Saturday, November 3, 2007
Woke up at 4:30 AM. Downloaded and installed Adium on the old Mac Mini because Trillian has been crashing a lot upon startup and I don't know how to fix it and I'll eventually be switching over to Mac. Looked at Halloween photos that Phil, Danny, and Drew sent out. Learned what LOLCODE is after seeing a comment of jowie's in bk's Flickr photostream. LOL! Caught up on blogs. My e-mail is inaccessible because my webhoster is doing a big server migration this weekend. That also means that some home websites are temporarily unavailable—e.g., tinaluu.org and lodestarquarterly.com. Breakfast: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer creamy vanilla cocoa; orange juice; hash browns; low-fat pig sausage; diced granny smith apple, brown sugar, and cinnamon in oatmeal. A modern-day irony: When preparing the granny smith apple for oatmeal, I washed it with green apple-scented Sun Light dishwashing detergent. Somehow Google isn't finding my entry of January 15, 2003 when searching on "natasha anne lee" so I'll provide an update of my rave review of Better Living Through Dentistry, which is the dentist office of Dr. Natasha Anne Lee, DDS (415-731-9311, 1317 9th Av at Irving). Since my first visit to Dr. Natasha A. Lee's office nearly 5 years ago, the office has grown in staff but the gracious service, tasteful decor, and attention to detail has remained. Indeed, after 5 years you might expect a certain wear and tear to the walls, equipment, waiting room couch, perhaps something slightly rusty in the restroom, worn carpet, or touch ups on the walls, but upon my recent visit the office I didn't notice anything amiss—it still looks essentially brand new, which I find amazing. Dr. Natasha Lee, DDS no longer does my cleanings herself now, but those she employs and entrusts to the task are either other dentists or otherwise fully qualified to do so. What's still striking is the genuine calm and relaxed pace. In other offices, I've often felt as though the office was in such a hurry to turn over customers that a certain respect for the customers' time and comfort was missing, and to me that represented a kind of greed which I didn't want to reward. Also, in other offices, they cram about 3 or 4 patient chairs into the space that Dr. Lee puts 2 private spaces, and I've always appreciated the concern for privacy shown by this arrangement. I work nearby, so it's an easy walk to her office, but it's also on the N-Judah and bus 44 lines as well as close to bus lines 6 and 66. The neighborhood at 9th and Irving just outside her door has plenty of nearby manicure salons, restaurants, shops, pubs, hair salons, and manicure salons for distractions before or after a dental appointment. Put in a photo and link to my Halloween costume from October 27, 2007. I've decided very recently that it is now impossible for Apple to rectify the situation with keyboards and keyboard shortcuts that has gone wrong for so many years, and virtualization has only made the situation worse. Yesterday I was using OS X 10.5 Leopard with Parallels running Windows XP. I was working with text in a dialog box in Windows XP and typed Ctrl+LeftArrow expecting to move the cursor back one word and instead my screen switched over to a new space in Leopard's new Spaces feature. I instantly knew what had happened, of course, having seen after Leopard setup what keyboard shortcuts worked with Spaces when I turned Spaces on, but then I disabled Spaces for now and also started thinking more about keyboard shortcuts and Apple and Windows and Parallels and realized that there is now too much complexity for any single person to easily comprehend or even fully document or understand the dynamics of the contemporary situation of keyboard shortcuts in scenarios like these. Installing Leopard screwed up my swapping of Command and Alt—I had to play with the settings to get it to behave more properly but I don't even know that it's behaving the same way as before—there are too many layers involved. Does the fact that I have both a PC keyboard and a Mac keyboard plugged in play a part? (The Mac keyboard is plugged in all the time but used only when I need to press either Option or Eject.) On PC keyboards for desktops I'm looking for the eject button which doesn't exist. On Mac keyboards for desktops I'm looking for the context menu key (Shift+F10) which doesn't exist. And Alt on PC keyboards doesn't let me choose the startup volume like the Option/Alt key on Mac keyboards does. On Mac and PC keyboards for desktops I'm looking for the Fn button which only exists on Mac and PC laptops. Shift+F10 never works reliably anymore, the context menu key isn't always available depending on what keyboard you're using at the moment, sometimes I hit one of the two keys left of the spacebar and realize that I hit the wrong one and there's a second or two of dancing while I correct the error. I realize that OS X and Parallels and other applications let you remap keys, but then you remap them and weird and unexpected things happen. For example, I remapped "switch to fullscreen mode" in Parallels to Ctrl+Shift+F and when I used it Parallels switched to fullscreen mode as expected but then in Windows a new search dialog appeared (the keyboard shortcut for which is Windows+F). Press Esc to make it go away, and now your newly mapped Ctrl+Shift+F has become Ctrl+Shift+F+followed+by+Esc. Some people swap Ctrl and CapsLock because the key left of A is easier to reach than the key in the lower left corner. Some people who switched from Windows to OS X swap the Command key with the Alt/Option key because on PC keyboards Alt is one key to the left of the spacebar and on Mac keyboards Alt is two keys left of the spacebar. Some people (I think) swap the Control key with the Command key because in Windows commands like copy are Control+C but on the Mac the same command is Command+C. All of these differences and problems are only a tiny fraction of everything that's wrong today. For all this presumed virtualization productivity, this is, to me, a great price to pay. It's almost enough to make hardcore keyboarders like me want to go back to having separate computers and a KVM. What's needed is for the keyboard to be reinvented entirely from scratch now taking into account these kinds of scenarios. It needs to be adaptive to changes in technology and truly platform agnostic. It needs to provide every key I might need. It should, for example, detect when your current focus is Windows (either in Parallels or Boot Camp) and switch to a Windows-appropriate keyboard layout and, instantaneously, switch to a Mac-appropriate keyboard layout if, for example, you switch out of Parallels and into OS X. As far as I understand, no keyboard can do this today. I see Apple as being largely responsible for this mess because as designers of both the hardware and operating system software that all Mac users use they have all the power to rectify the situation, and they've had this power since 1985. If anything can be done to save this, I believe only Apple can do it (but I'm not holding my breath given Apple's history of input devices). It needs to just work. Data gloves, large multitouch screens, I don't care. Someone just fix this—please! House chores. Closed a bank account. Bought gifts for Patrick at the drug store. Took the car to the car wash. Sunbathed in Dolores Park—it was very hot and sunny today, just like a summer day. Visited with Mom Ryan. Bought groceries at Mollie Stone's. Picked up Chris for dinner, ate at Chow on Church. He had either smiling noodles or garden noodles. I had pork chops with (broccoli rabe?) and polenta. For dessert we shared an order of ginger cake with pumpkin ice cream and whipped cream. All the food was delicious and the wait staff was friendly and mostly efficient. We liked this experience, and Chris particularly liked the dessert. Walked around the Castro. Dropped Chris off. Home.