Why writing a blog in English? Cherchez la femme!
I've been lucky enough to grow into a multilingual environment. My mother was Greek. My father was a Spaniard. They talk to each other in French and my best friends during my early life were Swiss Italians.
At the age of five, I could fluently speak Greek, Spanish, French and Italian.
Nowadays I can "defend" my self using all the above languages, including English and a dozen programming languages.
So why I started writing this blog in English and not in one of my other mother tongues?
Is it because of the global acceptance and dissemination of the English language?
Absolutely NO. The answer lies elsewhere.
Cherchez la femme!
Yes, there is a woman, a beautiful young lady and a romantic story behind my decision to write this blog in English! Let me present to you this small story behind it.
Many years ago, back in my early college days, at the University of Patras, in Greece, I was in love with a fascinating girl, a talented student at the medical school.
I was about to send her a love letter. And I wanted to be unique. A kind of surprise, using the new communication trend: the email!
Have in mind that it's about the early '90s, a "stone age", compared to our time, regarding technology. A time with slow internet, if any, no WiFi, no mobile devices, no smartphones, not even cell phones. No Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber or Instagram.
I dedicated countless hours to write and perfect that important letter. It was written in Greek, the mother tongue of my beloved girl, so she could read and clearly understand my feelings. It was a romantic letter, full of lyricism and poetic influences.
Once I finished that email, I pressed with excitement the "send" button of my email client application!
A few minutes later, at my great surprise, I got a reply from the girl. "Interesting", I thought. "I bet she is definitely impressed and a great romance is about to start".
Full of agony, I opened the email. And here is what I received:
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐,
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐?
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
A☐☐☐☐.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐☐☐,
☐☐☐☐
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you can understand, the message was corrupted. It was a total "communication" disaster. Wrong email encoding and transmission from one computer to the other!
A ruined romantic momentum.
So much time, effort and feelings, destroyed by this annoying miscommunication of computers. Unreliable IT protocols and interfaces destroyed human feelings and a romantic surprise!
From that day I decided to stop sending any kind of emails (technical, business or romantic) to any other format than the simplest one that all computers could "understand": ASCII-7 binary encoding.
ASCII-7 (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the most common format for text files in computers and on the Internet. In an ASCII file, each alphabetic, numeric, or special character is represented with a 7-bit binary number (a string of seven 0s or 1s). 128 possible characters are defined. ASCII was developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
ASCII-7 is the simplest and more widely accepted encoding format, among all IT systems, from Mainframes to PCs, Macs, Mobile Phones and Embedded Devices, like a DVD player.
And the used alphabet in ASCII-7 is English!
So no more decoding errors and unpleasant surprises. No more concerns about communication. Just focus on the content.
Perhaps you might ask what happened to my romantic affair. Perhaps you might guess that ended to an irreversible disaster.
Well, on the contrary. I took, literally, the situation in my hands; I handwrote the entire email content into a letter. Yes, the letter was handwritten into the paper. Using a pencil and "crafted" by my hands.
I also painted her portrait.
And wrapped together with the love letter, I delivered both to her personally.
It was a great moment of joy. And I still remember her smile.
That was the start of a great romance!
The Cyclyst
P.S.1. Lessons learned
Lesson no.1: never trust technology for your romantic moments!
Lesson no.2: "ουδέν κακό αμιγές καλού" ("there is no evil without something good")
Lesson no.3: girls adore handmade gifts! (and food)
P.S.2. More than 25 years after this incident and while developing on Python, algorithms for the online service Graypes - that rates business ideas using AI - I stumbled again in front of the never-ending IT encoding "plague":
I smiled with irony, thinking that the IT industry is about to deliver autonomous cars, and decipher the human brain but still without resolving yet this simple binary encoding mess.
And of course, I recalled once more, the joyful smile of that girl of my past, when I offered her my handmade letter.
And I'm absolutely sure that, If as a young student, I had to live today a romantic affair, I would prefer writing handmade letters than sending emojis!
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