Thursday, October 11, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Chatted briefly with student AP about how to buy a laptop and Apple laptop rumors. Lunch at You See Sushi with Ed, Eric, and John K. CSC meeting in the new Cole Hall, and many griped about the lack of wireless in our newly renovated, largest, near-modern, lecture hall on Parnassus. Finished the draft of the pharm sci resources page—now titled career research—and sent it to Carol for review. Helped Lucia with creating ZIP files and using yousendit to deliver. Dinner at home by myself: same as yesterday. House chores. Chatted with Patrick. Cut my hair, showered. Ironed my suit. Watched Hereoes 202 on the web. This time I had trouble with the player. I had to disable the IE7 pop-up blocker, install the Move player from abc.com as recommended in a forum thread talking about playback problems for Heroes, remove Mike's Adblocking hosts file, and—to counter slow frame rate problems from last time—run at 800 x 600. This is a weird coincidence, but my right pinky toe started tingling with a weird nerve sensation shortly after watching this episode. Jason and Ryan tipped me off to the Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard which appears to be very well designed except for the cut, copy, paste part—why waste 12 possible keys for functionality that way? Why make everyone learn something new when X, C, and V have been around for so long and still work? There's no advantage there. And if they attempt to accommodate such imprecision when typing ("so you'll never miss") why didn't they extend that to the rest of the key functions? Why aren't there 5 keys for Back, 5 keys for Forward, 5 keys for Select All, and so forth? An old Microsoft keyboard—I think it was called Microsoft Office Keyboard—had a nice idea that didn't seem to last. It had dedicated buttons for cut, copy, and paste grouped at the left side of the keyboard. A single keypress for each function, grouped and labeled properly. The only real disadvantage was that your hand had to leave the home row. Maybe you could do foot pedals instead? Still, I don't know any other keyboard that has labels for both Windows and OS X and has Command and Alt on the same key which is adjacent to the spacebar. Both Microsoft and Apple could learn plenty from the Matias design, and that alone might be reason enough to buy one. I kinda wish they made a split keyboard design as well.