Annoying printers

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 18:48:27 +0100, NY wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote in message
news
NY wrote:
I've always wondered... In countries where houses have mailboxes on the
roadside, how do they solve the problem of the postman having access to
the mailbox to put mail in it, without there being a problem with theft
or vandalism of mail by people walking along the sidewalk?

Sidewalk? "We need no stinkin' sidewalks!"

I only called it a sidewalk because I was talking mainly about US where
mailboxes are common except in urban houses which have front doors
directly
onto the road and therefore have nowhere to put a mailbox.

Who the hell would buy a house with the front door on the road?

A lot of houses, even in fairly affluent areas, in the centre of a city such
as London, have no front garden and the door is directly onto the road -
maybe via a short flight of a couple of steps from pavement to front door.

At least the steps provide a small transition. I wouldn't want a house where
you open the front door and the door frame is literally the transition
between your own private house and the public space of the pavement.

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 19:18:49 +0100, NY wrote:

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 18:48:27 +0100, NY wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote in message
news NY wrote:
I've always wondered... In countries where houses have mailboxes on the
roadside, how do they solve the problem of the postman having access to
the mailbox to put mail in it, without there being a problem with theft
or vandalism of mail by people walking along the sidewalk?

Sidewalk? "We need no stinkin' sidewalks!"

I only called it a sidewalk because I was talking mainly about US where
mailboxes are common except in urban houses which have front doors
directly
onto the road and therefore have nowhere to put a mailbox.

Who the hell would buy a house with the front door on the road?

A lot of houses, even in fairly affluent areas, in the centre of a city such
as London, have no front garden and the door is directly onto the road -
maybe via a short flight of a couple of steps from pavement to front door.

If you have money, surely you'd just move out of town a bit and commute in?

At least the steps provide a small transition. I wouldn't want a house where
you open the front door and the door frame is literally the transition
between your own private house and the public space of the pavement.

Surely kids would constantly be knocking on the door for a laugh as they walked past?

In article , Jimmy Wilkinson
Knife wrote:


I tried slotting it in by gravity, I tried pushing it a bit further, I
even tried gently pushing while it tried to feed it. It either didn't
grab it at all, or only grabbed one side and screwed it up, then continued
trying to print on it, whether it was there or not.


I have yet to meet a printer that jams paper.... No further comments nor
advice.

You must be using some very expensive paper, because everyone gets paper jams.

not everyone. actually, very few do.

"nospam" wrote in message
...
it's much easier to flip to a specific city or town, since they're
alphabetical. it's the side streets that matter, so only the last part
of the trip is needed, not the entire thing.

i've used both, and one city/town per page is much better.

As long as all the maps are all to the same scale and drawn to the same
cartographic standard. I think that was the most absurd and unusable thing
about the road atlas of my sister - that an inch on the map meant several
different things as you moved along the same road from one town to the next
and the next.

It didn't help that the overlap from one town to the next didn't specify a
page number to turn to, and in some places the name of the adjoining town
was not easy to see. With a grid arrangement of pages, you usually get a
fairly prominent arrow with the "turn to" page number in it, in all four
directions. And at least for two of those directions, you are turning to a
previous or next page, so there is only a problem of having to turn over
multiple pages for 50% of the time, whereas it is quite a coincidence if the
adjoining town is alphabetically before or after the one you are currently
looking at, so there is a problem 100% of the time.

I found that when I moved from one page to another, I had great difficulty
in working out where I was entering the new map because the change of scale
meant that there was no overlap of features to act as context, and you
didn't enter at the same position relative to the edge of the page as you'd
left the previous page.

I've never seen a map of the UK done that way. I wonder if that is partly
because we don't have the same expectation of always being in the
municipality of one town or another, with boundary signs between them, and
that it is quite common in the UK to leave the conurbation of one town, then
go into open countryside and then after a few miles enter the conurbation of
another town, having been in what is effectively no-man's-land in between.

There was something unusual with signposting of directions on road signs
when you joined a major road from a minor road. I think it was that the
compass directions for the two directions that you could turn were the
actual direction at that point, which only have any relevance if you know
which way you are currently facing. Here the north, south east or west on a
road sign (A1 North, A1 South) are the directions that the road ultimately
heads in, even if you might at the point be turning east or west because of
curves in the main road.

I never did feel comfortable at 4-way stop junctions (give me a roundabout
any day!). I think there were two reasons: frustration that they are
inefficient because you always have to stop even if you can see that the
road that you are joining is clear of any other traffic; and that they rely
on everyone remembering the order in which they arrived at the junction to
determine the order of setting off, whereas in the UK all our junctions have
position-dependent rather than time-dependent rules of whose turn it is at
roundabouts or major/minor junctions in the UK.

I drove from my sister's house to Cape Cod, and there is a huge roundabout
with many roads all joining it, just as you go onto the Cape. It was the
first roundabout I'd seen on my journey, but I coped well with it, because I
just applied a mirror-image of what I'd do in the UK (priority to traffic
coming from the left, choose a lane depending on whether I was turning
right, going straight on or turning left. A lot of the other motorists were
utterly bewildered. I stopped shortly after that roundabout and the car that
had followed me onto the roundabout happened to stop as well. The driver, a
Bostonian, complemented me on how I'd tackled it like a pro, with utter
confidence, and was even more impressed when he heard my accent and realised
that I wasn't a native and that I was driving on the opposite side of the
road to what I was accustomed.

One thing had me baffled until the penny dropped. I kept seeing signs "PED
XING" everywhere. Then I realised that it was always close to two parallel
white lines across the whole width of the road at right-angles to the kerb
(sorry, "curb"). Had there been zebra stripes and flashing Belisha beacons
I'd have worked it out much quicker: "PED XING" is sign-shorthand for
"Pedestrian Crossing" :-)

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
At least they weren't in one of the cities that got a brand new STD code.
My
grandpa lived in Leeds and his number changed from 0532 xxxxxx to 0113
2xxxxxx. He answered his phone with a pause between the new 2 and the
number
that he was used to, whereas I think the "approved" way is "2xx xxxx"
(according to BT purists).

I've never answered my phone with the number and thought it a very odd
thing to do. When I phone someone, I want to hear "hello" or their name,
not their ****ing number. What use is that?!

When I grew up in the 1960s, it seemed to be the common practice for
everyone to answer their phone with the name of the exchange and your number
("Hello. Bristol 123456"), so that's how I did it. I wonder if it was partly
so as not to give away your name to a stranger (who might have dialled a
wrong number or even a number at random) until you know who you are talking
to. That seemed to change around the 1980s or 90s, although it may also have
been that I was used to answering with my name at work, and just continued
that at home as well.

My step-grandma (wife of the grandpa in Leeds) had been a secretary before
she retired, but she had the worst telephone manner of anyone I've ever
encountered. Instead of answering with the number or her name, she'd say
"Hellooooooooooooooooo" in a dreary, dying-fall "I really can't be bothered
to answer the phone but I suppose I ought to" voice. Not very impressive or
inspiring. A few years after she died, my grandpa happened to mention the
way that she used to answer the phone and said that he was not very
impressed with it but never felt able to broach the subject with his new
(second) wife, and the longer he left it, the harder it became to mention it
later on.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
At least the steps provide a small transition. I wouldn't want a house
where
you open the front door and the door frame is literally the transition
between your own private house and the public space of the pavement.

Surely kids would constantly be knocking on the door for a laugh as they
walked past?

Hence the origin of childhood games of knocking at doors and then running
away, or tying all the door knockers together with string and then knocking
on the first door and watching as that first person set off the next
person's knocker which would set off the next one etc. Not possible on a
street where all the houses are set back from the road.

There is also the problem that you never have any privacy because anyone
passing by can look in through your lounge window unless you have a thick
net curtain.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 17:15:59 +0100, hah
wrote:

On 10/05/2018 01:34 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

[snip]

Please try to follow the thread! 'We' weren't talking about an
English-speaking country, we were talking about the US!

Isn't Trump going to make it English speaking?

Changing the locale from en_US to en_BS :-)

I fail to see what you have against Trump.

Well for starters, he's still alive and still President. Need I go on? :-)

Seriously, some of what he says sounds eminently sensible, such as putting
the needs of home industries before those of foreign countries that want to
import their good into the US, to the detriment of US companies. But his
dismissive, act-first-thing-later attitude to everything about the previous
regime or everything that isn't quite as he thinks it should be, makes him
into a buffoon. Boris Johnson is similar, but at least he's usually funny
and irreverent with it, and I suspect he deliberately puts his foot in it to
further the buffoon persona, whereas Trump seems to do it in all
seriousness.

I'm genuinely surprised that he's still President, and hasn't (yet) been
impeached or assassinated. I wonder what will happen in the imminent
mid-term elections if Congress and Senate end up with opposite parties in
the majority.

I can't imagine Trump as a great orator, remembered for years afterwards for
phrases like "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do
for your country" or "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the
other things, not because they are easy, but because they are *hard*". (OK,
JFK did also say "Ich bin ein Berliner" instead of "Ich bin Berliner", and
the former refers to a type of jam doughnut rather than a resident of
Berlin, but we'll forgive him for that.)

In article , NY
wrote:

it's much easier to flip to a specific city or town, since they're
alphabetical. it's the side streets that matter, so only the last part
of the trip is needed, not the entire thing.

i've used both, and one city/town per page is much better.

As long as all the maps are all to the same scale and drawn to the same
cartographic standard. I think that was the most absurd and unusable thing
about the road atlas of my sister - that an inch on the map meant several
different things as you moved along the same road from one town to the next
and the next.

they can't all be the same scale, since cities and towns are not the
same size. if a larger city doesn't fit on one page at a reasonable
scale, it will span more than one page.

It didn't help that the overlap from one town to the next didn't specify a
page number to turn to, and in some places the name of the adjoining town
was not easy to see.

it should be very prominent.

With a grid arrangement of pages, you usually get a
fairly prominent arrow with the "turn to" page number in it, in all four
directions. And at least for two of those directions, you are turning to a
previous or next page,

half the time is a lot.

so there is only a problem of having to turn over
multiple pages for 50% of the time, whereas it is quite a coincidence if the
adjoining town is alphabetically before or after the one you are currently
looking at, so there is a problem 100% of the time.

there's no need to go town to town and page by page.

take highways to the destination town and then stay on that page, maybe
one page flip if it transits to another town.

On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 16:42:05 -0000 (UTC), Lewis, another mentally challenged,
notorious troll-feeding senile idiot, blathered.


Around here people get very angry if you use 'it' for a baby. Or even
MORE angry if you use the wrong gender pronoun.

And troll-feeding senile idiot no.3 appeared on the scene to swallow the
abnormal Scottish attention whore's latest idiotic bait, hook, line and
sinker! tsk What a bunch of senile cretins!

On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 12:30:21 +0100, NY, another mentally handicapped,
troll-feeding senile idiot, blathered:

FLUSH another load of typical senile bull****

And idiot no.4 appeared to suck the abnormal gay Scottish ******'s cock! LOL

On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 16:38:53 -0000 (UTC), Lewis, the braindead notorious
troll-feeding senile idiot, blathered:

FUSH senile idiot's troll fodder

AGAIN? Does the unwashed Scottish ******'s cock taste THAT good to you? BG

On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 12:14:49 -0500, Mark Lloyd, the notorious, troll-feeding
senile idiot, blabbered:


together.* I used to be able to phone next door with only 3 digits!
I grew up on a farm 5 miles from town. You could call someone in town
with 5 digits (that lasted until about 1989 when they put in the ESS
exchange). But to call someone in the next house (on a party line), you
had to dial 14 digits.

And troll-feeding senile idiot no.4 appeared on the scene, sounding as
retarded as the troll he keeps feeding! LOL

On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 18:33:56 +0100, NY, another mentally handicapped,
troll-feeding senile idiot, blathered:

FLUSH senile bull**** unread

What has all this sick **** got to do with the groups you keep crossposting
it to? Just after a few replies to the abnormal Scottish troll and attention
whore, you sound as retarded as him! Such is the "power" of his idiocy! BG

On 6 Oct 2018 17:49:05 GMT, Frank Slootweg, another obviously mentally
deficient, troll-feeding senile moron, blathered:


The other way around:

Englishman in his best French to a sexy lady in the dining room:

"Je t'adore!"

Sexy lady:

"Shut the door yourself sir!"

And troll-feeding senile idiot no.6 appeared to suck off the unwashed gay
Scottish ******. Just what is it with all you lonely seniles? tsk

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 19:48:10 +0100, NY wrote:

"nospam" wrote in message
...
it's much easier to flip to a specific city or town, since they're
alphabetical. it's the side streets that matter, so only the last part
of the trip is needed, not the entire thing.

i've used both, and one city/town per page is much better.

As long as all the maps are all to the same scale and drawn to the same
cartographic standard. I think that was the most absurd and unusable thing
about the road atlas of my sister - that an inch on the map meant several
different things as you moved along the same road from one town to the next
and the next.

It didn't help that the overlap from one town to the next didn't specify a
page number to turn to, and in some places the name of the adjoining town
was not easy to see. With a grid arrangement of pages, you usually get a
fairly prominent arrow with the "turn to" page number in it, in all four
directions. And at least for two of those directions, you are turning to a
previous or next page, so there is only a problem of having to turn over
multiple pages for 50% of the time, whereas it is quite a coincidence if the
adjoining town is alphabetically before or after the one you are currently
looking at, so there is a problem 100% of the time.

I found that when I moved from one page to another, I had great difficulty
in working out where I was entering the new map because the change of scale
meant that there was no overlap of features to act as context, and you
didn't enter at the same position relative to the edge of the page as you'd
left the previous page.

I've never seen a map of the UK done that way. I wonder if that is partly
because we don't have the same expectation of always being in the
municipality of one town or another, with boundary signs between them, and
that it is quite common in the UK to leave the conurbation of one town, then
go into open countryside and then after a few miles enter the conurbation of
another town, having been in what is effectively no-man's-land in between.

There was something unusual with signposting of directions on road signs
when you joined a major road from a minor road. I think it was that the
compass directions for the two directions that you could turn were the
actual direction at that point, which only have any relevance if you know
which way you are currently facing. Here the north, south east or west on a
road sign (A1 North, A1 South) are the directions that the road ultimately
heads in, even if you might at the point be turning east or west because of
curves in the main road.

I never did feel comfortable at 4-way stop junctions (give me a roundabout
any day!). I think there were two reasons: frustration that they are
inefficient because you always have to stop even if you can see that the
road that you are joining is clear of any other traffic;

Why would you stop at any type of junction in any country if you know there's nobody else there?

and that they rely
on everyone remembering the order in which they arrived at the junction to
determine the order of setting off, whereas in the UK all our junctions have
position-dependent rather than time-dependent rules of whose turn it is at
roundabouts or major/minor junctions in the UK.

I find that insane! In the US you all have to remember the order you arrived? All four roads?!