Dinner from Yats: "Special" Jambalaya, meaning: "It has done cooked down gooood, sell this last bit off and start over," half & halfed with Red Beans and Sausage, over good rice with kiss-the-baker French bread with some kinda seasoned butter: OMG good!
Hating on the Caps Lock key: D00ds, it has done been there since before WW I. Did you only just now notice? Don't make the years of struggle have been for naught! The thing is RIGHT WHERE IT SHOULD BE. ;)
Riding the Highwheeler in Cicada-Silencing Weather: Hey-la, there's a better breeze higher up and little temptation to over-exert.
Cicada-Silencing Weather? Yes. Yes it is. It's like 95 for temp and humidility and what happens is, some cicada gets himself all swole up with wonderfulness, climbs to a high place rated for Loud and bursts into song:
For maybe twenty seconds and then takes a deep breath of mostly hot water and ends on a strangled-sounding:
Silence reigns until some other half-witted faux locust gets up to his own good spot, thinking, "I'll show 'em how it's done!" and crashes and burns in the exact same way. Poor little gnomes don't have much more than a Z-80 to run on, you know, and all the software was burned into the PROMs a long time ago.
8 comments:
I LOL'ed several times throughout your cicada bit. Something about being a life-long Hoosier.
I'm loving the cicada "verbage". You must have weaker cicadas than in TN. Ours are unaffected by humidity and heat, unfortunately.
they only run Z-80s, eh?
I'm surprised they aren't running on an FPGA...
Ya know, the 'right where it should be part' is valid only for mechanical typewriters, where there's the linkage for locking the shift mechanism in place. With the invention of electrons, we can effect the same result without a latching lever, thus freeing the caps lock to be banished to the nether regions. :-)
I can't remember the last time I might have intentionally used it. And, as far back as I can remember, my method of typing in all caps on a computer has been to hold the left shift key down with my pinky while typing away -- yes, my typing style is unorthodox, but I do use my left pinky more or less normally. I never, ever use the right shift key. Capital A -- pinky and ring finger on the left.
Also, am quite surprised that Navigator has not weighed in on this. ;-)
Navigator, bless him, is weighed down with a very lousy computer; he can barely post on the Web even when it's working well and when it isn't.... Anyone with a machine to spare?
As for "right where it should be:" the capslock key is where *my* fingers think it should be. As they were trained by years and years and years of actual *typewriter* use, that's not too surprising.
There's value in tradition, in physical continuity; anywhere you find a telephone dial, it's still laid out to turn in the same direction, with the numbers in the same sequence, and when the tech changed, it changed *radically.* Compromise/retro version stick the touch-tone buttons in the same position and order as the numbers on the old dial.
I have only contempt for this run-with-hounds/hunt-with-the-rabbits business of shoving around a few keys over spite at one's own inability to operate machinery that untold billions *do* work with grace and skill. Learn to work the clutch and gearshift, dagnabbit! Or go Dvoraky.
Just stop whinin' that the center line ought to be amber, not yellow-gold.
Just wait 'til the cicada kingdom learns about the Raspberry Pi. Then there will be a new tune! ;-)
May have a spare machine for Navigator. As soon as the temps here dip below the 90s, I'll look at the pile in the garage and see what can be fabbed for him.
Oh, man, I really LIKED the Z-80. Programs ran blazing fast when written in machine code. The stress made all my hair fall out, though...
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