h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Fair dues. I'll accept dumb.
These signals 'beep' for one direction (east/west) and 'twitter' in the other (north/south). Or perhaps it's the other way around.

One presumes they are consistent from one intersection to another block after block, but wonders what happens on an older curving road that evolved from a footpath that worked its way around obstacles like mountains and lakes.

Anyway, it's comforting to know that if a fella like me weren't so dumb, he could tell which was which and make his way around blindfolded. It'd be nice to always know east and west from north and south. But I'm afraid the Shania Twain will never meet.


~jwf~

Fair dues. I'll accept dumb.
These signals 'beep' for one direction (east/west) and 'twitter' in the other (north/south). Or perhaps it's the other way around.

One presumes they are consistent from one intersection to another block after block, but wonders what happens on an older curving road that evolved from a footpath that worked its way around obstacles like mountains and lakes.

Anyway, it's comforting to know that if a fella like me weren't so dumb, he could tell which was which and make his way around blindfolded. It'd be nice to always know east and west from north and south. But I'm afraid the Shania Twain will never meet.


~jwf~

That shouldna happened. It said 'service not available' and the content of my original dialog box disappeared, so I rewrote it and hey! waddya know, service was available all the time.

~jwf~

My original post wasn't meant to be anti American. Apologies if that's the way it came across.

But I do have another tourist one which shows people only comprehending one meaning to a word. Again I've been assured that it is true but I don't expect you to believe it.

A group of tourists were going round the house of commons, several years back, before Neil Kinnock was made leader of the Labour Party or was known to many people outside the Party.

Black Rod - or some other archaicly dressed officer of Parliament saw Mr Kinnock behind a group of tourists. Wanting to attract his attention he called "Neil" in a loud voice.

The Tourists knelt.

"some other archaicly dressed officer of Parliament "

First time I heard it, it was Lord Hailsham who'd got off his big fat woolsack ...

But the veracity of the anecdote is questioned by many sources. My favourite is at:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/misc/kneel.html

It's like the Indians said whenever somebody planted a flag and claimed a piece of their trritory, "How?"

Planting a flag and saying "I claim this land in the name..." doesn't seem quite enough to legitimise such a claim. Even now one has to ask exactly 'how' that is supposed to work.

Of course everybody just pretended they didn't understand the question and deluded themselves into thinking it might have meant 'hello' if not 'welcome'.


~jwf~

The contiguity of the previous posts led me to check on something I had previously intended.

I must stop reading these things.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/3/K0010300.html

Traveller in Time on his flag
"I claim there is not a single english sentence in Titerritory!
< A2508761 >

"

Oh, yeah?

" I claim this area! "

has a subject, a verb and an object, which combination unavoidably makes a sentence. Furthermore, I recognise none of the words to be usable in a language other than English.

Apart from that, it's a nice piece of publicity.

...to Ictoan.

Try holding down ALT and keying 239 on the numeric keypad then releasing ALT to get ´

Otherwise you could try 0180.

For ` use 96 or 096.

I have a whole file of these, do you think it's worth an entry?



rt

Yeah, the directional ones confused me too. The ones in the UK just don't tend to make a noise if it's more complicated than "all pedestrians get to go" (I should point out that ours tend to stop all traffic and let pedestrians cross, rather than letting pedestrians go in the direction traffic is going).

rooftiler,

"I have a whole file of these, do you think it's worth an entry?"

There are lots of folk who would probably burn you as a witch for knowing such things.
One thing to point out is that the "Num Lock" light should be illuminated and that "some" keyboards and fonts produce different results. I have a keyboard on which the upper case 2 key shows " but when operated, it displays ' and vice versa.

That said, I can never remember which is what, nor where I put any of the lists I have made from time to time.

Rooftiler, I would love to see an entry on this. But plaguesville is right. The things wouldn't translate to different fonts not to mention all the different keyboards h2g2 users might be using.

See A1007713 for a selection of 'non-English' characters and a few mathematical and currency symbols - all of which (I think) work in h2g2 threads for Macs and PCs in Internet Exploiter, Opera and Mozzilla

such an entry would probably be a good idea. Although I tend to use CharMap if I'm after something obscure or not on the keyboard. That way you can choose it from any font you want.

CharMap A map not dissimilar to those used in the second world war fighter command bunker. Small models of cleaning ladies with mops and buckets are pushed around the board to show their position. Areas of particular mess or spillage are indicated with coloured discs and the operators move the pieces around using rods with flat pieces of board on the end.

CharMap

This is more correctly written as CharmAP.
It includes all the ploys used by celebrities and politicians to try to achieve a positive response when dealing with news reporting agencies. It is not restricted to one agency, as may appear to be the case. Originally all the agencies were listed, in alphabetical order, but over the years there has been apocopation.

very good.

plaguesville,

'There are lots of folk who would probably burn you as a witch for knowing such things.'

It's spooky how closely that describes the responses I got at work with my lists...

Incidentally, I believe that having a different keyboard shouldn't affect keying in ALT+xxx codes, since a keyboard (setup) is simply a set of shortcuts attached to buttons and combinations thereof. Or something.

I would also have imagined that most (standard) fonts use the (standard) 255-character set, and certainly the first 127 should be ok.
There is also a difference (for 128 to 255) between those codes with a leading zero and those without, e.g. ALT-169 gives the Registered trademark symbol ® but ALT-0169 gives the copyright symbol ©. ALT-0174 and ALT-184 are their alternatives, respectively.

Confused yet? You will be!

six7s, thanks for that link! Good entry!

rt

rt,

Upon reflection, yeah - you've got to be right. There's much less margin for error when using the numeric keypad.

An hour ago, a colleague brandished a list of altxxx that I'd done some time back. We had an upgrade in the software and it seems that we're now operating on a cut down font, which no longer support some of the more exotically accented characters.

Needless to say, the genuine English characters are entirely unaffected.