Starship Asterisk*

Yesterday was the final of the European Song Contest, which many Swedes think of as the World Championship of popular music. Well, after all, ABBA won the European Song Contest back in 1974, and after that victory they conquered the world. So winning in Europe and being top of the world is the same thing, right?
Last night, Swedish singer Loreen won this year's European Song Contest with the song Euphoria. It's a good song, in my opinion.

It remains to be seen if Loreen will conquer the world!
Ann

Ann, thanks for putting up that clip I really enjoyed seeing Agnetha again; oh my!, how that takes me back!

I haven't watched the interminable "Eurovision" for quite a number of years now . .

As for Loreen, congratulations to her and Sweden, but I'm not sure she'll quite have the appeal and staying power that Abba undoubtedly had.

starstruck wrote:As for Loreen, congratulations to her and Sweden, but I'm not sure she'll quite have the appeal and staying power that Abba undoubtedly had.

I thought the song was just okay... typical commercial pop, not really my style. The performance style was interesting though. She came across to me as a witch casting some sort of magical spell.

Congrats Sverige!


I dont have a TV-Set...and I don't miss it, only when I like watch a movie on a big screen....I have internet, which is much better.

I watch shows etc on homepages, which is more and more common here and I do not have to bother with commercials a lot.

I watched most of ESC delayed.

My top 3 are:

Russia: ♥♥♥ you gotta love the ladies ♥♥♥ I loved the 86 old lady, she is so cute, wow, I am even not half her age and she is very dynamic
Denmark: Was genuine to me and I enjoyed the performance ♥♥
Ireland: sympathic guys, very hyperactive ♥


I think it is good to know that Turkish people are tolerant enough to choose a Turk, who is jewish, to represent the country, but I dont like the song at all.

My ears got really hurt when I tried to listen to Albania...I love opera but this was torture of my eardrums...

Moonlady, thanks for spelling "Sweden" in Swedish!

So you don't have a TV. Well, I watch very little TV, but I would miss it if I didn't have one. I do watch the news and weather report on TV, usually at six o'clock, every night.

I agree with you that the Russian ladies were adorable, particularly the 86-year-old! I enjoyed the Irish twins, too: not so that I would vote for them, but they were fun to see. The Danish girl left me relatively unimpressed, though.

As for Turkey, it was actually one of my favorites! I loved when they turned their clothes into a "boat"!

Tell me, Moonlady, where did you find those hearts? I have sometimes wanted to use a heart, but I haven't found any really small hearts when I have googled for them. And there are definitely no hearts on my keyboard!

Ann

Ann wrote:Moonlady, thanks for spelling "Sweden" in Swedish!

So you don't have a TV. Well, I watch very little TV, but I would miss it if I didn't have one. I do watch the news and weather report on TV, usually at six o'clock, every night.

I agree with you that the Russian ladies were adorable, particularly the 86-year-old! I enjoyed the Irish twins, too: not so that I would vote for them, but they were fun to see. The Danish girl left me relatively unimpressed, though.

As for Turkey, it was actually one of my favorites! I loved when they turned their clothes into a "boat"!

Tell me, Moonlady, where did you find those hearts? I have sometimes wanted to use a heart, but I haven't found any really small hearts when I have googled for them. And there are definitely no hearts on my keyboard!

Ann

I press ALT and number 3 at the same time, when you let go of pressing the keys, the heart appears, see ♥♥♥♥♥♥
Another way to express heart is <3, if you to turn that from left to right 90° counter clockwise, you see a heart, but the real heart is better.


I think the powers that be here should add more emoticons, I truely miss a moon, stars and sometimes a smiley hitting with a baseball bat.

Ann wrote:I loved when they turned their clothes into a "boat"!

The Turks went sailing off into the sunset naked

Moonlady, you've got a strange keyboard. Alt + 3 = 3 on my board. it does get a bit heavy when i shift though. Shift + 3 = #

Beyond wrote:Moonlady, you've got a strange keyboard. Alt + 3 = 3 on my board. it does get a bit heavy when i shift though. Shift + 3 = #

I'd think she has a German keyboard, which outputs different keycodes than yours. That heart character is a dangerous one to use in a forum like this, because it doesn't map to an escaped HTML character. That means there's no guarantee that others will see it as the author does. It all depends on your character set. The character is Unicode 2665, called "Black Heart Suit". The whole deck is there if you have the right character set in your browser: ♠♣♥♦.

Moonlady, how about a rolling-on-the-floor-laughing smilie? or perhaps a little red crab? As you can see, they each come in their own little box so you can't lose them. Also, the little red crab is imported from Turkey.

The character is Unicode 2665, called "Black Heart Suit".

What does "Unicode" mean, Chris? Can I find it on a "normal" keyboard?

Ann

Ann, Google is your friend: http://unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html

Well, well

The ABBA music is beatiful. Indeed.

owlice wrote:Ann, Google is your friend: http://unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html

Owlice use this one: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+do+you+make+th ... d+emoticon
Yes Chris, that is right, I have a German keyboard, I can type letters like ß ö ä ü

Beyond, that crab is cute, now stop playing with it and put it back into the sea!

Moonlady, you forgot to mention to use the numbers on the right side of the keyboard when pressing Alt. ♥ you anyway. I was going to show what you get with each number, but when i hit the fourth one, my post disappeared. So you all will just have to find out for yourselves.☺

Edit....upon further investigation, some of the ALT-number combinations make the post you are doing disappear. If you're doing an edit, the original post stays. So you will have to go through them all to find out what they produce and which numbers make your post disappear. IF i have time later, i might just do that and make a post of it, IF someone faster than i doesn't beat me to it. Here's #13-->♪

Beyond wrote:Moonlady, you forgot to mention to use the numbers on the right side of the keyboard when pressing Alt. ♥ you anyway. :lol2: I was going to show what you get with each number, but when i hit the fourth one, my post disappeared. So you all will just have to find out for yourselves.☺

Edit....upon further investigation, some of the ALT-number combinations make the post you are doing disappear. If you're doing an edit, the original post stays. So you will have to go through them all to find out what they produce and which numbers make your post disappear. IF i have time later, i might just do that and make a post of it, IF someone faster than i doesn't beat me to it. :mrgreen: Here's #13-->♪

In Windows, you can use Character Map (built into the system- just type "charmap" in the Run box if you don't already have a shortcut) to find all the characters available in each of your installed fonts, to copy and paste them into a document, or to see the ALT-numpad code (for instance, I use the degree symbol a lot, ALT-0176). In OSX, when you have the cursor where you want to place a special character, click on Edit, Special Characters to bring up the Character Palette. There are multiple utilities in Linux distributions for this.

Again, however, many of these characters tend to be font-specific, which means you shouldn't generally use them when posting to a forum like this. Safe characters are those with HTML escape codes (for instance, when I use the degree symbol in HTML, it should be inserted as &deg;, not the actual symbol from a font- otherwise, it will be rendered incorrectly for people using fonts that have the degree symbol in a different location). That escaping is usually handled automatically by forum software, so you can actually use the character, and the forum software should replace it with the HTML escape code automatically. But the bottom line is this: if the character you want to use isn't in this list, think twice about using it. Good practice says any other characters should be inserted as images, not text.

Moonlady wrote:

owlice wrote:Ann, Google is your friend: http://unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html

Owlice use this one: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+do+you+make+th ... d+emoticon

But that wouldn't answer the question Ann asked to which I was replying (even though my name isn't Chris ), which was "What does Unicode mean?"

I don't have a German keyboard, but I can still type letters such as é, ü, and ç, and symbols such as °.

owlice wrote:I don't have a German keyboard, but I can still type letters such as é, ü, and ç, and symbols such as °.

True, but it's a little awkward, isn't it? So there are are lots of keyboard variants for different languages that feature standard alphabetic and symbolic characters on their own keys.

To be clear, there are two issues in this discussion. One is the keyboard. No matter where they keys are, and how you access a specific symbol, the codes produced are mostly the same. For special key combinations (like Moonlady's heart symbol) that may not be the case. Sometimes that code may be produced directly inside the keyboard, sometimes by how the operating system interprets the keystrokes.

The second issue is how the characters are represented in different fonts. Unicode is a widely used standard, across multiple operating systems, and generally normalizes the most common symbols and alphabetic characters. But there are lots of specialized fonts, and there are characters found in some that are not found in others.

How you select a particular character varies with your keyboard and your operating system. The character that is actually displayed depends on the font you are viewing it in.

Beyond wrote:Moonlady, you forgot to mention to use the numbers on the right side of the keyboard when pressing Alt. ♥ you anyway. I was going to show what you get with each number, but when i hit the fourth one, my post disappeared. So you all will just have to find out for yourselves.☺

Edit....upon further investigation, some of the ALT-number combinations make the post you are doing disappear. If you're doing an edit, the original post stays. So you will have to go through them all to find out what they produce and which numbers make your post disappear. IF i have time later, i might just do that and make a post of it, IF someone faster than i doesn't beat me to it. Here's #13-->♪

Who on earth uses not the numbers on the right side?

I am waiting for the day when you come back here and show all Alt + number combinations till you reach infinity and make a second run for proof check!


Hey Neufer, are you ok? I am missing the history of ESC and how chinese people are typing with a keyboard!!!

Moonlady wrote:Who on earth uses not the numbers on the right side?

Me, for one. This is the first time i've ever used them. I guess that i'm just Beyond it all.

Moonlady wrote:Who on earth uses not the numbers on the right side?

People who've never had to enter numbers other than on an occasional basis. And especially, people who use laptops, which more often than not don't have keyboards with separate number pads.

And some of us deliberately buy short keyboards (very similar to a laptop's) to reduce the distance from the keyboard to the mouse. And then, for those rare occasions when we need lots of numbers, we can use a separate numeric keypad.

Rob

Chris Peterson wrote:

owlice wrote:I don't have a German keyboard, but I can still type letters such as é, ü, and ç, and symbols such as °.

True, but it's a little awkward, isn't it?

No. Or rather, maybe only for a character I don't type often (such as a thorn þ), but for letters with common accents, no.

Chris Peterson wrote:So there are are lots of keyboard variants for different languages that feature standard alphabetic and symbolic characters on their own keys.

Yeah, I used to have a Hungarian keyboard, but don't recall ever using it. No need to; I can get accents/diacriticals where I need them.

I just leave the accents off and hope the person who ends up reading doesn't mind. I remember trying to type on a keyboard in Germany and it was a tad cumbersome. Every nearby culture gets its own special keys and they share the multinational keyboard.

Chris Peterson wrote:

Beyond wrote:Moonlady, you forgot to mention to use the numbers on the right side of the keyboard when pressing Alt. ♥ you anyway. I was going to show what you get with each number, but when i hit the fourth one, my post disappeared. So you all will just have to find out for yourselves.☺

Edit....upon further investigation, some of the ALT-number combinations make the post you are doing disappear. If you're doing an edit, the original post stays. So you will have to go through them all to find out what they produce and which numbers make your post disappear. IF i have time later, i might just do that and make a post of it, IF someone faster than i doesn't beat me to it. Here's #13-->♪

In Windows, you can use Character Map (built into the system- just type "charmap" in the Run box if you don't already have a shortcut) to find all the characters available in each of your installed fonts, to copy and paste them into a document, or to see the ALT-numpad code (for instance, I use the degree symbol a lot, ALT-0176). In OSX, when you have the cursor where you want to place a special character, click on Edit, Special Characters to bring up the Character Palette. There are multiple utilities in Linux distributions for this.

Again, however, many of these characters tend to be font-specific, which means you shouldn't generally use them when posting to a forum like this. Safe characters are those with HTML escape codes (for instance, when I use the degree symbol in HTML, it should be inserted as &deg;, not the actual symbol from a font- otherwise, it will be rendered incorrectly for people using fonts that have the degree symbol in a different location). That escaping is usually handled automatically by forum software, so you can actually use the character, and the forum software should replace it with the HTML escape code automatically. But the bottom line is this: if the character you want to use isn't in this list, think twice about using it. Good practice says any other characters should be inserted as images, not text.

Thanks Chris. I did the run-box thing and took a look at it, and figured i'd save trying to figure it out for next century, when i know i won't have anything to do.
For now i'll just stick to the way Moonlady does it.

♥Ha, I got it!♥

I have to press Alt and write 9829.

Well, as long as it works! ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Ann