Hi all,

        On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, The digest contained:

> ...
> Date:    Mon, 17 Jan 2000 10:12:21 -0500
> From:    John Lawley <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: NONPD: Hieroglyphs
> ...
> Bill,=20
>     Sorry to impose, but after your explanation of html etc. would you =
> perhaps also be willing to explain the hieroglyphs you use as your =
> signature? I (and perhaps others too) have been racking my brain for =
> months trying to figure them out, but still can't see it. Please show us =
> some light.
> >From Erika (who thinks she must be one of those five out of four,     :) =
> ...
> Bill--
>   ...who believes five out of four people have trouble with fractions.
> ...

        :-)

        Thank you for your note.  If, as you indicated, there could be
     more than one list member who might be interested in  the  hiero-
     glyphs,  I'll  reply on-list -- even though it is incredibly off-
     topic. :-)

        I've  been  on  the  'Net for a while -- way before I became a
     PWP.  In fact, in my early days, there was no HTML, no picture or
     sound  attachments,  no way to make a "signature" interesting and
     entertaining.  If you wanted to be "different" you  had  to  find
     other ways and had to be a bit more inventive.

        The two inventive things that I noticed right off the bat were
     the witty "tag-lines" (the "five out of four" line  you  noticed)
     and ASCII-art.  ASCII-art is simply pictures that are constructed
     from characters -- letters, digits, punctuation, etc. -- that can
     be  typed  from  the  keyboard.   A subset of ASCII-art is FIGlet
     fonts -- letters/fonts constructed from the same types  of   key-
     board   characters.   And,  I combine all three of these items to
     construct my signatures.

        The  down side of trying to be inventive these days is that --
     especially on AOL and all of the free mail services such as  Hot-
     Mail  RocketMail, YahooMail, and the like -- is that you must use
     a mono-spaced font (such as Courier, Typewriter, Terminal,  etc.)
     to be able to "see" my signature.  The hieroglyph that is my sig-
     nature spells out my last name with a FIGlet font on the left and
     an  ASCII-art  "picture"  on the right.  I have an example at the
     bottom of my personal Web page at:

              http://w3.one.net/~wap/wapPersonal.html#section7

        If you feel up to the challenge, you could always open up your
     favorite notepad/notebook editor and resize it to be fairly wide;
     Copy everything from "Bill --" to the end of the message with the
     mouse and Edit menu; Paste it into notepad/notebook  and  "select
     all"  from  the Edit menu; Then, change the font to a mono-spaced
     font; and everything in  my  signature  should  magically  become
     "visible."

        Or, maybe not. ;-)

        Anyway, since I use UNIX/Pine/vi to compose my mail, I wrote a
     little program that chooses the ASCII-art and tag-line at  random
     and  both  should be different on every message received from me.
     BTW, as fanatic as I can sometimes get about 'Netiquette, this is
     *my*  one  flagrant  violation of 'Netiquette guidelines.  Common
     'Netiquette courtesy says that your signature should be  no  more
     than four lines long.  It is often the case that my signature can
     be from 8 to 9 lines long depending on the "art" I use.

        Thanks  for  asking.   I hope I explained it such that you can
     grok it in fullness.  We now take  you  back  to  your  regularly
     scheduled Parkinson chat ...

Bill--
  ...who thinks that Hindsight is an exact science.
.___. William A. ....._..._ .......7177 Heritage Drive+--------- (42?) --+
| _ \__ _ _ _ _ _ ___| |_| |_ ___ .Westchester........|    /\_/\  /      |
|  _/ _` | '_| '_/ -_)  _|  _/ -_).OH 45069-4012......|   ( o.o )        |
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..... http://w3.one.net/~wap/ .... [log in to unmask] .......+------------------+

<=== the FIGlet font last name is over here <===
                       ===> and a small picture of a cat is over here ===>