On 9 Oct 2009, at 20:07, Jim McKenney wrote: > I occasionally see postings with lots of gratuitous question marks, and more > rarely lots of asterisks. I assume these mean something else (or are > associated with certain email programs). Likely an encoding problem. Contemporary operating systems are all Unicode- aware and can (in theory) handle any writing system that's been Unicodified, but not all software gets it right. Also, you probably don't have the necessary fonts installed on your machine to render every unicode code point, so if someone sends you an email with (say) Chinese text in it, it will be rendered with some kind of place holder character. Unicode text is most commonly encoded using the variable-length UTF-8 encoding scheme. Under UTF-8, not all bit combinations are valid character encodings. In particular a leading 8-bit byte with a decimal value over 127 (i.e. 0x10-0xFF) is not valid UTF-8. A surprising number of web pages show mis-encoded characters that I suspect are due to software not encoding that range. Ob Bulbs: While driving out in the distant burbs, I passed a house with a large planting of /Crocus speciosus/ 'Albus' in the front yard, flowering in rather weedy turf. It seems clear that the planting is quite old and the bulbs have gradually spread from however many were originally planted. I've posted a photo of this on the Scottish Rock Garden Club's web forums: http://srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php/… -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate on beautiful Vancouver Island http://maps.google.ca/maps/…