Yes, back to this nut again. Just entering some text into an online form on lulu.com. In Word where I prepared the text it counts the characters [with spaces] as 999. On lulu.com it rejects the text as over 1024 characters.
I didn’t realise characters could be counted indifferent ways. Surely:
characters
…is 10 characters whether you look at it from the left or right or upside down. No doubt there’s some reasonable explanation that is not immediately transparent or adjustable to the user [in this case me]. Perhaps they don’t mean the same thing when they say characters, or there’s a typo error in the programming in terms of the max or something.
This is what, in stress terms, is called a daily hassle. Something which should not occur. An error, or a miscommunication, that, presuming innocence on whosoever’s part, frustrates a third party [you or me], adding to the hindrances of getting through the day.
So how do you deal with it? Contemplate blaming the ‘offending’ parties? Those who created these conflicting [and thus 'poor' designs]. Dream of exercising retribution? Comply with whichever seems to be blocking progress [in this case the rejector lulu.com], which reinforces their position whether or not it’s right or wrong? Spend more of your precious time looking for an alternative? Pull your already thinning hair out [mine's thinnning even if yours is full and rlowing!]? Swear? Go and have a cup of tea? and scotch or a glass of wine or two? Pray for a simpler life? Leave it?
It’s that old chestnut of a phrase:
The straw that broke the camel’s back.”
It’s those daily hassles that tend to increase in an increasingly large, complex and misaligned organisation, society or world.
Mmm.
No wonder the more ‘advanced’ nations tend to have higher stress [only one factor of course].
Finn
PS: I complied to lulu.com [even though I trust Word ’s count, and rationalised it as pragmatism as I’d like to get through some other stuff before the end of the day and my hair’s very short so it’s hard to pull out!
PPS:
On the lulu.com site the 1024 characters could be incorrectly set. You see, the error message you get is:
The description cannot be more than 1024 characters. Please shorten your description.
Just by the form is a help button. When revealed, the first sentence is:
The description is a brief synopsis (max 1000 characters) for your book’s item page.
In complying with lulu.com, whatever their criteria, the text was rejected when Word had a character count of 982, and accepted on my next attempt of 968.
Maybe, unlike me, they didn’t do lots of maths at school, or perhaps it was back to the camel:
a camel is a horse designed by committee.”
The quote that is taken to mean once there are too many folk involved the design is not what was asked for…more on the next post [a different take on it.
PPPS: Look out for my upcoming book on stress and relaxation – I’ll let you know once I’ve checked it’s fine on lulu.com!
Tags: Challenge, Design, Information, Perspectives, Stress
The problem is that word counts the characters that you can see. Websites on the whole count all characters including white space (tabs, new lines etc.) because that is how much space that is required in the database to store the message. So both Word and the website are correct, they are just defining ‘character’ a different way.
Thanks for the pointer to your blog
Regards
Chris