The World According To PTK

It's time to learn how to type, so I'm doing that with the help of these lessons by Dave Bartlett. He points out something interesting that I never knew on the second lesson page : The keys of early typewriters were, sensibly enough, laid out in alphabetical order. The impetus for change was not exactly the yearning for blistering speed that has brought us together here today, but rather necessity. Early typewriters were mechanical and prone to jamming. The QWERTY layout solved that problem by spreading the popular keys across the board, inadvertently creating an ideal layout for distributing the effort of typing to all ten fingers rather than the traditional hunt and peck method.

My cat, Elwood, one of four who roam around this house, just came into the office to visit. I had the door closed, so he sat outside it and explained, repeatedly, that he'd like to come in and join me. When he got in he jumped up on the desk and found a small pile of pistachios. Elwood wondered, with a great amount of excitement, initially, whether or not he could derive any pleasure or nutritional value from these strange items. He decided against the concept, after various sniffs and licks, and has settled for making it hard for me to type by lying across a forearm and purring contentedly. Good boy!

Here's a nice quote by Larry Ellison from the book Softwar (2003), in which he's referring to Oracle's attempts to win market share in the applications market in the mid 1990s by putting together best-of-breed systems. He says the guys at Oracle running this process "had all these wonderful names for the new integration technologies that they were developing: the message backbone, integration glue, and all this other stuff. I tried to get a detailed technical explanation as to how it all worked, but nobody was able to explain it to me. I just couldn't understand what they were saying. One of two possibilities here: I'm too stupid to understand, or they don't understand it either. Even though they couldn't describe how this stuff worked, they just knew it would solve all their product integration problems.... It was like, wouldn't it be nice to have flying cars..." This reminds me of a lot of situations in life, when you're not sure if you&

I just installed the latest version of Firefox, 3.6, released two weeks ago. You can get it here . It has many handy features, some of which are: Personas, a way to apply a new browser theme with a single click, which I have already found is fun. Full screen native video support. After you've installed version 3.6, you can test the feature out by right clicking on the video here and choosing 'Full Screen'. Support for new HTML5 specs such as Drag & Drop. Support for CSS gradients. Here are more details .

Tonight my internet connection is doing its best impression of a 14K modem. Remember those? This is unbelievable. I want my fast connection back! I don't know if it's Charter Communications dropping the ball (as usual. Thanks, Charter. Thanks again for the great value you bring me for only $200 every month), the Chinese hammering away at our national telecommunications grid, a squirrel frying on the line outside, or what, but it is decidedly not loads of fun. My cat, Bill, doesn't mind. Completely oblivious to current connection speed and leaning on my left arm. Hi, Bill. I notice that when I google myself these days, there are links to various sites where I've posted stuff. None of it is going to win me any prizes, but still I find it pleasing. Understandable, yes?