Friday, January 22, 2010
Font peace
An oddity to intrigue the meanest of geeks here. When I uploaded from Word to Blogger yesterday, during an interval of Broadband service, Blogger thought it would do something funny with the font and I have no idea - yet anyway - how to change the font of a post. I can do bold and italic but that is about it. So I went to the bother of inspecting the html that you get if you download a chunk of blog and found that it was using something called Verdana. Plus a whole lot of qualifiers which were not quite in the sort of format I would expect. Probably more to do with my lack of knowledge of html than anything else. But, if push came to shove, I could try putting the Word text into Verdana, uploading that (by copy and paste) and seeing if that did the trick.
Then, service continuing absent, off to Epsom library where normal service appears to have been resumed after some difficulties with the snow. Or something. Where I find that if you upload from Word, Blogger puts the thing into the right font, that is to say the font that it usually uses when you do not try and do anything clever. The only thing that was differant is that at home I use Google Chrome, whereas the library uses Internet Explorer. I suppose it is entirely plausible that the two products handle the passage through the clipboard in subtly different ways. But I do not propose to investigate further. I shall wait until I have the opportunity to ask a real geek.
Meantime I can ponder about what I suspect to be a bit of contraband tree felling in the road next to us. You appear to have a refurbishment operation going on in a house which had a large if not particularly handsome tree in the front garden. One fine day the tree gets chopped down. But the chaps chopping the tree down do not take most of it away. And the chaps doing the refurbishment have slowly been transferring chunks of tree into the skip that one had thought intended for old ceilings, used sanitaryware and the like. What is more, for the first time for a very long time, I have seen people making big chunks of tree into smaller chunks of tree using wedges and a sledgehammer. So why are they going about it in this odd way? I suspect that they did not get proper authority from the bizzies and had to get some dodgy tree operator in to do the dirty work, someone dodgy enough not to bother about the lack of paperwork. Dodgy enough to say that he wasn't going to take the bulky stuff away. How could he dispose of it without paperwork? I shall reflect on where my duty lies in this matter.
Amused the other day to read a piece, maybe not in the DT for once in a while, about how the Labour Party had been wrong footed when the Conservative Party dumped Thatcher in favour of Major. It seems that the former had ramped up their entire election campaign on the basis of trashing Thatcher, a campaign which had to be binned in her absence. It then took them some time to build a new campaign, one which targeted the right leader. Re-brief and re-train all the thousands of campaign workers. Re-print all the junk that has to be pushed through letter boxes. Re-shoot the ad. of Kate Moss doing something desirable with the proposed leader. Maybe they were reduced to targetting the policy rather than the leader. Needs must in an emergency. In any event, they lost. What amused me was the sight of a political party having the same sort of management problems as the rest of us. Having to turn their carefully crafted and heavy machine on a dime, rather in the way that they always expect their long suffering civil servants to when they happen to be in the chair.
PS: another geekery. Blogger viewed through the Library does not check my spelling. Blogger viewed through Google Chrome does. Nothing that I did.
Then, service continuing absent, off to Epsom library where normal service appears to have been resumed after some difficulties with the snow. Or something. Where I find that if you upload from Word, Blogger puts the thing into the right font, that is to say the font that it usually uses when you do not try and do anything clever. The only thing that was differant is that at home I use Google Chrome, whereas the library uses Internet Explorer. I suppose it is entirely plausible that the two products handle the passage through the clipboard in subtly different ways. But I do not propose to investigate further. I shall wait until I have the opportunity to ask a real geek.
Meantime I can ponder about what I suspect to be a bit of contraband tree felling in the road next to us. You appear to have a refurbishment operation going on in a house which had a large if not particularly handsome tree in the front garden. One fine day the tree gets chopped down. But the chaps chopping the tree down do not take most of it away. And the chaps doing the refurbishment have slowly been transferring chunks of tree into the skip that one had thought intended for old ceilings, used sanitaryware and the like. What is more, for the first time for a very long time, I have seen people making big chunks of tree into smaller chunks of tree using wedges and a sledgehammer. So why are they going about it in this odd way? I suspect that they did not get proper authority from the bizzies and had to get some dodgy tree operator in to do the dirty work, someone dodgy enough not to bother about the lack of paperwork. Dodgy enough to say that he wasn't going to take the bulky stuff away. How could he dispose of it without paperwork? I shall reflect on where my duty lies in this matter.
Amused the other day to read a piece, maybe not in the DT for once in a while, about how the Labour Party had been wrong footed when the Conservative Party dumped Thatcher in favour of Major. It seems that the former had ramped up their entire election campaign on the basis of trashing Thatcher, a campaign which had to be binned in her absence. It then took them some time to build a new campaign, one which targeted the right leader. Re-brief and re-train all the thousands of campaign workers. Re-print all the junk that has to be pushed through letter boxes. Re-shoot the ad. of Kate Moss doing something desirable with the proposed leader. Maybe they were reduced to targetting the policy rather than the leader. Needs must in an emergency. In any event, they lost. What amused me was the sight of a political party having the same sort of management problems as the rest of us. Having to turn their carefully crafted and heavy machine on a dime, rather in the way that they always expect their long suffering civil servants to when they happen to be in the chair.
PS: another geekery. Blogger viewed through the Library does not check my spelling. Blogger viewed through Google Chrome does. Nothing that I did.
# posted by Jim @ 1:32 AM 
