Computers are weird.

[kiya]

teriel called me to ask if I had access to an ftp program; I said sure, I'm running a *nix (it's rare that the backend of OSX is that blatantly useful, but hey). Gave me info about the file I needed.

Ran ftp from terminal, got the file. File message included "File may not have transferred correctly." Well, okay. We'll see. Attempted to open file, Word said, "Are you sure that's a Word file? Open it from the Open menu to be sure?" I tried that, I tried from Finder.

I redownloaded the file. "File may not have transferred correctly."

Sigh. I email to notify of the problem.

I tried opening it in Appleworks, in the principle of what the hell. It crashed Appleworks so hard I could hear the pixels burning.

Um.

I tried opening it in BBEdit, a text-only processor.

It opened in BBEdit with lots of Word crap, but there was text there, at least.

I said hmm.

I FTP-downloaded it again in BBEdit, just to try at getting a clean copy. I saved it, in the hope that not modifying anything would leave the Word crap interpretable by Word.

It appears to now open in Word, complete with fonts and formatting.

Computers are fucking weird.

Comments

Re: the other thing...

[brooksmoses]

And, in particular, sneers at such modern UI ideas as having the "File may not have transferred correctly" error message actually say, "This probably means you need to specify 'binary' file mode and retry" even though that's nearly always what it means.