The Vent and Rant Thread

[WT Sharpe]

My family hates my cooking. My wife complains that everything I make seems the same and my grandson doesn't like all the vegetables. Thomas Jefferson's attitude toward food is my own: just enough meat to season the vegetables. And to make sure my grandson gets vegetables in his diet, I make a lot of casserole style dishes. He'd eat nothing but Pizza and Anytizers if we let him, and my wife isn't much better. For her it's spaghetti, hamburgers, and more spaghetti. Notice I didn't mention fish? I think it would be easier to convince them to have an elective root canal rather than a dinner of fish. Well, tough. I'm the housewife in this family, and I say we eat healthy.

Tonight it will be a chicken casserole with mixed vegetables, broccoli, and rice topped with fried onions and cheddar cheese. As usual, I'll be the one eating the leftovers over the next few days.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

Desert Grandma is MIA

I have received an email from Desert Grandma. She is well, but still missing her late husband a great deal, especially in this holiday season. She hopes to be back sometime next year. She was pleased to be remembered by her friends at MobileRead.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I have received an email from Desert Grandma. She is well, but still missing her late husband a great deal, especially in this holiday season. She hopes to be back sometime next year. She was pleased to be remembered by her friends at MobileRead.

Thanks, Paul, for the update.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

My family hates my cooking. My wife complains that everything I make seems the same and my grandson doesn't like all the vegetables. Thomas Jefferson's attitude toward food is my own: just enough meat to season the vegetables. And to make sure my grandson gets vegetables in his diet, I make a lot of casserole style dishes. He'd eat nothing but Pizza and Anytizers if we let him, and my wife isn't much better. For her it's spaghetti, hamburgers, and more spaghetti. Notice I didn't mention fish? I think it would be easier to convince them to have an elective root canal rather than a dinner of fish. Well, tough. I'm the housewife in this family, and I say we eat healthy.

Tonight it will be a chicken casserole with mixed vegetables, broccoli, and rice topped with fried onions and cheddar cheese. As usual, I'll be the one eating the leftovers over the next few days.

To the 'I don't like that (or, anything)' people I always say that it would be good for them to spend half a year in Zimbabwe or Ethiopia. Then you'd eat anything that's not concrete, wood or stainless steel. Be glad you live in the 30% part of the world in which you actually have a choice in what you can eat. Then use that choice.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

Indeed, no middle name and also Dutch. The GP's new system seems to insist you should have multiple initials.

I've had this problem several times, especially at university in the UK. I had to go to the registrar's office each year to explain it to them (also they always registered all Dutch students as being from the Netherlands Antilles instead of the Netherlands). Coupled with a difficult surname (even for the Dutch, it's impossible for other languages) I have spend a lot of time on phones, sending emails and in offices to get things corrected.

Stop reminding me.... !

I'm Dutch, but my last name is spelled Style Belgique: everything written together. So, for example, it's not "Peter van der Horst" (Dutch, filed under H in the Netherlands), it's "Peter Vanderhorst" (Belgian, filed under V). They ALWAYS GET IT WRONG, EVEN WHEN I WRITE MY NAME FOR THEM TO BE COPIED. They always spell it in Dutch, filing it under H

(PS: my name is not Peter Vanderhorst.)

[Freeshadow]

We get it, it's Horst Vanderpiet

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

We get it, it's Horst Vanderpiet

Eh.... No.

--Minion

[Hitch]

From one of my crew:

We have a new champion for the number of spans in one file. This book had 192,633.

or ... I almost can't decide.

Hitch

[eschwartz]

That seems quite impressive... how many pages is this book? Presumably not in the ~1000 range.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

That seems quite impressive... how many pages is this book? Presumably not in the ~1000 range.

Nope. Plain ol', plain ol' fiction. I forget exactly how many pages, but between 75-100K words. WORDS, not pages, so between 350-400 pages, let's say, if it were 250/words/page. {sigh}.

Hitch

[kindlekitten]

What's a span?

[Lin2412]

trichobezoar Thank you, I ended up taking tylenol when I've already sworn to avoid drinking medications during headaches for the sake of my kidneys. Sometimes I
wish I had high pain tolerance. Thanks again.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Nope. Plain ol', plain ol' fiction. I forget exactly how many pages, but between 75-100K words. WORDS, not pages, so between 350-400 pages, let's say, if it were 250/words/page. {sigh}.

Hitch

So that would be about 1-2 spans per word. Lovely.

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

What's a span?

Weird computer code used in ebooks and websites.

It is used to define arbitrary chunks of content (like these words) and give them funky styles. You can stack them (stupid idea), which is probably what happened here.

[kindlekitten]

O.i.c. sorta

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

O.i.c. sorta

KK:

I don't know how much power-using of Word-like programs you do, or if you may have used Wordperfect "back in the day" (or even now), but spans are a function, really--a space-holder. They don't "do" anything on their own; they are a container, a wrapper, into which you put commands to create formatting. For example:

<span class="italic">this text would be italic</span>

Now, in this case, in a cleaner book, you'd have regular italics or em tags instead. There's a lot of semi-heated debate as to whether spans are BAD or not; there's argument that there's really nothing different about a span like the one I showed you, versus using the italics or em html tags. Some argue that, from a pure CSS standpoint, it's better to use spans, than inline HTML coding.

I won't really take sides in that argument (not the place), but in THIS particular file, it meant empty, or meaningless, or worse, gibberish unique spans, stacked, as eschwartz suggested, around words, partial words, phrases, you-name-it. I do believe that the bookmaker is right--I think it's a record for us.

Does that help? Spans simply exist to hold a command, or rather, a formatting instruction. By themselves--if you were to wrap plain <span></span> tags around something--they do absolutely nothing, but they also make SEARCHING for text in HTML a giant PITA. It forces us to do a boatload--an absolute boatload--of cleanup, because when you get junk spans, they all tend to be unique, or unique "enough" (not to abuse the word "unique" as is so often done) that you can't find-and-replace in giant batches. Utter PITA.

Hitch