Mike, you do realize that I work hard to format my posts in such a way that they are more readable and escape the problems of prose that John Warfield used complain constantly about and did more than a little writing about the problem of translating systems thought into English prose in his books on "systems thought." Everytime I put something together that organizes the text with bullets and illustrations, or just simple paragraphs sometimes, it comes back deconstructed from Futurework and I also find the text font I'm forced to use very difficult to read given my astigmatisms.
The font that works best for me are the ones closer to script. Comic sans MS is the easiest. I find that answering a text in the old typing script is annoying and makes me pissy in my responses. I guess what it all comes down to is this: as long as there is not a good high quality generic model set by a central authority that at least doesn't rearrange the formatting of what we've done and allows for individual expression, we will just have to take up the slack individually. I find these little >>> marks to really be annoying and hard to read so I spend fifteen, twenty and even thirty minutes sometimes just taking them out and rewriting the formatting so that I can read objectively what someone has honored me by taking the time to write. It's not their fault and it's not my fault that I'm getting older and have to adjust to these goddamned glasses. I should be grateful. I had great eyes for sixty years and I would be blind now without these but I hate them. I guess it is a metaphor for the semiotic positions that we all inhabit that separate us around the wheel of life. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 3:14 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] [META] Re: NYTimes.com: Degrees and Dollars me> [Gripe about non-ASCII email] MikeG> I'm seeing this increasingly from certain lists/individuals. MikeG> Neither I nor the senders seem to know what to do about it. Ha. Apparently not. :-\ Your post on "corporate partnerships" use the same non-ASCII 3-byte sequence to represent both apostrophe and double-quote. (Although the posts that you originate without inclusions are plain text.) What to do about it.... I haven't used MS Windows since 3.1 so I have only peripheral or general knowledge about how to make it do what you want. The first step would be (if you can bear to do it) is use dedicated, non-Microsoft email software. Don't use email capability of a web browser or Outlook/Outlook Express for email. KISS -- use the least featureful email software you can find. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Windows_email_clients Eudora and Pine have long track records. Never "drag" a page from your browser into an email message. Windows tries to make the resulting email look (to you) as much like the web page as possible, with utterly unpredictable results. If you send email with a browser itself, don't, for the same reason, tell the browser to insert a web page into outgoing mail. Whatever "features" you may have available to "just put the web page into mail", don't do that. Just say no. Whatever program [1] you use for mail, grovel through the the hierarchies of menus till you figure out how to: Enforce "plain text", (aka "7-bit ascii" or just "ascii") for outgoing mail. (My wife has just shown me that you can do this in MS-Outlook's Tools->Options->Send menu popup.) Disable UTF-8 for outgoing mail. Disable sending of HTML mail. For Mac users, disable duplicating your email message in that proprietary Apple format. Obviously, if you communicate regularly in Hebrew, Russian or Japanese or if you need to send mail to destinations, such as US government contract bid offices, that make procrustean demands for specific formats, you won't want to do that. In that case, things become too complicated for me, as a non-Windows-user, to advise on. Use mail software that incorporates a usable editor that can be forced to do "plain text". Treat text as you would have a typewriter-created page. Copy and paste text from other sources. Some current MS programs may actually have disabled this in order to force you to transfer format details from web pages, MS-Word docs, RTF, PDF etc. I have no idea how to defeat such a "feature" if it in fact exists except to switch to Linux. Most people think of the Linus alternative in the same light as if the old gag were offered as pragmatic advice: How do you lose 40 ugly pounds of excess weight? Cut off your head. I wouldn't have posted this gratuitous pontification had you not asked on-list. Since I'm here, I'll digress even further. Or maybe, ever so tangentially, I'm drifting back on topic. It may be Quixotic project, trying to encourage plain, simple email. My own approach is, insofar as possible, to keep everything as simple as I can get away with; work close to the bare metal; take everything apart to see how it works; maintain fine-grained control; and just ignore or work around anything that makes such an approach utterly impossible. Some people to whom I've said these or similar words hotly, even belligerently reply, I'm an expert artist [businessman, banker, journalist, whatever] and I leave everything else to other experts. Do you know how your kidney works? I leave that to a physician. Do you know how your car works? I leave that to a mechanic. I just *use* a computer and leave how it works to a specialist. Actually, I *do* know how my kidney and my car work. I majored in chemistry because I wanted to know how stuff works. I specialized in biochemistry and physiology because I expected (well, hoped :-) to be using my body for a long time and wanted to understand it. When I left science, I worked as an auto mechanic because I expected to be using cars for the rest of my life [2] and wanted to understand them. For 40 years now, I've been raising a significant part of my own food because living things (in the large, not as biochemical specimens) are the foundation of human existence and knowing how they work, how they grow, reproduce, compete, and cooperate, is fundamental to knowing who you -- who all of us -- are. So when I got my first computer, in '87, I likewise believed that computer would be an increasingly influential part of everything for the foreseeable future. So I learned how my humble CP/M machine worked and how to program it in assembler and C. When moving up to more modern machines, Windows was automatically an enemy because it is *intentionally* made impenetrable so that you can never learn how it works. Even God didn't do that with the world as three and a half centuries of science have shown. Linux, consequently, was more than welcome because the source code was available for anything I cared to look into. I've made an avocation of neuroscience and (what is commonly called) the mind/body problem because it's obviously relevant to how we all work and the most basic and intimate level. So how can I do all that crap, learning about stuff that has only rarely or for relatively short periods of time produced any, you know, cash income? What about having a respectable career? Well, I'm not smart enough to have been a good scientist. [3] I'm not a great artist [4] or a wizard programmer or, for that matter, a widely imitated organic gardener. I'm abashed that, in the face of the erudition of people I respect, I can't get far enough into economics (another phenomenon of life-long influence) to get past the impression that the discipline is dominated by bogosity. I dunno of the last few paragraphs even tangentially address the question of the future of work. Most people who are unwillingly out of work have too many worries to thing about what's actually on the end of their forks, [5] let alone about how things around them work. Did I mention "Quixotic"? Guess I better stop here. - Mike [1] Okay, I've dated myself. Programs are now called "apps". Does that mean that people who used to be programmers are now applicators? [2] Not to mention that the auto industry, directly or indirectly, represented over a third of the whole US economy. [3] E.g., I failed my 4th semester of calculus. [4] But when I presented a seminar at MIT showing slides of my work along with that of famous artist smiths, Cyril Stanley Smith asked a question about a slide of Jean Tijou's work at Hampton Court, then said, "Yours is better". That was enough to maintain my self esteem as an artist indefinitely even were I to live in a cardboard box and be regularly reviled as a loser by all and sundry. I once got a Canada Council grant of a few hundred bucks while the Brits have spent a million pounds restoring Tijou's screens but I'm okay with that. :-) [5] ...naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. -- Jack Kerouac (About the title of William S. Burroughs' book) ...people are not bribed to shut up about what they know. They are bribed not to know it. -- William Burroughs, _Naked Lunch_ -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
