March 2021 North Woods Journal

 

I realize that I haven’t spoken with you in a while. In fact, this blog is intended to explain my surprising quietude that is uncharacteristic. (How about that ‘quietude.’ I just made that up, then I was surprised that there is an actual word. I’ll need to remember that for my next scrabble contest.)

So, there are quite a few reasons for my quietude. First is the pandemic – with the forced isolation, nothing much has happened worthy of talking about. Secondly, I have been busy with other scribbling, (more about that at another time), and lastly, I have spent an inordinate amount of time wrestling with my computer.

You may know that I have two blogs; this one and another that vents my emotions concerning climate change. The climate change blog has been both a treat and an ongoing challenge as I have fallen into the habit of preparing twice-monthly climate change blogs. Of course, those blogs require homework, unlike this blog that is routinely made of thin air with little thought before- hand. The climate change blog has a list of recipients, namely, members of the local Citizen Climate Lobby for our Roscommon County and the adjacent Crawford County. I feel like  preparing this blog is an important task as the future of our world depends upon us taking action to remedy the problem before it is too late.

Before you send me a nasty note, I should tell you that I realize not everyone shares my view about climate change. You should know, however, that more and more people have become believers, including a surprising number of congress members from both political parties. To my continuing surprise, none of them have asked to see my blogs. They must know about quietude as they are all practicing it.    

This second blog about climate change is the reason for my recent computer fight. As I noted, I have been doing the homework, writing the blog, posting it, and then sending a notification to our membership that the blog is ready for their detailed examination whenever they have sufficient quietude to study my offerings. The listing of our local group changes regularly as we get new members, as folks change their e-mail addresses, and so forth. Our hard-working leader sends me regular updates of the membership list so I can send out notifications coincident with each new blog. Pretty straight-forward, don’t you think? That was indeed the case until the proverbial monkey wrench was thrown.

In this case, the monkey wrench was good news, our membership increased substantially when the national organization sent us a new list of members from their computers to our local group. I didn’t notice anything different when I received my copy of the revised list for sending my blog. It turns out that I had a little more to learn about sending e-mail notifications about my blogs. The new list of members had a few changes that I failed to notice. The changes still seem minor to me, but apparently the Gods of Computer Land think that adding a comma instead of a semi-colon is a major failing and unacceptable in the world of HTML and e-mail addresses. Adding names written in English is also forbidden if they are intermixed with e-mail addresses and God-forbid, doing anything that interferes with the function of the little carrots seems to upset the hand-cart even more.

Don’t know what the carrots are? I didn’t either nor do I now, but I think they are HTML characters that basically say, pay attention, or quit paying attention. Here is a carrot “<” and an uncarrot, “ > ”. You need to insure that you have one before and one after the accurate writing of each e-mail address if you want something to happen when you push the send button.

The things that I just explained took me several hours spent over several weeks before I finally learned that when they are wrong, no amount of swearing will make the computer do something it doesn’t want to do.

So, that’s my story. I expect that having learned my lesson about carrots, semi-colons and mixing names with e-mail addresses will finally give me more quietude and time to prepare my blogs. See you then, < Bill >.