Sun Sep 10 17:42:33 EDT 2000 Notes On PUN (NoPUN) This is a not-so-brief note preparing you for a terrible chain of narratives put together under the title of pun. I may put these things on my homepage, once I make one (If you are reading it on my homepage, you know it has already been done. But it is an unlikely prospect right now; in fact I know it is an unlikely prospect ever- that someone should be reading this. But you should allow me the luxury of imagining that I have a wide readership). As of now my audience is limited to those unfortunate enough to have this thrust upon them via email (push technology, i guess). By now you must have got the general idea of how things are going to be out here. But it can get much much worse, and with out warning. Don't panic! Most mail readers (the software, not you) allow the user (that is you) to delete a mail without having to read it completely. So if you receive one of these by mail, you can delete it. The raison-d'etre of these notes is as a means of telling my family and sometimes my friends what I'm upto here and what things are like, around here in Princeton (but of course this is not the only means). But when I realized that I'll be writing quite a lot, and to many people, to reduce the effort I thought I would filter the common factor out of all those mails and put it down in a recyclable fashion. But like everything else, that purpose (of reducing the effort) is hardly served. Who knows, soon I'll be making logos and mottos for PUN: (I already have a motto: PUN indented; and I have thought of a logo in the Princeton University colours (colors?) of orange and black). A word about the style: I call it "write-only". I enjoy writing these notes, and can keep going on and on and on, once started. And I am in love with my editor vim (no, no, it's not someone who comes and edits these notes. It is just a software). But even I find it quite tiresome to read these. And mostly I don't. So that's my excuse for the poor style and typos and factual errors and all that. I do it in a very write-only mode (or mood, if you want). Another thing about the notes are the parentheses (like these). If you want I could send you a vim macro to get rid of everything with in parentheses. But if you are smart enough you could do it as you read- skip till the matching bracket. Mostly they are something I find interesting enough to write down, but not good enough to be read. (So probably I should enclose the whole passage in brackets). And finally, I don't expect anyone (apart from my family) to read all the rubbish I write here. But I'll be very happy if others did. (For instance if you have reached up till here in the intro, you could mail me and I would be happy :) ). All criticisms/comments/suggestions are welcome. And please read the disclaimer .