Fonts

I'm old enough to remember the days when computers worked in one font, and one font only. OK, it was a problem if you wanted to type characters in a foreign alphabet, but other than that everything worked.

These days we're exhorted, obliged even, to use a sans-serif font, which from my perspective is a pain. I've had a number of phone calls from people expecting to talk to Lain, simply because it's an unfamiliar name, and their font is set to something which can't distinguish between an upper case 'I' and a lower case 'l'.

PS: Curiously, there was an article in the Guardian (at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/20/in-defence-comic-sans-font). One of its advantages, for me at least, is that it doesn't suffer from the same I/l problem as Arial.

Blogger gripes

OK, here's one for a start. This blog is attached to my Google account which has a calendar. I created the calendar for work purposes only (excluding leave) and it knows I write in UK English and write from the UK time zone. Blogger is apparently incapable of copying this, so the first blog was apparently written at 2:38 a.m. because it thinks I'm writing from California. More mysteriously it's worked out that I'm going to write in UK English!

Digital scepticism

This is supposed to be a blog that I created as part of this wretched 23 things stuff at Cambridge. This of course leaves me with the problem of making sure that it's not public. Strictly speaking I've been here before, and have a blog created from a diary I kept of our last Antarctic trip. Not really the correct medium for a diary as the entries tend to get sorted in order by date of editing, which means that you've got to get the entries correct first time round.