al said:
Re bowerbird - ignore him/it.
i'm male, al. if you had been at the december 2003 meet-up, where we celebrated the first 10,000 p.g. e-texts, you would have met me, so you woulda known then. but i'm sure you probably knew that anyway, and were just using the "it" form as a mechanism of dehumanization.
Few, if any, aspects of PG (or DP) satisfy him/it,
don't be ridiculous. i love michael hart, the soul of p.g., the man who birthed the project, nurtured it to adulthood. the man's a saint, and he's smart too, with his solid focus on the text format as the backbone, to ensure a lifelong viability. i love all the volunteers, who have generously donated so much of their time and energy and money to digitize these old books, and persisted in spite of the shitty schooling and tools they had, working inside workflows that wasted their time on terrible design. i love the world, who embraced the project gutenberg library early, making it the premiere cyberlibrary, beating back half-assed efforts by other people who were enamored of some gimmick or another, whether in the form of proprietary formats or open-source snake-oil. i love the faq, which lay down some good advice on the .txt format, even if the whitewashers don't do any checks to ensure compliance. i love david widger for all the hard work he's done over the years... i love greg newby for offering webspace to anyone who needs it... i love the d.p. people who give me support behind the enemy lines. i love the d.p. people (lucy!) who support me in _front_ of those lines. i love the d.p. people who keep working on improving the .html format. i love thundergnat, for giving the d.p. people a tool they can use... i love all the other programmers who said "phuck you" to d.p. because programmers shouldn't hang out in a place where we ain't appreciated. i love the guy who programmed "eucalyptus" and thereby proved that you can create _beautiful_ e-books on the iphone from p.g. e-texts. i love the guy who programmed "eucalyptus" because he left me room to prove that you can make those iphone e-books _powerful_ as well... i'm sure there's more, but that's probably enough off the noggin...
while little, if anything, that him/it does, satisfies anyone else.
"that him does" -- didn't think that one through, did you al? -bowerbird