rks!! Outstanding! Thanks, Matt Harris!
This morning I'd never heard of a smart quote. I guess you can teach an old dog the occasional trick.
Sigh. As you can see in the post below, I have enough trouble with the Queen’s English, without fighting with computerese. For the time being I’ll try to eschew quotation marks wherever possible, and fix those I must use. If anyone out there sees any other problems with this blog, other than my shitty attitude, please let me know! Please.
Let me know if you don’t like my attitude too. Although I doubt there’s much I can do about that.
Finally, someone tells me!
When I started this blog I had the very devil of a time trying to figure out how to create links. I dutifully typed the HTML code character for character as Steve Den Beste had explained them to me, but they didn’t work. Finally, I did a "View Source" to see exactly what I was sending Blogger and discovered that the quotes characters I was sending to Blogger appeared as little squares in Blogger’s text editor. The only way I’ve found to correct this is to manually retype the quotes in Blogger’s text editor before publishing to BlogSpot.
Almost two months later I’m still doing that. A tiny nuisance, but it works and given my magico-religious approach to computers, I generally don’t mess with what works. Until now. Anton Sherwood informs me that my "smart quotes" don’t look so smart from his point of view:
"I decided not to bother urging you not to use "smart" asymmetric quotation marks in your blog, because it would be mere whining about the incomplete font in which I read the stuff. But
(you knew there had to be a 'but')
Then I found your link to A Boy and His Blog, which is broken because - ta daa! - the tag contains "smart" q rather than dumb ones."
Oops. I forgot to retype the quotes in Blogger. They're fixed now. And apparently, although the non-HTML quotes marks in my text look fine to me, they don’t look so good to some folks. I don’t wish to give up composing in MS Publisher. I’m working in Publisher all day anyway and sticking with a single text editor is easier on my head than switching back and forth. I also desperately need a spell checker. However, I don’t want folks to read my blog and see a bunch of @$#%@ instead of elegantly composed prose. (Or is it semiliterate gibberish? I’m not the one to judge.)
However, MS Publisher does provide a couple of 'Unicode' fonts that appear to me to be pretty much straight ASCII code. I’m composing this post in Unicode to see what happens when I blog it. In the mean time, please don’t be bashful about emailing me if you have any problems reading my blog or anything is coming through garbled on your end. I can’t promise I’ll fix the problem, as I have no clue how to make any of this compatible with Apples, Unix, Linux, or what have you, but if I don’t know about the problem it’s a sure bet it won’t get fixed..
Hmm. Unicode quotes characters still come through as little black boxes in Blogger's editor. I've manually retyped all the quotes in this post, but that is a huge pain. Ah well, I'll keep working at it.
Saturday, March 16, 2002- - -
Great minds think [somewhat] alike?
Personally, in times of indecision I always ask ‘What Would Machiavelli Do?’ I’m beginning to suspect similar thought patterns from the Bush II administration.
Local Blogger Makes Good!
Outstanding! I see that we have a new ‘semi-pro’ in the ranks. Megan McArdle writes about Netscape’s Folly in Thursday’s Salon.
Via Anton Sherwood, I’ve noticed these quasi-libertarians cropping up in letters to the editor at Reason and Liberty (no active website). A frequent argument of this set parallels that espoused by Bill Bennett a couple years back—that the public school teacher’s First Amendment rights ought to trump your right not to have your children proselytized in school by their teachers.
Regardless of the issue, the message seems always the same: “Freedom for me, but not for thee.” I would hope that most folks see this as the perversion of the libertarian ideal that it is.
Friday, March 15, 2002- - -
Bill Quick