Blog di Rovinare di Sid

Objectivity Implemented in Thought, Action, Computers, and Photography

Archive mode
(Week of 28.09.2003)

Monday, 29 September 2003

The nu way to format e-mail —

When it comes to typesetting, there is only one way to describe my attitude: anal retentive. My resume [ps pdf] is typeset in LaTeX, and I adjust its formatting in increments of tenths and twentieths of an inch. I meticulously study the placement of every comma, hyphen, en dash, and em dash. I know what a double hyphen is, although they seem to have fallen out of favour with most folks these days. I've spent over thirty minutes considering the placement of a single blank line in my web page. I usually edit anything I write except for the most mundane e-mails several times, if for no other reason than to ensure that I haven't errantly misspelt any words since I don't use any sort of spelling checking software. It goes without saying that I regard the custom letterpress printers at Firefly Press with the highest honour for their quite magnificient work.

This analosity extends into e-mail, and when replying to someone else's e-mail, it's annoying to have to reformat their e-mail to wrap lines correctly (i.e. to an 80-column width), obtain uniform block quoting, and account for the space consumed by multiple levels of quoting. Yesterday, I decided to take the matter into my own hands, so I wrote a program to do the reformatting for me. It reformats paragraphs, makes quoting uniform, and deletes signatures (but not your own). The program is available as part of version 0.0.7 of my mail niceties package. Just use vim as usual for editing your reply and first do :%!nufmt, and most of the work of reformatting should be done for you. If you try it out and find a bug, please let me know, and send me the input on which it did something bad.

posted by Sid at 10.54 / 704 [ Comments: 4 ]

Wednesday, 1 October 2003

UK petrol tax rises —

The cost of petrol there is up to 83p per litre ($5.20 per gallon), most of which, of course, ends up in Her Majesty's coffers. Even more amazing is that travel by car remains cheaper than public transport.

posted by Sid at 08.07 / 588 [ Comments: 1 ]

Getting into the game —

Whilst reading the most recent issue of Cook's Illustrated this evening, I took a stroll through the latest column by the editor, Mr Christopher Kimball. His columns tend to be very mixed. On a sense of life level, they can be very good and this-worldly, but on more abstract topics, he tends to be very unintellectual. Nevertheless, he managed quite a line in this issue, which I think deserves quoting.

Observance and remembrance don't measure up to getting into the game itself, pumping your legs while they can still feel the thrill of speed.

posted by Sid at 21.30 / 146 [ Comments: 0 ]

Friday, 3 October 2003

Put your mind to rest —

As part of the ongoing row over Arnold, CNN have reported that, amazingly, Arnold did not rape the women who claimed he made unwanted sexual advances toward them thirty years ago! Wonders never cease.

Two of the six women in the Times report were identified; the other four spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they feared career retaliation. None of the six has filed legal action against Schwarzenegger. None of them alleged that they were raped.

You know, just in case you were wondering whether he raped them.

posted by Sid at 19.43 / 071 [ Comments: 0 ]