semanal entry

[kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)]

Well, it's been a week or two since I last posted here.  So perhaps
'journal' is not a descriptive name.

I've spent about two weeks posting a lot to comp.lang.perl.misc.  Today
a long-time poster there told me he was losing his respect for me
because of some of the things I'd posted, and suggested that perhaps I
was posting too much.  I tend to agree; on review, during the week ended
Monday, I posted a little more than an eighth of all articles on the
newsgroup.

Today I designed fonts with xmbdfed.  I finished a readable 4x6-pixel
ASCII font; at this resolution, you could get 33 rows of 80-column text
on a 320x200 screen.  It's still mostly readable at 1600x1200 on my 21"
monitor at work.  I started work on a mostly-traditional but slightly
goofy 15x20-pixel font, but began running into ignorance problems with
the minuscules.

(I can't stand the traditional no-contrast block-serif fonts available
for fixed-width text, and I hoped I could design something a little more
pleasant to look at.)

Marilyn and I have been a bit at odds of late.  Today is the first day
this week I've left work before dark; she's on a trip to transport a
couch to her niece.

I went to Books & Co. to try to find examples of old (pre-1900)
typefaces that I could model larger fonts after.  What I found instead
were books on typefaces and typeface design.  Now I know what it means
to have a right-angle axis, and I know the difference between a serif
and a spur, and I can tell a bowl from a loop.  But I still don't have a
font.  :)

I did learn that "Garamond", "Baskerville", and "Bodoni" are not
actually typefaces, but names of typographers of centuries past who
created some of the best faces of their era.  Modern typographers have
created fonts after the style of, for example, Garamond, and called them
by the name of their model.  So there are many different Garamonds and
Baskervilles.

I left Books & Co. at 23:00, as they closed, and picked up a pizza on
the way home.

The person from clpm who criticized me suggested that perhaps I was
posting so much so as to get attention.  I think there may be some truth
to this; indeed, probably many of my online activities are attempts to
get attention.

Perhaps this is true of others as well; it might help explain why so
many people ask FAQs, and then get upset when they're told to read the
FAQ.  Perhaps they're looking, not for answers, but for attention.