Uzis a-blazin’
Over the years that I’ve had e-mail, and that’s about 15+ years, I’ve noticed various e-mail programs like to do various things.
I got a reply last night (Tuesday, September 18, 2007) from K-man (Kevin Frisch, Managing Editor at the mighty Mezz), and I noticed it put carets and a space at the beginning of each line of my send, and a hard return at the end of each line.
This is OutLook, the e-mail program at the mighty Mezz. It always does that.
I also noticed it squished words together (e.g. “wasgiving”), as if something had dumped my space before a wrap.
I’ve seen that happen too, and who knows if it was Outlook or my Netscape (MyWay doesn’t do that). I have Linda amongst the Netscape Messenger Ne’er-do-wells. We’ll see if it squished words on her, and her mail is Yahoo. If her’s is squished too, we suspect the Netscape.
All of this is of little consequence; if all you’re trying to do is communicate.
But a newspaper is something else. Fly errors like that and Granny shows up at the receptionist-desk, Uzi a-blazin’. Tub-thumping REPUBLICANS bellow loudly at us about Liberial bias.
Quite a few of our columnists e-mailed us their stuff. Our Cornell Co-operative Extension columnist would e-mail a weekly column she had done in Word.
I always had to fiddle it. Deleting carets and hard returns can be done en masse with an AppleWorks find/replace — everything in one fell swoop.
Then I would have to delete her link-tags; which in Word were not HTML h-ref.
E-mailing her column saved time, but I usually had to do an hour of fiddling.
Who knows how things are done now....... Probably the e-mail is printed and our typist retypes it. That there typist is acting as the ‘pyooter translator.
It would take her about an hour too (maybe a little more — she was quick), but “tricks” (as I called them) were beyond the intellectual wherewithal of most Messenger employees. —I think the Webmaster could have mastered it, but he already was swamped.
(Our Senior columnist used to do his weekly column on his old Royal typewriter. I tried to get him to type his column in a ‘pyooter, and then e-mail that, but it was over-his-head. The thing could be OCR-scanned, but was very messy. He had inserted corrections with a pencil.
Finally we gave up and had the typist do it.
And then he fell and had to give it up — his wife had died too.)
I also used to get a garden column, but that was pretty decent = OCR scannable.
Once he misspelled “diarrhea;” in a way that passed the spellchecker. I asked my proofer if she had ever heard of such a thing, and she said emphatically it was “diarrhea.”
I didn’t like calling him up — he was over 90. He never knew I was a stroke-survivor with compromised speech. When my speech went wonky he’d get frustrated.
He died during 2003, and his column ended.
We also had quite a few local business-columnists. The rule was they had to be based in Canandaigua, and their column locally-written.
One guy cheated. He’d mail me a boiler-plate column that had been written by his PR in New York City. It even had the web-address on it.
I’d crank the web-address into my browser, and VIOLA; there it was.
All I had to do was copy/paste the sucker, and we were ready-to-print.
But it was cheating. It wasn’t locally written.
As such we never ran him much; only when we ran out of locally-written stuff.
We had at least three other business-columnists, and they all resorted to e-mail once I showed them how — a slam-dunk; it’s what they wanted to do anyway.
Our columnist from Canandaigua National Bank’s Wealth-Strategies Group was the most challenging, although he wrote the most useful stuff.
He did his columns in a recent version of Word; although mine (at the mighty Mezz) was an antique: 6.1.
It would only open his stuff as text; devoid of all his formatting.
So what I did was forward his e-mails here to home, where I could open with Word-98, print, and the print-out would have his formatting.
Then I’d sneaker-mail the print-out back to the mighty Mezz (or complete it here at home), so I could format his column as he had done it.
That was the onliest way I could bold and italicize anything; 6.1 wouldn't do it.
The other fix was bullets; and that got into Quark versus other apps.
Quark (the pagination software at the mighty Mezz) had its own tags, not HTML and different from Word or AppleWorks.
Bullets were a valid Quark character, but ya hadda generate the Quark bullet-tag, because AppleWorks and Word bullets came through as asterisks.
So I had 89 bazilyun macros for Quark-tags; about 3-4 characters each.
I’d file a column with all the Quark-tags already in it, so the column just flowed on the page as it was to appear.
There were a few Mezz-people who could do such things, although in most cases they individually typed in the Quark-tags, or formatted on the page. They weren’t using macros or “tricks.”
“Just e-mail it,” the Veep who got fired once said — wonderful technology being the solution to all our time-constraints.
“Uh, sure. Print what’s e-mailed and the Grammar-Police call us up.”
Honor-rolls ended when I retired. (The reason we could run so many is because I was using “tricks” on e-mails — a typist can’t afford the time to type up an entire honor-roll; like the huge one from Canandaigua Academy.)
I got a reply last night (Tuesday, September 18, 2007) from K-man (Kevin Frisch, Managing Editor at the mighty Mezz), and I noticed it put carets and a space at the beginning of each line of my send, and a hard return at the end of each line.
This is OutLook, the e-mail program at the mighty Mezz. It always does that.
I also noticed it squished words together (e.g. “wasgiving”), as if something had dumped my space before a wrap.
I’ve seen that happen too, and who knows if it was Outlook or my Netscape (MyWay doesn’t do that). I have Linda amongst the Netscape Messenger Ne’er-do-wells. We’ll see if it squished words on her, and her mail is Yahoo. If her’s is squished too, we suspect the Netscape.
All of this is of little consequence; if all you’re trying to do is communicate.
But a newspaper is something else. Fly errors like that and Granny shows up at the receptionist-desk, Uzi a-blazin’. Tub-thumping REPUBLICANS bellow loudly at us about Liberial bias.
Quite a few of our columnists e-mailed us their stuff. Our Cornell Co-operative Extension columnist would e-mail a weekly column she had done in Word.
I always had to fiddle it. Deleting carets and hard returns can be done en masse with an AppleWorks find/replace — everything in one fell swoop.
Then I would have to delete her link-tags; which in Word were not HTML h-ref.
E-mailing her column saved time, but I usually had to do an hour of fiddling.
Who knows how things are done now....... Probably the e-mail is printed and our typist retypes it. That there typist is acting as the ‘pyooter translator.
It would take her about an hour too (maybe a little more — she was quick), but “tricks” (as I called them) were beyond the intellectual wherewithal of most Messenger employees. —I think the Webmaster could have mastered it, but he already was swamped.
(Our Senior columnist used to do his weekly column on his old Royal typewriter. I tried to get him to type his column in a ‘pyooter, and then e-mail that, but it was over-his-head. The thing could be OCR-scanned, but was very messy. He had inserted corrections with a pencil.
Finally we gave up and had the typist do it.
And then he fell and had to give it up — his wife had died too.)
I also used to get a garden column, but that was pretty decent = OCR scannable.
Once he misspelled “diarrhea;” in a way that passed the spellchecker. I asked my proofer if she had ever heard of such a thing, and she said emphatically it was “diarrhea.”
I didn’t like calling him up — he was over 90. He never knew I was a stroke-survivor with compromised speech. When my speech went wonky he’d get frustrated.
He died during 2003, and his column ended.
We also had quite a few local business-columnists. The rule was they had to be based in Canandaigua, and their column locally-written.
One guy cheated. He’d mail me a boiler-plate column that had been written by his PR in New York City. It even had the web-address on it.
I’d crank the web-address into my browser, and VIOLA; there it was.
All I had to do was copy/paste the sucker, and we were ready-to-print.
But it was cheating. It wasn’t locally written.
As such we never ran him much; only when we ran out of locally-written stuff.
We had at least three other business-columnists, and they all resorted to e-mail once I showed them how — a slam-dunk; it’s what they wanted to do anyway.
Our columnist from Canandaigua National Bank’s Wealth-Strategies Group was the most challenging, although he wrote the most useful stuff.
He did his columns in a recent version of Word; although mine (at the mighty Mezz) was an antique: 6.1.
It would only open his stuff as text; devoid of all his formatting.
So what I did was forward his e-mails here to home, where I could open with Word-98, print, and the print-out would have his formatting.
Then I’d sneaker-mail the print-out back to the mighty Mezz (or complete it here at home), so I could format his column as he had done it.
That was the onliest way I could bold and italicize anything; 6.1 wouldn't do it.
The other fix was bullets; and that got into Quark versus other apps.
Quark (the pagination software at the mighty Mezz) had its own tags, not HTML and different from Word or AppleWorks.
Bullets were a valid Quark character, but ya hadda generate the Quark bullet-tag, because AppleWorks and Word bullets came through as asterisks.
So I had 89 bazilyun macros for Quark-tags; about 3-4 characters each.
I’d file a column with all the Quark-tags already in it, so the column just flowed on the page as it was to appear.
There were a few Mezz-people who could do such things, although in most cases they individually typed in the Quark-tags, or formatted on the page. They weren’t using macros or “tricks.”
“Just e-mail it,” the Veep who got fired once said — wonderful technology being the solution to all our time-constraints.
“Uh, sure. Print what’s e-mailed and the Grammar-Police call us up.”
Honor-rolls ended when I retired. (The reason we could run so many is because I was using “tricks” on e-mails — a typist can’t afford the time to type up an entire honor-roll; like the huge one from Canandaigua Academy.)
posted by BobbaLew at 10:58 AM
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