A

"A" is also a: user

created by Yoz
(thing) by bewlay (8.3 y) (print)   ?   Thu Apr 27 2000 at 16:29:34

A language designed originally by Ken Iverson at Harvard University in 1957-1960 as a notation for the concise expression of mathematical algorithms. It went unnamed (or just called Iverson's Language) and unimplemented for many years. Finally a subset, APL\360, was implemented in 1964.

(Adapted from "A Programming Language", Kenneth E. Iverson, Wiley, 1962.)

(idea) by TallRoo (1.6 mon) (print)   ?   1 C! Fri May 18 2001 at 14:44:36
A major is, for most people, a simple chord to play. It is usually played using the 1st finger on the fourth string, the 2nd (middle) finger on the third string and the 4th (ring) finger on the second string.

A was the first chord I leaned to play, and I was disappointed with how hard I found it to finger properly. To fit three fingers in a row, they had to be at a wild angle: 


================ 
|  |  |  |  |  | 
|  |  |  |  |  | 
|  |  |  |  |  | 
|--|--|--|--|--| 
|  |  1  |  |  | 
|  |  |  2  |  | 
|  |  |  |  3  | 
|--|--|--|--|--|
My first finger was so far away from the 2nd fret that it never made a 'clean' sound no matter how hard I tried. Luckily, I tried other chords, and discovered that they were comparatively easy - so I didn't give up all hope, or the guitar.

The next day, I was at work complaining about my difficulty with A, and my boss suggested that I try an alternative fingering. It's difficult to explain without a guitar or a diagram in front of you, so... 


================                         
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|--|--|--|--|--|      
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|  |  2  1  3  |      
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|--|--|--|--|--|
The idea is to cross your middle finger over the top of your first finger. Although it sounds really difficult to do, your middle finger is, usually at least, longer than your first finger so it feels quite natural. With my comically large hands and fingers, I have found that it makes A much easier to play.

stewacide points out that three fingers are even harder to fit when making an A-major shaped barre chord further down the neck. His alternative is to play the chord with just one finger fretting the three strings at the second fret, while using that same finger to mute the high E (which is not needed of course, as there's already a low E in the chord).
(thing) by sighmoan (1.8 mon) (print)   ?   1 C! Mon Jun 11 2001 at 20:16:24
In lowercase ("a"), the title of a book facilitated by Andy Warhol
published by Grove Press, 1968

Though billed on its title page as "a novel by Andy Warhol", a was originally conceived as a transcription of a 24-hour period captured on audio tape, during which Warhol (who appears intermittently as "Drella", his nickname that was a combination of "Dracula" and "Cinderella") would hang out with some of the motormouth amphetamine abusers who facinated him with their "creativity" (Lester Bangs once observed, regarding an interview he had conducted with Lou Reed, that speed-freaks have to lie all the time, otherwise they would run out of things to say). Warhol later admitted that his scheme for creating "a consecutive twenty-four-hour tape-recorded 'novel'" had a few flaws--Andy was incapable of staying awake that long himself, and several sessions were needed to fill the tapes. Also, when the taping was done, the cassettes were handed over for transcribing to whoever wandered into The Factory, Warhol's studio. After a year-and-a-half of amateur typing, the resulting text was a mess--full of mis-hearings, spelling mistakes, inconsistent formatting and confusing attributions--nevertheless, it was published without corrections. At 451 pages of fine print, a is as intimidating as any epic could be, but with far less charm than, say, Finnegans Wake.

A sample:
(silence) (dialtone) (silence) (voices in between static) (dialtone) (Drella's making phone calls) (Phone rings) At the tone the time will be 6:27 exactly. (Beep) At the tone the time will be 6:27 and ten seconds. (Beep.) At the tone (click) (buzz) (silence) (buzy signal) (click) (dialtone) (dialing) (phone rings) B--Is Ondine? Yeah. B--Oh, fifty minutes of tape. Are you on the phone? O--Yeah. Will you talk to me for fifty minutes? B--Oh, of course. Okay, I'll take the, right here. O--What?
(idea) by e-troon (4.2 wk) (print)   ?   Fri Jun 22 2001 at 12:24:34

Everything Guitar Project : The Everything Guide to Guitar Chords : A

This is a high and funky version, good for alternating with the E chord in my writeup. Strictly this is an inversion (or slash chord), A/C#. 

-12- 
-10- 
--9- 
-11- 
--X- 
--X-

Notes, from the bottom up, are C#, E, A, E. Best played with a bar across the top four strings at the 9th fret.

(thing) by litui (3.9 mon) (print)   ?   Wed Jul 25 2001 at 9:23:00

Series of Single Lens Reflex Canon cameras beginning with the AE-1 released in 1976 by Canon Inc. The 'A' portion of the name stood for "Automatic" which was a selling feature of this product line. The AE-1 was the first Canon SLR camera with "Automatic Exposure" setting. In the case of the AE-1, this was shutter priority. The A-1, released in 1978, allowed for aperture priority as well.

(thing) by JDooty1234 (3.1 mon) (print)   ?   Sun Oct 14 2001 at 16:42:11
Also the name of a 1980 Jethro Tull album. The style had changed from rennaisance to sci-fi, and there was a much more computerised sound to the music, accented by Moog synthesizers. Also, their bass player, John Glascock had died in 1979.


In 2003 a super deluxe special DVD/CD 2-pack reissue was heralded by Tull fans. This package contained the DVD of "Slipstream", a concert/"video" show containing both live performances of Tull songs, and music videos for a few songs.

Tracklisting: 1. Crossfire
2. Fylingdale Flyer
3. Working John, Working Joe
4. Black Sunday
5. Protect and Survive
6. Batteries not Included
7. Uniform
8. 4WD -- Low Ratio
9. The Pine Marten's Jig
10. And Further On

Furthermore, the original issue CD is out of print. It sounded like shit anyway.
(thing) by Ti Nonso (1.2 y) (print)   ?   Thu May 09 2002 at 1:36:17
Letter stiched to Hester Prynne's clothing in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, as punishment for having a child out of wedlock in a Puritan community. The 'A,' which stood for Adultery, was a beautiful scarlet color, and bordered in gold. As time passed, and Hester learned to live with the symbol, the 'A' came to stand for Able, being that she was a competent, hard-working member of society.
(idea) by DoubleD (1.3 mon) (print)   ?   Sun Oct 13 2002 at 0:45:57
From The Demon's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce:

A.

The first letter in every properly constructed alphabet. It is the first natural utterance of the human vocal organs, and is variously sounded, according to the pleasure and convenience of the speaker. In logic, A asserts and B denies. Assertions being proverbially untrue, the presumption would be in favor of B's innocence were it not that denials are notoriously false. In grammar, A is called the indefinite article, probably because, denoting a definite number, it is so obviously a numeral adjective.


NOTE: The Demon's Dictionary was published by Bierce in the December 11, 1875 edition of the San Francisco News Letter. The Demon's Dictionary was later incorporated into The Devil's Dictionary in 1967 by Ernest J. Hopkins, thus creating The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, which, naturally, remains copyrighted.
(thing) by in10se (29 s) (print)   ?   Tue Jul 08 2003 at 13:55:37

One of the most useful HTML tags, a allows you to create an anchor between or within one or more documents. An anchor is typically some text or an image that marks the boundaries of a hypertext link (a.k.a., hyperlink). Clicking the link will take you from one document/resource to another. While the concept is simple, this is the driving force of the World Wide Web.

See also: area, map, link, hard link, pipe link, soft link

Attributes

To be of any use, the anchor tag must define either the "href" or "name" HTML attributes -- however, there are no required attributes. If either of these values is not defined at design time, they are usually set through a client side or server side script at runtime. Below are all the valid attributes for the a tag based on the W3C HTML 4.01 specification:

Usage

There are several methods for using the a tag, but all of them involve the placement of opening and closing HTML tags around some text, an image, or some other object. Here are some examples:

Standard Text Link - the following will link the words "Blow your mind" to the everything2.com web site

<a href="http://www.everything2.com">Blow your mind</a>

Standard Text Link with Title - the following will link the words "Joe Blow" to the Bazooka gum web site

<a href="http://www.topps.com/Confectionery/Bazooka" title="Blow some bubbles">Joe Blow</a>

Inner-Document Anchor - the following will specify the words "Jump down to here" as the location to go to for an internal link

<a name="inner-document-anchor">Jump down to here</a>

Linking to an Inner-Document Anchor - the following would take you directly to the inner-document anchor specified above using the URL fragment (#)

<a href="#inner-document-anchor">Jump down there</a>

Standard Image Link - the following will create a link from an image instead of linking text (this example links the E2 Jukka logo to the E2 homepage)

<a href="http://www.everything2.com"><img src="http://images.everything2.com/img/e2_others_01.gif" alt="Everything2 logo"></a>

Email Address - the following will link the words "Email nate" and would typically cause your default email client to open and place nate's email address in the "To" field

<a href="mailto:nate@oostendorp.net">Email nate</a>

Everything2 Support?

Technically, E2 does not support the anchor tag. However, by using hard links and pipe links, you can get similar results. By using these unique features of Everything2, you will create links similar to the "Standard Text Link with Title" under the Usage section above. When creating a pipe link, the hyperlink text will show the words you are linking, and the title attribute will contain the title of the node you are actually linking to. Hard links display the same text as the link and the title. If you want to use real anchor tags, turn on and use your Notelet Nodelet.

Common Browser Implementations*

With the default settings, nearly all visual user agents (web browsers) display hyperlinks as underlined blue text. If it is an image anchor, it will usually display a blue border around the linked image. Obviously these settings can be overridden with additional HTML tags, cascading style sheets, and various scripting languages.

Previous HTML Tag: !doctype
Next HTML Tag: abbr
See Also: HTML tags and HTML attributes

* If you know of any browsers that implement a link differently by default, please contact me so that I can add this information.

(idea) by DogDaze (15.5 hr) (print)   ?   1 C! Tue Jul 08 2003 at 20:19:13

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See also: @, ª, À, à, Á, á, Â, â, Ã, ã, Ä, ä, Å, å,