I was reading an article about the economy, and they were discussing the current
’speak’ from the top talking heads (the major banks and the fed). The writer
brought in the old quote from Yogi Berra… “it ain’t over till it’s over’.
This reference led me to research Mr. Berra on Wikipedia. He is quite a figure, and still with us. They had his famous
quotes on there, which are gems. For some reason, though, I thought he was more
prolific, but there were only 5 or 6 ‘famous quotes’ listed.
So why malapropism? Well, it is because it was stated that Mr. Berra “has a tendency
for malapropism.”
Just a quick recommendation. We were using Websitepulse as one of our extra, external monitoring systems.
They consistently failed to alert us to issues (when the other systems worked). Yet, we were paying them
around $80 a month. For a simple task, they should have been able to excel at the task. With all of their
customers, they should have quite a margin to pay for network and infrastructure. Yet they failed.
This just goes to show… you always have overlap whenever possible when dealing with outside vendors.
The above catalog was the first one I saw. To an 11 year old brain, the possibilities of that machine for fun
seemed as amazing as those illustrations.
A while back, I was watching Scott Cruzen browse to a site via Firefox.
Quite the clever guy, he was just using the address bar to do searches.
For example, if he was searching for widgets on google, he could just do:
g widgets
if he was searching wikipedia, he could just do:
wp widgets
if he was searching ebay, he could just do:
e widgets
… and so on… all right in the address bar. This was quite cool since it let you
perform this without having your hands leave the keyboard. (Note: to get to the
address bar via the keyboard hit ALT-D on a PC or ALT-L on a Mac). This was very cool,
so I had to copy Scott’s trick and it has become a standard modification on my
Firefox.
It is really easy to install, as well. All you have to do is right click on any search box
on any site, and choose ‘Add a Keyword for this Search…’. Then you get a dialog box
that only requires a name and the ’shortcut sequence’. It then stores these shortcuts
as bookmarks.
Just yesterday, I showed this to a co-worker. Today he thanked me for this trick. He started adding
shortcuts for all sorts of sites that he uses. Oddly enough, I only used it for Wikipedia. I had never
thought of using it for stock quotes. I immediately did the same and added shortcuts
for a bunch of sites that I frequent for simple searches (stock quotes, whois, etc.)
This got me thinking about keyboards in general. This is a consistent trend with the power users on GUI/Window
systems. They want the power to invoke a simple or complex action, as quickly as possible. If you are
using a computer a lot, chances are that your hands are almost always on the keyboard. YET, if you look at the
history of Windowing systems, the point was to get away from the keyboard for actions.
It wasn’t until I worked at Plaxo, that I really got to appreciate the power of the keyboard.
One of the founders there, Cam, was a master of the keyboard and its shortcuts. He could perform the same operations that I was
doing with a mouse about 10x faster. He was able to do this because Windows has excellent
keyboard navigation support from the 80’s. He mastered that system and he was blindingly fast
on his computer.
At the same time, the trend was obvious on other platforms as well.
Look at what any Mac user says about Quicksilver… they love it. They cannot imagine their machine
without it. (In a way, the Firefox shortcut system is like Quicksilver for the web) Look at what the
Lifehacker people think about the AutoHotKey system. Even Steve Jobs changed his mind
and made Spotlight a simple key sequence away (ALT-SPACE).
The mouse is a great input device, but it is clear to me that empowering power users via the keyboard
will only become an essential element of any system going forward.
“The money is going to help Americans offset the high prices we’re seeing at the gas pump, the grocery store, and also give our economy a boost to help us pull out of this economic slowdown,” Bush said.
Interesting…
I wonder if the dollar hadn’t been systematically devalued by his administration, maybe we wouldn’t need
this stimulus? How many 100’s of billions have been lost versus the income that will be generated
by the simulus package? Where is this money coming from anyways?
Very interesting…
Notice how the media is holding off on anticipating any more rate cuts? Why? Inflation, that is why.
