email, digests, Unix, PC's Macs, etc.

["Patrick G. Sobalvarro" <pgs@sobalvarro.org>]

Folks, please forgive me for discussing this non-Leica topic, but I thought
I'd say a couple of things about e-mail.  I used to be one of those people
who complained about MIME encapsulations -- codgers, I think they're
called.  Someone would send me one of them HTML-ified, MIME-encapsulated,
JPEG-attached, base64-encoded, styled-text, URL-included messages, and I
would fire off a reply saying in plain ASCII, "Boy I was hackin PDP-10
assembler and pokin around in the guts of COMSAT core dumps and tellin
better people than you that they weren't RFC 822 compliant back when you
were playin Brick Out on your daddy's Apple II with one finger up your nose
and Twinkie crumbs all over the paddle so don't you DARE send me one of
them unreadable damn messages again!"

Time passed.  Working late at the lab, I hardly noticed.  Nights I would
come home and make my way up the walk, my feet rustling through it seemed
an ocean of maple leaves -- when had they fallen?  Fall, and winter and
spring and summer and fall again.  Each day the sunlight made its way
across the carpet in my office.  Models, programs, papers -- the days
rustled about me like an ocean of maple leaves, until one morning I awoke
to find that the Twinkie Boys had long since won, and I hadn't even noticed.

The future arrives inexorably.  It surely looks like documents in mail and
news and on the Web are coming together.  Plain text mail is on the way
out, and those who resist will simply find themselves complaining to more
and more people until they become apoplectic, suffer a debilitating
aneurysm, and die.  I don't want to die just yet.  If you read my headers
you'll see I'm using one of them new-fangled PC things with Eudora on it.
Eudora or Pegasus or Netscape Mail or Internet Explorer or what-have-you
are all a better way of reading mail these days than plain text readers, so
why don't those of you who are always complaining about styled text
messages save yourselves a lot of irritation and just get a modern mail
reader?  Many of them are free, and the machines that run them can be had
for less than even a budget Leica kit.  I will be glad to answer questions
in personal e-mail for any of you who need information about how to do this.

- -Patrick