B5 page at SciFi.com

[B5JMS Poster]

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From: Ted Dennison <dennison at telepath.com>
Date: 16 Sep 2000 13:13:45 -0700
Lines: 57

Jms at B5 wrote:

> For those interested, a page with info about the show, and a small essay by yrs
> truly, is now up at:
>
> http://www.scifi.com/babylon5/welcome.html

A very touching essay it is too.

A few years ago I had a chance to go listen to you speak at a convention in
Orlando. I had a very low-grade headache at the time (probably due to caffeine
withdrawl, I later learned). But I sure wasn't going to let that stop me. When you
started to speak, I realized I had planted myself next to a badly humming speaker,
and would have to strain mightly to hear you over it. I wasn't going to let that
stop me either.

At the end of your talk an hour later, that damn speaker (and my own
hard-headedness) had caused the headache to blow up into the worst (and only)
migrane I'd ever experienced. It felt like my head was being crushed.
Non-perscription painkillers didn't even make a dent in it. 24 hours later it had
gotten so bad that I went to the hospital.

I wasn't mad at you for this, or even myself (as I perhaps should have been). But I
was very angry at the convention organizers for setting up the sound system in such
a shabby way. They should have known that the particular guest in question would
have fans so ravenous as to injure themselves trying to hear him over a horrible
sound system.

I bring this up now because when I visited that link above, I had a very similar
experience. I'm using Netscape on Windows2K. The text of your essay there is almost
completely unreadable on my system. It is both fuzzy and incredibly tiny. But being
the hard-headed fan that I am, I just dropped my screen resolution to 640x480 and
squinted real hard. I managed to read through it that way, but I still had to guess
at a lot of the words from general shape and context.

Doing a little more playing around, I discovered that the font is much more legible
on my disused copy of InternetExplorer (still *way* too small, though). Clearly
this was created by some IE user who never even bothered to see how it looks on
other browsers. But instead of only injuring a few dunderheads in one little talk
to about 100 people, I could see this technical gaffe causing Netscape-using fans
all over the world to injure themselves trying to make out what you are saying.

Anyway, I ask that you speak to the web designers at SCIFI.com about this, before
anyone else gets hurt. In the meantime, other readers here should be warned to
*not* try and follow this link with Netscape (or perhaps any others at SCIFI.com,
if this one is representative).

This dunderhead is going to go take an asprin now...

--
T.E.D.

Home - mailto:dennison at telepath.com  Work - mailto:dennison at ssd.fsi.com
WWW  - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html  ICQ  - 10545591




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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Date: 16 Sep 2000 20:10:51 -0700
Lines: 19

>Anyway, I ask that you speak to the web designers at SCIFI.com about this,
>before
>anyone else gets hurt.

Already done.  They should have it modified by the first part of next week.

 jms

(jmsatb5 at aol.com)
B5 Official Fan Club at:
http://www.thestation.com
(all message content (c) 2000 by
synthetic worlds, ltd., permission
to reprint specifically denied to
SFX Magazine)




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