The happiest discovery of the day, thanks to Dave, was how to do an apple. - like this. It has, sad little woman that I am, become my signature du jour.
I'm feeling pretty good today, in fact. All those things that have been hanging over my head for weeks - they're done. Not that I've not got a lot still on, but there are no more deadlines. No more speeches. No more performances. No more meetings to chair until September. They've all happened. It feels wonderful. I don't care whether they were done well or badly; they were done. When I arrived home today, there was a message asking me to play the organ at a funeral next Thursday. I will say 'no'. Unless the weather is nasty, I shall go to the Norfolk (and good) Show. This Saturday, I will go to London to fetch boxes of Stuff as well as Phil, who will be delivered to Norwich as he will spend the next four days painting. I'll go and help (though I've been forbidden to go up ladders; I'm sturdy and sensible on ladders, but I obey my daughter and am glad she cares) and have said I won't be available for church. I've done it, I don't have to do it.
Family promises, babysitting and the like are a joy. Paperwork has been building up and must be completed, but will be. The garden is a disaster because we are plagued with rabbits at present, but never mind. It's nature. We may swear but we can't completely control and that's not at all a bad thing.
What a lovely evening. I must go and close the doors to the greenhouses. The green wheelie bins must be wheeled down to the gate (they are chocker; no one did it a fortnight ago). Then, a delicious ripe peach. And a pear. Then coffee. Yes. It's good. The Sage will be happy later; I'll be charming to him. The darling man went to a funeral today, in Northamptonshire, which is a long way (anywhere out of Norfolk and Suffolk takes half a day to drive to). It was someone whom he had known for over 60 years and her husband was so pleased to see him. He had been a schoolteacher at the Sage's prep school and she had been Matron. They were both lovely people and I'd have gone too, if it hadn't been for the last of my obligations.
Have a good evening, darlings.
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25 comments:
I think the ability to take delight in simple things is as far from 'sad' as a human being could hope to be.
I'm not sure what to make of 'F snowflake FF'; has something been lost in translation?
I can only see a little square. I hope we're not ruining her euphoria. Maybe we should humour her, and pretend we can see a Granny Smith...
The useful thing with my computer is that I can see all the symbols shown on Macs and on PCs.
love from Granny S
Maybe it is a box of apples?
Sadly, on my PC it doesn't look like an apple. I did wonder why all your comments yesterday ended with a ?.
I apologise for having alerted you to something that is only of value to a limited (but deeply cherish by the rest of us) minority.
As you know, I have never said that Macs are 'better' than PCs. In most everyday respects, each is as good as the other. But those of you who are so charmingly teasing me about a symbol you can't see appear not to appreciate that this is because of an inadequacy in your machines, not mine. You don't even all see the same symbol as each other. On the other hand, my mac is equipped to read everything you do.
Oh thank goodness i thought it was my eyes!
One might humbly suggest that an inability to publish a symbol which can be recognised by the majority of computer users around the world (given the preponderance of PCs) might be considered by some to be an inadequacy in your machine.
One might suggest that. I never would, of course.
Funny thing is, I'm reading this on a Mac and all I can see is a little box... Ah well. Stay happy.
Ah well indeed, Badge. Can you get the symbol yourself though? Alt+shift+K.
I knew someone would say that, Dave. It shows an arrogance and lack of consideration on the part of Microsoft that they think they're the only ones who are important. Macs can read PCs, but PCs can't read Macs. Badgerdaddy's Mac can't read my Mac, either as it happens. Ah well.
Yes of course you can read everything we do, because we are using universal symbols :-)
I also think it shows an arrogance on the part of Apple, etc, if they're going to invent symbols that can't be read by the majority of people.
Of course, one could spin it either way, but rather than a Mac-PC debate, I think this one more properly applies to the more general writer-reader dichotomy...
(What do you see for this last character: ?)
Fuck me, it's bloody Blogger, isn't it? If we were sending each other proper letters, we'd be able to read them in their entirety.
Don't let Weeza hear you talking like that....
Oh dear! Since mud is now being slung, I had better explain what this is all about. Like badgerdaddy, I wondered why Z's blog didn't display properly on my iMac, or on my Linux machine either, so I researched it.
The character that Z typed goes by the name of Unicode code point U+F8FF, or #63743 for those of you who think in base 10 rather than base 16. On the Mac, you can make it using Option Shift K, I think. I must have read the 8 as a snowflake because it was late at night, and I had consumed wine.
Unicode is an international standard character set for typography, but it includes a Private Use Area where companies can design special characters for their own private use. It's like a private slang word that you use in the family, but people outside the family can't understand. Since Z typed it on her blog, and blogger automatical inserts tags in all it pages to say that the character set is Unicode and private is false, the rest of us didn't stand a chance.
The reason Apple decided to make their logo into a character is that the company put an awful lot of effort into designing good typography for the Mac, and they didn't want other companies stealing it. Copyright law on fonts is a bit vague, but by putting their trade mark into every font, Apple made it much easier to sue the pants off anyone who copied them.
This explains why there are no Mac-compatible computers, why Z's new computer probably cost more than three of mine, and why she can read everything that's written on a PC, but I can't even see her Apple symbol on a Mac running OS X, unless I close down Firefox (which is standards based) and open up Safari (which is proprietary to Apple).
So Z dearest, you are right, up to a point. There is an arrogant, inconsiderate computer company in this story. But it's the one in Cupertino, not the one in Seattle.
HUmble apologies to Blogger and thanks and appreciation to Gordie.
On my last computer, I changed over to using Firefox, but although there are some things that work better on the internet with it, Safari is so much more compatible on the Mac that I use it for everything except accessing my Hotmail account, which I used to be able to do but can't now.
This computer cost £799 by the way.
Good old John Lewis! Since this isn't the first time an almighty kerfuffle has been caused by a woman with an apple, I'm posting the link to Umberto Eco's article on Religious Wars in Computing, in which he explains that Apple is Catholic, the PC is Protestant, and Windows is the Church of England.
Id, in both Firefox and Camino, it's a little box with a sort of looped cross in it that my eyesight's not quite up to making out. What's it meant to be?
I expect it's a miniature box of Granny Smiths.
I've rather despised Umberto Eco since I read that he said that he deliberately made 'The Name of the Rose' extremely difficult to read so that only people who were worthy to do so would complete it. I had, but after I read that wished I hadn't bothered. In this article, my understanding is marred by his use of the word 'hermeneutic', which I've not come across before and can't be bothered to look up.
I don't know enough about the operating system of Macs and PCs to give an opinion on his theory. although what I like about Macs is that they don't tell me what to do, which is not what he's saying.
And I think the idiots running the Church of England give religion a bad name, as does, quite often, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church.
And by the way, I'm not anti PCs. They're fine. Computers are useful. I don't identify with them.
Ooooh. A big word of which I do know the meaning. Only because I come across it quite a lot.
Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation, especially of the Bible - it's also the branch of theology that deals with the principles of Biblical exegesis.
Dave, you are a fine man. You know that so that I don't have to.
The quality of people you despise says much for your character.
I know about computers so other people don't have to. One of my clients once called me "The Anti Geek". There is also a hermeneutics of computing, which is the art and science of interpretation. I practice it daily.
GoogleAds has decided to illuminate your post with a reference to John 1:14. The Unitarians must have money to burn.
Ouch. I should add, of course, that he is, no doubt, a fine, upstanding and admirable man, far more knowledgeable than me and more likeable in every way. However, in that unguided remark, he sounded arrogant and self-satisfied and so, since that explained a lot about the book (which I found hard going, ultimately worth having read but unnecessarily tricksy), I jumped to a casual conclusion about him and resolved not to bother to read a book of his again.
gordie I wanna give you a round of applause for your fine forensic analysis of the situation. Very educational. Thank you.
Z I was trying to do the picture that the apple button has on it. Personally, I thought Kant & the Platypus was excellent. Have zero interest in fiction about mediaeival monks and the rosicrucians though.
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