New keyboards rock my world

I’m typing this entry in WordPerfect 11 tonight because I’m currently enduring the 52nd consecutive hour without the internet here at Waterhouse. The storm we had Monday night apparently fuckled severely with Verizon’s ability to provide the services they’re paid to, even though the rest of the city seems to have managed to go on with their lives. But whatever. It just confirms to an even greater degree my opinion that Verizon doth sucketh much ass.

So, yeah, because I’m incapable of not being on the computer, even when there is no internet available (no one around here even has a signal I can leech... greedy bastards all!) I’ve been playing around with the shit on here that does not require me to use the internet. Like WordPerfect 11. I’d almost forgotten that I even had this thing installed... it was among the forgotten bundled software that came with the machine. Anyway, I was toying around with it, being not terribly impressed, when I remembered all those nights I spent in the lab at the bottom of the library at SU (when it was one of three labs on campus, and the only one open 24 hours) typing away at papers in WordPerfect 5.1. As a matter of fact, I seem to recall that the freshman computer class that we all had to take (wasn’t it called “Using Computers” or some such nonsense?) spent a fair amount of time teaching us how to use this blue-and-white beauty. (Remember those cheat sheets we had to rest atop the function keys just so we could remember that Alt+F3 was “Reveal Codes”?)

Anyway, I was tooling around in this version of WordPerfect, released a good 13-14 years after that version of yore, waxing somewhat nostalgically for those days gone by when I wondered if Corel, or whoever the hell owns WordPerfect now, had enough whimsy in their programming staff to include an “emulate 5.1" mode. I mean, everyone and their dog used WP5.1, didn’t they? Even after SU’s network made the leap to Windows, and included the Windows version of Word (1.0, baby!) and WordPerfect (6), they left WP5.1 on the network for those of us who couldn’t take the time to relearn how to do all the shit we already knew how to do. I think people who make up names for stuff call that “institutional memory”.

This screenshot should say it all.

Of course, it’s not perfect. It’s not exactly emulating WP5.1. For instance, just back in that last sentence, I was able to italicize “emulating” just by hitting Ctrl-I on either side of the word. That was never so easy back in the day. Also, that “52nd” up in the first paragraph... that superscripting happened automatically. I don’t think I ever even learned how to do superscripts in WP. And, of course, the taskbar’s down there at the bottom, and the little interface tweaks I’ve added to the screen’s real estate to make my life a little easier... they’re there too. I could auto-hide all that stuff, but it’s all just a mirage. You can’t go back. In fact, I had to tell WP11 to make Courier the default font for its Classic Mode. It wanted to use TNR, fer chrissakes. But the meaningless tangent I set out to resolve was resolved happily, and now I got part of a blog entry out of it.

Now to the actual blog entry.

Jenn, because she is the awesomest thing ever (I mean, better than Breyer’s Vanilla, man) bought a new keyboard and mouse for the computer. She found a deal on Woot that was just too good to pass up (basically, the keyboard was free). It’s a Kensington K64364 wireless duo. And it is sweet. I love Kensington stuff to begin with (all the way back to their first ADB 4-button trackball for the Mac (circa 1995)). It doesn’t have neon rims or turbo boost or whatever the hell the really tricked out keyboards have, but it is wireless, and keys’ responsiveness is incredible. I love new keyboards. If there’s ever been a way to make a computer you’re used to feel like a newer machine, a new keyboard is it.

There’s a whole row of function keys arrayed across the top of the keyboard, for web browsing, and controlling the sound, and for opening stuff like My Documents or Outlook, but I’ve muddled through life for so long without them (dang... just realized I’ve been using a personal computer of one sort or another for about 23 years) that I don’t know if I’ll ever get in the habit of using them. Plus, my one gripe about it so far (and it’s kind of a minor one, really) is that the Play/Pause etc. buttons won’t navigate iTunes playlists when iTunes isn’t the program in front. You have to be staring at iTunes to have those buttons work there. It’s not the same for Windows Media Player, however. You can navigate your WMP playlists from wherever the hell you want. It’s annoying, but not a deal-breaker.

So anyway, that’s the entry. I just wanted to let you all know that I got a new keyboard. It’s cool. (Odd random memory... the H key on the keyboard I had for the Mac I had in college gave out my senior year. It got progressively worse as the year went on, so that by the time April and May were rolling around, I was literally pounding on my H key, eventually getting to the point where I would avoid using words that contained H’s in them at all. Except, there are an awful damn lot of words that have H’s in them. Like “that,” “have” and “them.”)

I have no idea how to bring this entry to any sort of neat conclusion. So it just ends here.