Fall Semester Books

As if either one isn’t dif­fi­cult enough to deal with by itself:
Obe­si­ty, depres­sion pro­vide dou­ble-wham­my to heart

I’ve decid­ed that all pro­fes­sors should be required to print, right there on the syl­labus next to the name of the required texts, the price of said texts. Every sin­gle damned one. Because if they actu­al­ly paid atten­tion to what they’re ask­ing every stu­dent to buy, per­haps they’d stop and think, “Is this nec­es­sary?” Or I’d hope so, anyway.

• Med­ical ter­mi­nol­o­gy: A short course, 3rd edi­tion. Chab­n­er, D. (1999) — $19.95.*
• The lan­guage of med­i­cine, 7th edi­tion. Chab­n­er, D. (2004) — $46.95? I can’t even FIND this ver­sion an Ama­zon. Oh, wait—I found the pub­lish­er’s site. List is $48 and it isn’t even sched­uled for release until 1/30/04.*
• Health writer’s hand­book, Gas­tel, B. (1998) — $32.99*
• The Non-Design­er’s Design Book, 2nd edi­tion. Robin Williams. $19.99*
• The Non-Design­er’s Type Book, Robin Williams. $24.99
• The Non-Design­er’s Scan and Print Book, Robin Williams. $24.99
• The Non-Design­er’s Web Book, Robin Williams. $34.99**
• The Prac­tice of Tech­ni­cal and Sci­en­tif­ic Com­mu­ni­ca­tion: Writ­ing in Pro­fes­sion­al Con­texts. Jean A. Lutz and C. Gilbert Storms (eds). (1998). $31.95
• Writ­ing a Pro­fes­sion­al Life: Sto­ries of Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tors on and off the Job. Ger­ald J. Sav­age and Dale L. Sul­li­van (eds.) (2001). $30.00
• Tam­ing Microsoft Word 2002. Jean Hol­lis Weber. $8. ***
• Prin­ci­ples of Web Deis­gn, Farkas & Farks (2001). $47.33
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Com­mon-Sense Approach to Web Usabil­i­ty. Steve Krug. $35.00*
• Infor­ma­tion Archi­tex­ture: Blue­prints for the Web. Christi­na Wodtke (2003). $29.99*

*New to SPSU, at least, so no used ones available.
**I am seri­ous­ly hop­ing that Robin Williams does not decide to pub­lish some­thing like The Non-Design­er’s Pot­ty Train­ing Book, because I fear it would end up on the required read­ing list for this course.
***I’m still using Office 2000. No, it isn’t good enough. Add that to Page­mak­er 7, Pho­to­shop 6, and Adobe Acro­bat 5 (writer, not the read­er) as required soft­ware. Learn­ing Framemak­er is just “strong­ly sug­gest­ed.” I know that the edu­ca­tion­al ver­sions of these pro­grams cost WAY less than the retail prices, but they’re still damned expensive.

I real­ize that I could prob­a­bly find cheap­er prices on many of these online, and I will be search­ing. Any­one who has any of these books and does­n’t want them, feel free to send them my way!

Total: $388.17

I also found it amus­ing that one pro­fes­sor said that we must have, “A com­put­er with pro­cess­ing speed ade­quate for grad­u­ate-lev­el tasks.” Huh? That isn’t exact­ly a tech­ni­cal spec, doc.

We’re also sup­posed to use Zip disks to trans­port our work to and from school. Not flop­pies, nope, not allowed. I don’t hap­pen to own a Zip dri­ve, although I came across three old zip disks while clean­ing the office. I don’t remem­ber where they came from or why I have them, but they would be reusable—if I had a Zip dri­ve. And I don’t.

One of the class­rooms I was in today had no Zip dri­ves in the PCs. When I asked about that, I was told, “I don’t know why, but they’re sup­posed to.” Well, that makes it all bet­ter! If they’re SUPPOSED to be there, I’m sure they’ll mag­i­cal­ly appear!

I’m glad we already have a scan­ner, as we need one. We aren’t allowed to use ANY clip art for the graph­ics course, peri­od. So I’m think­ing a dig­i­tal cam­era would be damned handy. But we don’t have a work­ing one.