pumpkinstrokemarrow

Spent part of yesterday refreshing my knowledge of beach huts; the sort of thing which at fashionable Southwold fetches more than a proper house in darkest Hartlepool. It seems that beach huts are direct descendants of the bathing machines which were all the thing in the 19th century. And furthermore, that that used by Queen Victoria at Osborne came complete with a water closet; of which, despite having inspected the thing from the outside on several occasions, I was completely unaware. My tutorial booklet did not explain the details of the royal plumbing but one hopes that the discharge, if any, was not too near the royal person.

Then to musing about the way that successful software products get used in all kinds of ways never dreamed of by their inventors. So, in my case, a big use of Google is checking my spelling. If you put the word in in a rough and ready way, most of the time Google will point up the proper spelling. Not sure if it recognises my Englishness and offers English rather than transpond spelling but it would be easy enough to check. Perhaps a job for after TB when ITV3 has failed me for once.

And a big use of Wikipedia is getting the accents on the foreign phrases I like to impress my readers with. Now I do know what the hexadecimal codes for accented letters are; but I do not know how to tell Blogger about hexadecimal codes. Not really up to searching through the help blogs to see if they can tell me. So what one does instead is type the foreign phrase into Google, en clair, that is to say without any trappings. Then, 99% of the time, Google points to a Wikipedia entry which is all about the phrase in question. Often, the phrase is the title of the article and comes complete with trappings, that is to say accents. An easy task then to copy the phrase from the Wikipedia screen where it is very properly accessible, as more or less public property, to the copy command (something which does not work on the many web sites where the owners fuss about intellectual property rights and theft), and then to paste it into MS Notepad. Notepad strips off the font supplied by Wikipedia. One can then copy the phrase from Notepad and paste into Blogger where it will take on the native font. Which is what I want. Hopefully it makes the desired impression.

Try it with 'Joyeux Noël'.