I get paid decent money to notice and correct things like that. It makes me happy.
Me too. Notepad is a friend in situations like yours, Becks.
You work in IT, right? Can't you make an argument to the creator of the document that changes in format are, to the reader, the equivalent of switching programming languages midstream (or something equally impossible)?
Barring that, there's always enforced formatting through judicious use of MS Word templates (assuming the culprit is within your organization).
When calm, I always opt for the "People can't do what you want if they get distracted by how you're saying it" line of reasoning.
When angry, I usually stomp.
My students think they can fool me with subtle reformatting that makes their papers longer. I warn them all about my years as a production manager for an academic journal whose tiny pages required me to have mad eyeballing skillz, but they never believe I'll be able to spot their deeds.
Well, it makes me extremely happy to learn that I am not the only person who cares about such stuff. It's a serious pet peeve (especially when I am the one left to fix the formatting).
Oh, believe me -- my little-bitchiness has already resulted in a number of "you will use this Word template or else I won't even read your document" directives. That doesn't keep them from shifting the tab stops by just enough to raise my blood pressure. If I had my way - LaTeX for everyone!
If you're alowed to edit the document, you can do an awful lot of high-speed standardization with the paintbrush tool. (Which Ideal actually showed me. The man has mad secretarial skilz honed during his 20 year military career.)
(Also, I can't believe that "more of the same but of a different complexion" resulted in no Google hits. That was the catchphrase of the instructor in this physics video series we used to watch in 11th grade. He was so awesomely geeky that we all adopted his saying as our own. I am fully aware that I am a huge dork, thank you.)
Tomorrow a friend of mine goes to hospital to find out if the surgeons are willing to operate to give him a new hip joint-- he has lost the use of the left side of his body due to a stroke but is still able to stand on his own to go to the toilet, so to retain this ability he needs a new hip joint as the one he has is severely arthritic and causes him terrible pain . I am so terribly sad to hear of all the formatting woes you guys suffer and I hope you all get over it in the near future without too much angst .
What a bizarre place to come for sympathy. Best wishes for your friend, of course.
LizardBreath, you're a better person than I.
Dimitri, I'm pretty sure no one here is confusing ironic overstatement of pet peeves with the sincere language of tragedy. If you want to chastise a community for bourgeois dissociation from suffering, try aiming at those who think what happened at Abu Ghraib was no worse than chummy fraternity hazing.
mad secretarial skilz honed during his 20 year military career
I bet you had no idea that mad secretarial skilz were a requirement for modern warriors, but they are. When I was a staff officer at the headquarters of the U.S. forces in Korea, the four star general had several field grade officers whose job including checking every document sent to the general for signature to make sure the formating was exactly right. They routinely sent stuff back (but not to me, of course) for things such as the margins being a tenth of an inch off.
Aw dimitri, I am so sorry to hear that. It makes the loss this weekend of my entire family in fluke marshmallow-toasting conflagration seem so small.
The founder of this site still feels bad about calling someone blackie at some younhgage which I can't remember and don't want to search, in fact it may have been back when he was a (super-intelligent fetus). And someone is complaining about the presence of neuroses here?
May all your friends healthcare needs be addressed successfully.
On preview, this appears to have been addressed.
Also, I am part of an organization where we read formatting changes out loud while proofreading every document to be published in pairs.
changes in format are, to the reader, the equivalent of switching programming languages midstream (or something equally impossible)?
That's completely possible and sometimes even respectable.
So, a question about formatting. I can understand wanting a consistent style throughout a document, but why do universities mandate that all their dissertations be in one rigorously specified style? To what end?
Was 18 addressed to me or to 17? If me, I must say, alas, it is impossible as we would never finish revising the invitations.
My high school trig teacher used to explain certain calculations as "it's the same thing [as something we'd already done], only different."
20: To present a pleasing uniformity to the hypothetical reader progressing systematically through the shelves of dissertations in the library?
My high school trig teacher used to explain certain calculations as "it's the same thing [as something we'd already done], only different."
Sure, you've got FFM, FMF, MFF...
Because, as anyone who teaches undergraduates knows, if you are the least bit vague about the formatting criteria, people will come up with all sorts of crazy stupid shit.
I thought many, but perhaps not all, dissertation style requirements were meant to make it so that no text gets lost during the binding process. But maybe this only applies to the margin requirements.
And apparently the style files they give to LaTeX users here is buggy—here, where Don Knuth teaches!
What's amazing to me is that people can't even follow a fucking stylesheet. Their minds must be wired differently from mine, because the wires in my brain (an early electric model) are directed in such a way as to immediately pick out the important details in a style guide -- where the commas go, whatever. Other peoples wires, however, apparently got crossed and maybe that is why they are stupid, because of the wires in their brains.
I'm terribly grateful for a clear style guide, as making certain writerly decisions wastes valuable writing time. That's why I give my classes extremely clear formatting and style requirements, so they won't spend hours and hours funking up the margins and playing with fonts and thinking up weird ways to use punctuation. It saves time to know where you stand.
I just realized I'm a Hobbist.
But if students don't have to waste hours and hours fiddling with their formatting, they have to face the lack of content in their papers. The horror!
How clear are your instructions to someone who has never thought about style, or not very much? Are they available in a "Set this parameter to this, set that parameter to that" way? Or is thinking about style a hidden subject for the course?
I tell my students "x margins, y font size, underline this, put name, date, course number, instructor in the upper left-hand corner, put surname and page # on all pages except the first, center title above the beginning but below the name, date, course # and instructor, double-space, and use a staple or I won't accept your paper and you'll be deducted marks for lateness." Sometimes they still get it wrong. GAH.
What's
writing ComMentslike this
The hilarious thing is that when you give a class stern and specific instructions, the ones who find them relatively easy to fulfill come in trembling, saying, "I really hope this is what you wanted! I'm terrified that I forgot to do something the way you told us to!" while some other schmuck comes up with a handwritten half-page and mumbles, "Yo, pafessah. My printer broke an' shit."
I just use LaTeX's article class, and \maketitle for titles. Once or twice I think I've had to use the fancyhdr package to accomodate weirdos like bphd.
"When calm, I always opt for the 'People can't do what you want if they get distracted by how you're saying it' line of reasoning."
I used to start banging my head against the wall when that sound observation would inevitably be met (and there's always someone subliterate who wanders into any online fora sooner or later to say it) with a variant of "oh, you're just hung up on unimportant matters that distract from what My Important Ideas Are; you need to lighten up, and stop obsessing about details no one cares about," but nowadays I just note that they're a subliterate moron and move on.
Of course, their phrasing is always more like "you so stupid for, caring ab9out trevea!!!!! geta life,,, and quit being sush an ashole!!!!! Its what i say that maters!!"
I always love people who try to explain that in written discussion, the actual ordering of words and sentences matters not; it's the "ideas" that count, and focusing on mere writing and coherency is an irrelevant distraction, and you are being a dreadful elitist for suggesting otherwise.
Apparently words and punctuation are mere items of magic via which, if we properly focus our minds, we can transmit pure abstract ideas, due to the sheer intense brilliant correctness of the wonderful notions we are broadcasting from inside our heads. Don't get in my way with snobbish your obsessions about grammar and punctuation!!!!!!! Your jus tring to destract that Im rigght!!
There. I feel better now.
37: You'd have to do more than that to accomodate me, Ben.
typoing a soducment is the ifuynnnest thing i can think of doiing in the right order and the oamy bnraint and my fingrd get our of syunc diveringsssss
Only a select company [nsfw] can manage that feat, B.
Copy the link into the address bar, it's a hotlinking thing.
I can't be bothered. I'm going out to dinner, and your links bore me. I'm very demanding.
B, I think you may have been responsible for that link. (The link in B's comment is NSFW if you click through, perfectly safe if you copy and paste.)
It's probably crucial that Bitch did not view that image immediately before dinner.
I accept students' papers electronically these days, and I usually just point out that it's totally obvious if they adjust the margins by a quarter-inch and the font to 11 point, and I don't care that damn much if they go onto a sixth page, no one has ever been failed for going onto the sixth page, so who the hell are you trying to kid, but if they change the paper type to A4 to make it fit, the printer WILL eat their paper and make me completely cranky and I don't give A's when I'm cranky.
text has been looking at my special place again.
in fact, tia, I think that's the only way for me to regain my sight. otherwise I'm going to start committing a lot more typos.
Not to worry, I won't let you languish sightless, my poor text!
Use your long white stick to find the way.
That's because you tried to put it in before you were ready. You have to read the instructions. Pass your fingers over the bumps.
it's taking me awhile to figure out what the bumps say. But I'll keep at it. Got any hints?
Public displays of affection are banned!
(58: psst, text, were the wives with the cats in bags *really* going to St. Ives?)
You know, it's underspecified. Yeah, the riddle goes "as I was going to St. Ives', I met a man with &c". But who knows—maybe they were also going there. Or maybe just the man was going there. After all, if you say "I met a man with two wives", that doesn't mean you met all three of them. You might have just met the man—the man who has two wives.
And then there are all the other people the riddle doesn't explicitly mention who might have been going there as well. All you can tell is that at least one person was going there.
I should probably not disclose that I learned that riddle from Die Hard: With A Vengeance.
hey, butt out w-lfs-n. I'm trying to read braille here.
it's got something to do with a cat in a bag
The women were actually heading to the doctor and the vet; it turned out that putting cats in bags and then sticking your arms in the bags is a treatment for hives that's good for neither people nor cats.
Also, you can learn a lot from that particular Die Hard.
46: I am not responsible. I tried linking a picture of boobies and got that crap instead, and I warned people not to watch it. Not my fault Ben tried to link it on purpose.
Oh, Bitch, on the train today I decided I'd start a new genre of blog writing called "me-you slash." Instead of being pornographic fanfic about, say, boyband members, it'll consist of wild adventures involving me and people I've never met. It's going to be a great success!
Someone's beat you to it. If I take the time to find other examples in the archives, someone will post this before I do.
That's not really an example, since the author is not one of the participants.
Also, isn't what you describe better known as "creepy stalker fic"?
73: I'm sure you've the better background to judge, Weiner.
Wouldn't it be cool? The Adventures of A White Bear and Bitch, Ph.D., all stalkery, but it wouldn't be, and, like, everyone would know it's not. Ha ha. Ha ha. Right? Ha.
The best ever presentation of the St. Ives riddle was given by Walt Kelly. Albert was the one trying to figure it out and IIRC Churchy was telling the riddle. It extended for several days and was extremely funny.
Weiner has pioneered a genre of stalking fic in which the stalker stalks two people rather than one, and then tries to convince them to marry.
Tia was cold since she'd been separated from the rest of her Arctic expeditionary team. Cold and...lonely. She wasn't sure what was worse: the knowledge that she could not survive for long in the subzero temperatures, or the devastating isolation of the windswept ice floes. She couldn't help but think back to nights spent by the fire with the sensual companionship of a gentleman friend, and as hypothermia set in her mind traveled even further back, into her childhood, to warm nights in bed with her favorite teddy bear, a white bear she'd named Fluffy. Now, minutes from her final repose, she fluttered her eyes open, and thought she saw Fluffy come back to her, only more majestic than ever before, as if he real polar bear. "I'm hallucinating," Tia thought. "In a moment I'll see a white light." But to her surprise, she felt herself moving closer to consciousness as a warm puff of breath tickled her neck, and then an insistent tongue licked her ear. She saw a pair of warm, brown eyes gazing lovingly back at her. Could this be real?...
(Happy, Emerson?)
Were you ever out in the Great Alone,
when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in
with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf,
and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world,
clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red,
the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . .
hunger and night and the stars.
79 -- you totally ripped that off from "Eight Below".
I just dropped an open bottle of molasses, which rolled around for a while without seemingly spilling a drop. Yay viscosity!
But it did spill many drops, only it did not seemingly spill them. Tricksy molasses!
Let's see, so far I've been pwned in comments 74, 78, and 84. Anyone else want a whack?
Your fruit, it is low hanging. May I...whack it?
Most consumer-grade bottles of molasses contain significant impurities, originating from the other, less desirable parts of the mole.
Tia and I learned about that from the same chemistry teacher.
Everything I can do, you can do pwner.
You can do anything pwner than me.
Should be "no I can't" to be sensical.
I failed to notice the full extent of the change from the regular lyrics.
Unless "you" is rigid all of a sudden.
Or 89 and 90 were addressed to the same person.
Technically I think 88 was a farb.
"I posted about this last year."
The term is used, of course, with the greatest of affectionate respect. But you have posted about pretty much everything last year. (Or, in the case of breaking news, sometimes as recently as six months ago.)
Yes, the affectionately respectful idea is that the farb is your thing, as trying to fix up co-commenters and calling "pwned!" on preemptive comments is mine.
Occasionally appearing in a more explicit form.
I object to 94. I did not link my own comment.
I was going to point out that the same thing is true of the comment linked in 94, but it turns out that there is mysteriously no comment linked in 94. (I Do My Thing.)
