when I took the trash out yesterday afternoon I was greeted with multiple squadrons of geese flying northwest in massive vee’s. The birds I saw must have numbered in the hundreds, and despite the fact that it is still early February they were demonstrating the same eager commitment that used to take place in mid-March.

But it’s all fine. Your heating bill this winter will be less, and you’ll be able to drive hither and yon through all four seasons, just like people from Missouri and Arkansas always have.

— Mark Barrett

University of Iowa Lawsuit Roundup

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Following years of bureaucratic and legal obstruction by the University of Iowa and the Iowa Board of Regents, in mid-December the Iowa State Auditor finally concluded his review of UI’s celebrated public-private utility partnership. (Excellent reporting and context here, from the Gazette’s indefatigable Vanessa Miller.) Because that partnership was a notable administrative act perpetrated by former illegitimate UI president J. Bruce Harreld, I began writing a post reviewing and commenting on the state audit, and whenever life stops dropping hammers I intended to finish that post to put a black bow on Harreld’s legacy.  [ Read more ]

Yamada Sensei

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Yoshimitsu Yamada passed away recently. He was many things, but above all he was a teacher.

In my aikido practice decades ago I first became aware of Yamada Sensei through VHS video tapes. There were a number of high-ranking senseis who had some prominence in the aikido community, and a few who seemed to aspire to celebrity, but Yamada Sensei appeared constitutionally incapable of anything other than humility and unqualified encouragement.

His simple goal of daily improvement became my goal in various crafts, and is still the only future I seek.

On one of my recurrent trips to New York City — again, decades ago — I went to the New York Aikikai just to watch him conduct a class. I didn’t want to sit in, I didn’t want a picture with him, I didn’t want anything except to see if the person matched the images I had seen, and he did. The exact same person on camera, and in person in a roomful of students on a random day.

Yamada Sensei’s last class — part 1 of 3.

— Mark Barrett

Apple Slices

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Growing up in the Midwest in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the only apple variety commonly available for eating — as opposed to baking — was Red Delicious. As apples go it was mediocre, but because it was the only variety commonly available we didn’t know that at the time. If you wanted to eat an apple you were going to eat a Red Delicious, and that’s just the way it was.

The main selling point of the Red Delicious seems to have been its stable shelf life. If you had a Red Delicious apple on your kitchen counter in September, you could count on it being palatable in January if you suddenly developed a hankering. Which of course you didn’t do very often because Red Delicious apples were also relatively bland and a bit on the pulpy side, but still.  [ Read more ]

The Face of Chess is a Clown

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There is a lot of backstory here that I’m not going to get into, so if you’re not already up on the drama raging in the world of chess feel free to skip this post. Even if you know very little about the game itself, however, you may have heard that there was a recent cheating scandal, and that’s true. While the full contours of the cheating are still unclear, there is compelling and convincing evidence that a player of some considerable skill and accomplishment cheated in online games on multiple occasions.  [ Read more ]

Coping With the Evolution of COVID-19

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Two years ago to the day, and roughly two months after the novel coronavirus pandemic arrived in Iowa in 2020, I published a post titled Coping With the Reality of COVID-19. One year ago to the day, and roughly two months after the national vaccine rollout, I published a follow-up post titled Coping With the Persistence of COVID-19. In this post, as we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to take stock of the progress we have made in fighting the disease, and explain why you should remain vigilant even if your immediate personal risk of hospitalization and death now seems relatively remote.  [ Read more ]

America and Mass Murder Theater

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Since we’re still committed as a nation to mowing down roomfuls of elementary students — along with citizens in every other age group and demographic — in order to protect the emotional fragility of gun owners, I wanted to point readers to a series of posts I wrote almost a decade ago about America’s insatiable lust for violence, and our penchant for denying and obfuscating the root cause.

In the aftermath of Monday’s ritual atrocity in Texas I confess I am not at all interested in hearing anyone talk about what’s wrong or what they’re going to do about it or what they need (usually cash) in order to do something about it. Absent new rulings by the United States Supreme Court — effectively overturning prior foundational perversions of the Constitution as wrongly decided — I don’t expect anything to change in my lifetime, even if I live another twenty or thirty years.

That said, my current mindset is also informed by the thinking I did close to a decade ago, which exposed the degree to which everyone but the actual victims and their families plays a self-serving role. (That was particularly evident on social media over the past twenty-four hours, as everyone used yesterday’s act of violence to burnish their own brand — like every other day of the year.) Reading the series won’t make you feel better or prevent any future deaths, but it might help put your powerlessness in context, and make it harder for people to exploit your raw emotions for their ends.

You can read the first post here.

Update 05/27/22: We’re only three days out now from the latest firearms massacre at an elementary school in the United States, and both the press and general public are already distracting and comforting themselves by focusing on the fact that the local police department demonstrated gross dereliction and cowardice when faced with weapons of war. In the real world, however, that’s actually a rational response to those weapons regardless of your level of training, yet we insist on making those weapons absurdly easy for any citizen to procure and wield. Then, when something horrific inevitably does happen, we blame law enforcement because they don’t want to step in front of military-grade firepower which is designed to explode the human body with every impact.

It’s not that the guns are a problem, it’s just that we need more heroic and selfless law enforcement officers. Anything to avoid doing something about the availability of those weapons.

As for the killer, again we’re only three days about but law enforcement is already on the hunt for a motive, and of curse the profit-driven press will undoubtedly follow. (If you haven’t read the series of posts linked above, read the series of posts linked above.)

As for what you can do, I am under no illusion that anything will ever change. What I can say is that if you have not been radicalized by now — both by gun violence and by the governmental refusal to do anything about gun violence — to the point that you support the repeal of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, then you’re part of the problem.

Update 05/31/22: One week later.

— Mark Barrett

Consent 101

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At my advanced age it is not very often that I read something I find viscerally disturbing, but that proved to be the case with an otherwise excellent report from Cooper Worth at the Daily Iowan on 05/12/22: UI student accused of attempted murder, robbery had multiple UIPD reports made before arrest. In reporting additional information about the psycho who strangled and robbed a female student on the University of Iowa campus, including multiple prior contacts said psycho had with the UI Department of Public Safety, one of those prior incidents was related by the victim in the passage excerpted below.  [ Read more ]

Iowa State University Leaves AAU (Cough)

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In a press release today, Iowa State University (ISU) announced that “it has concluded its membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU)“. For those not steeped in the arcane associations which drive meaning and relevance in much of higher education, the AAU in question is an exclusive research collective which provides no actual benefits to member schools, but nonetheless commands and confers a great deal of prestige in an industry which values tokens of esteem to an embarrassing degree. To that point, while ISU is putting the best possible gloss on this breakup, the truth is that Iowa State would not abandon its AAU membership if it was not already under threat of imminent expulsion.  [ Read more ]