Ode to Courier New

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
fixed-width fonts maintain spacing for easily readable tables despite the rendering application,
and variable-width fonts are pretty but not very functional for engineers.

Thanks Courier New.
(Spaces weather changes in rendering applications much better than tab characters, too. Courier+spacebar=legible crossplatform tables. yay.)

Two spaces after period killed by HTML

This MLA page talks about how single-spacing after period is becoming more common and should be considered the standard in writing: http://www.mla.org/style_faq3

I wonder if HTML helped the downfall of double-spacing after period. Before the majority of the web was created by html-generators, authors typed their content in HTML markup that ignored whitespace beyond a single space, without explicit use of a non-breaking-space code ( ).

It could be that the wealth of websites whose users's browsers refused to render more than one space helped make single-spacing more common and accepted.

An interesting aside: Wikipedia is a very specific about spacing, quoting the standard spacing after a period as 1 em. I'm always surprised when wikipedia shows me extremely well-documented details, formalities, and histories of topics that I took completely for granted.

Est ce que tu parles francais? Entiendo une poco castellano.

My daughter has been picking up a few Spanish nouns from Dora and her friends lately. She's still young enough that she thinks her parents know everything. I'd like to keep this going for a few more years, so I started listening to the Pimsleur Spanish audio CDs while I drive to work.

They've started teaching me basics like "Good Morning", "Do you speak English", and "I am American". These are obviously useful to the novice Spanish speaker.

What's funny is that, when I previously tried the Pimsleur French package, it seemed like they were quickly teaching me things like "Can I buy you some wine" and "Would you like to come to my apartment" instead. Is there some statistic that shows that Americans learn French to pick up chicks but only learn Spanish for more traditional conversation?