That's what Germans call the usual plotting of the EU bureaucrats. Or, in good German, Regulierungswahn. It's a bit like mad cow disease, really. The other day I read on the internet that the EU bureaucrats have now a cunning new plan of killing the German economy. Allegedly, we shan't be allowed to have more than two sorts of bread any more. Now I didn't check the date of the origin of this future law; it may well have been on 1 April. The trouble is, nobody here would put it beyond the bureaucrats. The reasoning was, that German bread contains too much salt and hence isn't healthy, so there should be a law that our bread can only have some specified ingredients in specified quantities. In other words, an Einheitsbrei (pabulum) like you get in in all other European countries. If this wasn't an Aprils Fool's Day joke, it bears a few questions, like: how can they allow burgers, sweets, .... the list of unhealthy food is endless.

There were a lot of comments attached to the news, the majority of commenters being understandably very upset at the prospect. Some were very gloomy and said this was just the first step, and English will be official language in all EU states soon if it goes on like this. I think that is a bit exaggerated, though, after all, there's France between us and English as official language.

However, there are a few things that could do with a bit of pabulum, like formats of files. Now I understand that photos/pictures have different formats for a reason: gif is short for 'graphics interchange format, and from what I understand it is needed if you want to have an animated graphic. Plus, the quality remains reasonable if you reduce the kb of a graphic if it doesn't have more than 256 colours max. bmp is short for bitmap, consisting of the pixel data of a graphic and its attributes. Other formats are PNG and TIFF, neither of which I have a clue what they stand for/specifies them, and then there is jpg (or jpeg), which is short for 'joint photographic experts groups' and is widely used to save photos with up to 16,7 mio colours. I don't know the details about the various formats, but they're all there for a purpose, depending on the picture/photo you want to work on.

But what about text documents? You can save them as .txt, or .doc. Those are the two formats I'm most familiar with and which my PC opens without asking me to browse the web for specific software. Then there are .pdf files, which require you to install a software that can read them. They are incredibly slow to load on the www, and I always try to avoid them. Then there is .rtf, short for: Rich Text Format, another format, which can't always be opened. That isn't all, however. The other day a friend sent me an email saying: I got an attachment which I can't open, can you? I had a look at said attachment. Its name was 'winmail.dat'. I had never before come across such a format. My email provider usually offers me to 'View as HTML', 'Open as Google document', or 'Download'. With this file however, the only option I got was 'Download'. Which I did. On trying to open it, a box popped up, telling me that:

You are trying to open a file of the DAT (.dat) type. These files are being used by the OS and various programs.Editing or altering of the files may harm the system. Click on 'open with' to open it anyway, or on 'cancel' to stop the process'.

So now it depends on your curiosity whether you dare to go on or not. I clicked on 'Open with', which made another box pop up reading:

The following file could not be opened:

File: winmail.dat

The program with which this file was created has to be known in order to open it.

The search can be done automatically online, or you can manually choose one from the list of the programs present on this PC.
How do you want to proceed?

• Search the web for a suitable program
• Choose a program from a list

If you search the web, you'll then be led to a website offering a few links. I didn't see the site initially, because my noscript blocked it, which I didn't realise at the time. Searching from a list didn't have the wanted effect, either, as Edtor showed me a lot of rubbish¹. I uploaded it to google docs, hoping they would convert it to something readable, but for once, google wouldn't play. In the end, I renamed it to 'winmail.doc' and was able to open it².

As if this had been sent to me to prepare me for more trouble, the next file I got was shown as a lot of rubbish, too, when I opened it in MS Word. Only then did I realise that it was a .docx file, which rang a bell. I think that's got something to do with Windows Vista saving text files as .docx instead of the XP variant .doc. I removed the x (renaming it to just .doc) and could read it perfectly fine.

I really can't see any reason why there are so many formats to save a simple text in. Maybe I should email the EU bureaucrats who seem to have way too much time on their hands and no important things to regulate, attaching a file as winmail.dat, asking them (in said file) to pass a law that all text files have to be sent as .doc in the future. That would get rid of those annoying .pdf files, too. They'd have to negotiate with all non-EU countries. Erect some filters which make all other text formats bounce back to the sender or something. Maybe it would keep them so busy that they'll leave our bread alone.