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 ) |
|_| \__,_|_| |_| \___|\__|\__\___|.513/779-0780.......| > - < |
..... 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 ===>
