The Double Space

I was born in 1972. That makes me old. Maybe you don’t think 41 is old. I think its old. I feel old. Things are changing around me all the time. When I was growing up, you had to dial a number on the phone by spinning the rotary thing. Then touch tone came in style and it cost extra to have with your phone service.

I can remember our kitchen phone having a cord that was 10 miles long. You could go from the phone all the way into the living room…almost. If you came in and someone was on the phone, you had to either limbo or step over it and hope that you wouldn’t trip and fall.

Then there were the cordless phones with the pull out antennas. I remember when we got one of those. I felt so cool! I felt like I was as cool as Tubbs and Crocket on Miami Vice. Well, I felt cool until I broke the dumb, cheap antenna off. I think they made those things out of aluminum foil.

I remember when you had to push a button with your foot on the floor of the car to flip the bright lights off and on. It was called a toggle switch. I remember having to put a quarter on the needle to get it to play through the scratch in the record–and if you didn’t understand that, too bad. I remember having to load software onto a computer with a cassette tape. Then there were floppies. Then there were Zip Drives.

I am old.

As one gets old, there comes a need to change with the times. I don’t use a rotary phone anymore. I have an iPhone. I am very proficient at it, I might add. I have adapted to change very well. I am fully functional with any computer. I can even handle a 3.5” floppy still–I work for a church, some of our computers are really old.

Except for two things…both of which are grammatical changes in English. The first is the use of the comma. I was taught in school by Mr. Paupier and Miss Ashby to use a comma before the and as I was writing a list in a sentence. Thus, one would write, “I went to the grocery store, the mall, and the gas station.” Makes sense. Unfortunately, for me, that has changed. It is not socially acceptable to put the comma in anymore. Or at least that is what I have been told. I stand in rebellion and put it in ALL the time!

The other change is the double space. When I took typing back in 1988, Ms. whatever her name was (I said I was old) taught us to put two spaces after a period while typing. When we hand wrote things, you alway put a little more space between the end of one sentence and a new one. The double space translated over our writing style for the typewriter. The world was at peace.

I guess that isn’t acceptable anymore. Like I care. I continue to put them in wherever I put a period. (See, there I did it again. You can’t see it, but I put in in there. I’ll explain in a moment.) If you were to get an email from me you would see them all over the place. I have the settings in the auto correct in Microsoft Word to make sure they are there, if by chance I miss one.

Unfortunately, I work a lot on the internet. I have this blog that I’ve been writing to for ages. I manage the website for South Lansing Christian Church. For some reason, the people that wrote HTML and the laws of the internet decided to follow a different rule than I was taught. Maybe they made up the rule and the rest of the world chose to follow along. All I know is that it messes up what I do.

There are things you simply can’t unlearn. I play the guitar. I didn’t have formal training–I learned on my own. In turn, the position of my left hand at times is totally wrong. I learned wrong. I made do and can handle my own, but I can’t play an A Bar chord for nothing. I’ve tried to learn the right way. It just don’t work.

It is the same way with the double space after a period. I can’t unlearn it. I did it right that time, but it was only because I was thinking of it. Every other time my brain is in high gear and the double space simply happens without thought.

Unfortunately, when I type things into a web browser–blog posts like this one, the world wide web has no idea how to handle my double space. It actually sees it as a double space and puts it in there. Nice of it to do what I ask it to do. The problem is, when there is a double space at the end of a line and the line break happens in between the two spaces, the next line is thrown off…because the space is there. Look at pretty much any post before this one and John 1 and you will randomly see the extra spaces on the left hand of the text. If you resize your window some of them will go away. They don’t care. They come and go as they choose depending on where they fall at the end of the line.

I sort of ignored them on this blog simply because its my personal page. Its my statement of defying the system that chose to make a dumb change. However, I can’t deal with the extra spaces on the church website (nor can my Sr. Minister).

This put me on a quest to solve my problem. I needed to find a program that will let me double space, interpret it as only one space, and ignore my rebellion. That program was MOU. It is the program I am writing in right now. It uses a system of coding called Markdown. It allows you to type and add style through some simple keystrokes rather than having to move your hand off the keyboard and touching the mouse. Its really quite slick. And, some of the other programs I use also understand Markdown. So, I’ve been learning the coding…which leads me to here.

The other day I wrote a blog post on John 1. Its linked above. I wrote it with MOU using markdown. It was supposed to go smoothly. But it didn’t. Nothing seems to go easy for me. When I copied and pasted it over to the blogger page, I either got my formatting for the paragraphs (a space between them so it is easy to read) OR bold/italics I had put within the dobument. I couldn’t get both to work at the same time. The double space issue was fine after my periods, but I had to choose one or the other of the above formats and then edit the other when I moved it over into the blogger website.

If you know me, once I have a problem to solve, I will dig and look and figure it out, no matter how long it takes. Simply fixing the problem by sidestepping it doesn’t sit well with me, especially when it comes to computer things. It goes along with my ability to write long, worthless blog posts about things like the double space.

Tonight in my searching, I found a solution. It was really accidental. MOU has some exporting features, which I tried and had some success with to another blog website. It only made things worse when I tried to cut and paste from there. So, I turned to the almighty Google and did some searching for Markdown with Blogger. I found success!

Stackedit.io is an online Markdown editor that can post directly to my blog, amongst other things. It keeps all the formatting I type in with Markdown AND it totally ignores my double spaces.

Its all for your benefit, so you aren’t distracted by the extra spaces that haphazardly appear at the beginning of the line.

Aren’t you glad you spent the time reading this? It looks beautiful on your screen! All is at peace in Wally’s world again.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be posting more blogs about John in the next few days.