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My younger brother (just 2 years younger) is a semi-professional magician, among other things. It's one of his avocations (along with musician) that I can relate to easily. As I worked on the fursuit design this weekend, it dawned on me that he might offer some little mime-like sleight of hand (sleight of hoof?) things that I could do to add interest to the character. It's nice to have at least one family member who won't freak out at having a furry in the family. At this point, I think neither of us is likely to surprise the other.
Anyway, he replied Sunday with encouragement, agreeing that it was a good idea, and sending a drawing of his concept of "pseudo-hooves" for the hands that would allow sufficient dexterity for simple stage or parlor tricks. I had suggested the linking ring tricks or possibly handkerchieves, and he countered with rope tricks as an appropriate tie-in (pun intentional, no doubt.) This was great.
What was not great: he did his diagram in PowerPoint, no doubt because it was the tool he had at hand and is most familiar with. Shouldn't be a problem, I have access to Powerpoint on Windows and I use OpenOffice on Linux which supposedly can read .ppt files as well. Except, he was using Outlook for his e-mail. Outlook has this nasty Micro$oft habit of burying attachments in its own private mime type, ms-tnef. In my experience, nothing but Outlook or Outlook Express understands this, so typically I end up with an attachment called winmail.dat that I can't read. Good old Micro$oft, trying to make sure that the entire market uses their product by defaulting to non-standard behaviors.
After some poking around and a false start with a Java-based decoder that just doesn't work, I found one for Linux that can read a winmail.dat file and extract the attachments. That did the trick, but why should this be necessary? We have international standards for mime and e-mail, yet the biggest corporate players persist in defying them whenever they feel like it.
(Have I mentioned before that I despise Microsloth? Probably...)
Anyway, he replied Sunday with encouragement, agreeing that it was a good idea, and sending a drawing of his concept of "pseudo-hooves" for the hands that would allow sufficient dexterity for simple stage or parlor tricks. I had suggested the linking ring tricks or possibly handkerchieves, and he countered with rope tricks as an appropriate tie-in (pun intentional, no doubt.) This was great.
What was not great: he did his diagram in PowerPoint, no doubt because it was the tool he had at hand and is most familiar with. Shouldn't be a problem, I have access to Powerpoint on Windows and I use OpenOffice on Linux which supposedly can read .ppt files as well. Except, he was using Outlook for his e-mail. Outlook has this nasty Micro$oft habit of burying attachments in its own private mime type, ms-tnef. In my experience, nothing but Outlook or Outlook Express understands this, so typically I end up with an attachment called winmail.dat that I can't read. Good old Micro$oft, trying to make sure that the entire market uses their product by defaulting to non-standard behaviors.
After some poking around and a false start with a Java-based decoder that just doesn't work, I found one for Linux that can read a winmail.dat file and extract the attachments. That did the trick, but why should this be necessary? We have international standards for mime and e-mail, yet the biggest corporate players persist in defying them whenever they feel like it.
(Have I mentioned before that I despise Microsloth? Probably...)
