Assorted rants

[jack]

Got to work late because of waiting for the bed delivery. Then got 8 hours of productive work done. That never happens! Why can't that happen every day?

Squeeeee! Bed!

Where would you put the "off" switch for a monitor?
☐ Somewhere you can't reach
☐ In a concrete bunker under the raptor cage
☑ At the corner where you need to grab it to adjust the height
☐ Anywhere else

How can you tell if a unicode ☐ character shows up correctly? :)

I added two more weekly resolutions to beeminder. It's a lot more convenient now it has a "max safe days" option, it's easier to make goals where you don't want to do a total amount, but want to do an approximate amount every week if you say "doing twice as much this week can give me credit for next week, but no more". But getting in to work 7 hours early, I wouldn't do, but if I did, would be equally unprofessional to getting in to work 7 hours late, not cancel it out. And no amount of cleaning now will mean I don't have to tidy again for three months! My new resolutions are 15 minutes of tidying twice a week (ie. not only at the last minute). And 15 minutes of practising some hobby (drawing, writing, juggling, etc) twice a week.

Personal pet hates, book blurbs that end with an ellipsis. LOOK, STOP BEING COY, THAT'S IMPLICIT IN YOUR PREMISE, IT'S NOT A SNEAKY SURPRISE, JUST SAY IT, WE KNOW THE PROTAGONIST IS GOING TO SPEND ALL BOOK JUGGLING THOSE TWO COMMITMENTS, TELL ME WHAT SETS THIS BOOK APART FROM ALL THE OTHER ONES WITH THE SAME COVER, OK?

In related news, I'm so averse to capslock that even when I am writing an all-caps rant, I just hold down shift! It's easier because my fingers do it automatically.

Come to think of it, why isn't there an italic-lock key?

Finished Saga vol 1. Beautiful and fascinating. I was somehow expecting less gore and disturbing situaitons, though, even if they were perpetrated by bad people. On to Vol 2, but not immediately.

ETA: In case it wasn't clear, guess who just hit the last day of "resolution to post three blog posts a week" :)

Comments

[cjwatson]

I have a theory that caps lock vs. hold shift correlates with vi vs. emacs because modality. Not sure how true this is.

Perhaps oddly I've only read Saga vol. 2 (after ghoti handed it to me). It was excellent even without context though.

[jack]

I guess that would make sense, but I'm not sure if it's true. I suspect most people's view on capslock comes when they first learned it, or maybe how they learned to type: I'd be interested if vi-people started using it again...

[simont]

I disable Caps Lock completely, to remove the risk of hitting it by mistake when I was aiming for a. I never miss it wish I had it back – like you, my fingers are quite happy to type a long all-caps rant by just holding one finger on Shift and adapting, and I don't even have to think about it.

Come to think of it, why isn't there an italic-lock key?

There is one, in any application that wants to invent one! What is Ctrl-I in Word, for example, if not an italic lock?

If you gave it a dedicated key and LED on the keyboard, so that there was one global 'italic on/off' state shared between all applications sharing an input device whether they had anything to do with WYSIWYG text editing or not, then (a) there'd be annoying fiddly corner cases to sort out (should emacs html-mode handle it by inserting <em> and </em> as appropriate, or just ignore it? should tex-mode insert \it? should text-mode insert underscores?) and (b) I'm sure there'd be situations in which you actually wanted to have one application in italic mode and another not.

On the other hand, I suppose this design at least has the virtue of simplicity. But also, it sets a precedent that WYSIWYG formatting features deserve their own keys, so the next thing that would happen would be: 'Great! Now give me a Bold Lock, a Small Caps Lock' (especially if you're Terry Pratchett), 'a Monospace Lock, an Underline Lock and a Strike Through Lock. Oh, and a safety lock to stop me accidentally turning on one or another of those locks every 20 keystrokes.'

[jack]

I'm sure there'd be situations in which you actually wanted to have one application in italic mode and another not.

Right, thank you for explaining why capslock is so annoying! :)

In fact, I think I was thinking of something in the middle, not assuming a global state, but assuming a standard short-cut key which many programs used, whether that was "change font style" or "insert <i>" or whatever was appropriate for what was being edited. But that might not be plausible.

I agree, having a special keyboard key for everything would be terrible. Although the other side of it is that any special mode should be clearly visible on the screen -- I don't get how people can ever use vi without it being obvious from the whole screen whether you're in insert mode or not, and capslock should tint the screen red or something :) And terminals on non-production machines should always be a different colour :)

[damerell]

Both Ctrl, and then I don't have to remember where Ctrl is, although if I'm feeling keen I make Alt-Caps Lock do Caps Lock.

Jeff Lait had a Shift pedal for rants and Modula-3.

[eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com]

Similar to your monitor rant - one PC tower design at work had the on switch entirely in matt black to match the rest of the tower, right up in a top corner near where CD drive switches usually are ... I think it did have a little on sign which lit up when you had pressed it, but of course you were looking for it when it was *off*, so that really didn't help ... multiple people had the slightly embarrassing experience of being perfectly proficient programmers who were, for a small amount of time, completely baffled as to how to actually turn the computers on.