SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us = tgdigby@netcom.com Issue 1 Feb 1, 1995 Contents copyright 1995 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. For more background info, details of how the mailing list works, etc., ask for a copy of issue #Zero. ***************** For the last few days I've been busy putting together a Web page. Since I'm running lynx via a Unix shell account and connecting at 2400 from an MS-DOS machine it will be built almost entirely of words. If you want to look at it, the URL is http://www.well.com/www/bubbles/ and I need a few more words to fill out the sentence so I don't end the URL with a period and possibly confuse people. As usual with Web stuff, it'll keep changing so keep checking it. ***************** Ever notice how one song can sometimes be sung to the tune of another? One family of interchangeable tunes is "Clementine", "Marines' Hymn", "Deutschland Uber Alles" (aka a bunch of other titles like the Christian hymn "Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken"), "Ode to Joy", "Reuben and Rachael", and probably others. ("Deck the Halls" is an almost: You can sing it to the listed tunes by cheating on the Fa-La-La part, but you can't sing the other songs to "Deck the Halls".) ***************** Someone remarked that you can't just stick a few flowers on your car and join the Rose Parade. But I think you could if you had a good enough spell of Mind Control. Just stick some flowers on your car, drive up to the staging area, and use the spell (or The Force or whatever you want to call it) on anyone who tries to question your presence, like the way Obi- Wan got R2D2 and C3P0 past the Imperial troopers in the first Star Wars movie. But be prepared for some awkward publicity in the media later. ***************** How can you check the level in a gas tank with a candle without blowing yourself up? Use one of those long thin candles you see at formal candle-lit dinners as a dipstick, without lighting it. Dip it in, then walk up front and examine it by the light of the headlights. ***************** NEWS not even the tabloids will print NOSTRADAMUS'S WEB PAGES FOUND Papers believed to be manuscripts of World Wide Web pages for Nostradamus, the well-known 16th Century prophet, are being studied at Miskatonic University, officials there announced today. The papers were given to the school by an anonymous donor who had found them in an old trunk in the attic of a house she recently inherited. How the papers came to be in the house is not known, but certain of the donor's ancestors had been minor nobility in France prior to the French Revolution and may have fled to America with the collection. Because of the primitive technology of the day, Nostradamus had hand-lettered the documents on parchment for later conversion to machine- readable form. This data-entry task is now underway but has been slowed by the less-than-perfect condition of some of the manuscripts and by the relative scarcity of assistants good at reading ancient handwriting. The html syntax is generally correct even though some of the markup tags don't appear to make sense and a number of sites specified in links do not exist. Some believe the discrepancies arise from modern misreading of the writing, while others claim the prophetic documents are being studied too soon. As evidence for the latter view they point to least one comment in the document that claims it is written for html level five, which hasn't been defined yet. Most Nostradamus fans are taking a wait-and-see attitude. Although some are suggesting that the supposed level five tags be passed on to software developers to hasten their realization, others would prefer to keep the details under wraps until future developments prove Nostradamus right. ***************** It's almost Groundhog Day, and if I wait until tomorrow I may see my shadow and delay this six more weeks, so I'd better get this out now. Tom Digby bubbles@well.sf.ca.us