Cassowaries Rant

Computer Masochism in the form of a Ramble

Once upon a time, in a land far away (i.e. when I still lived in zone 1), I used to willingly endure complicated computery things because I thought it was good. This is not to say I no longer do, but rather that I now endure the CCT because it is a trade-off between using what I know, being able to do CCT to mean I have to do fewer CCT, and having other people more willing to make software that means I have to do less CCT. Also, sometimes, one has no choice: enduring complicated computery things means that I can give things the best appearance possible; for instance, I am loath to use a word processor because LaTeX’s (pr. /la:tek/ \LAH-tek\, not /læiteks/ \LAY-teks\) output is vastly superior in almost every single way, and no harder once it’s been learnt.

(In my ramblings, I’ve actually managed to say or imply most of what I want to say. If I was writing to be published or marked, I would whinge and complain at myself and re-edit this. Fortunately this serves its job just as well if I’m the only person reading it, so my rambles are fully justified. If your browser supports CSS well enough, they’ll be justified in two senses of the word. Hence, I shall continue.)

Time has this irritating habit of passing. The passage of time means that procrastination is probably inappropiate for many occasions, and is a habit I should get out of, given that time doesn’t look like it’s going to break its. Another consequence of this passage of time is that one has the chance to get thoroughly irritated with one’s current means of doing things.

So basically, what I’m saying is that I grow weary of these complicated computery things, and fret that in spite of it’s utter ugliness and the fact that it has many sad mistakes in its UI, I probably should’ve got a Mac, because while MacOS X is utterly ugly and has many sad mistakes in its UI (I refuse to ever get over the fact that some idiot——that is to say, designer thought it was a good idea to lump the maximise, minimise and close buttons together and distinguish them only by rollovers and colors. It was discovering this that really made me lose my respect for the Mac designers.

On the other hand, it does occur to me that if I could be bothered doing just a few extra CCTs, I wouldn’t need to be bothered fretting about it because I wouldn’t have to use very ugly replacements, merely sort-of ugly ones. Better still, I could do even more CCT and have them fixed in elegant ways, submit the patch to the necessary people, and live life happily… But it’s never gonna happen, is it?

In summary, I set out to say the following:

• Computers are annoying shits
• Using them is a waste of time, which is a pity, given that they have so much potential and the Internet ranks up there with food and sleep in my list of essentials
• A useable environment is a good thing.
• I should probably have got a Mac.

However, I succeeded in saying the following:

• Computers are annoying shits
• Using them is a waste of time, which is a pity, given that they have so much potential and the Internet ranks up there with food and sleep in my list of essentials
• A useable environment is a good thing.
• MacOS X ranks down there with Windows XP in the sensiblity of interface design dept., though it might be better from a purely useability standpoint. If I’d bought a Mac, it would’ve been for the hardware, not the software.
• I can’t wait for improvements from any of Gnome, ROX and/or GNUstep

Additionally, Seth needs to fix up the keyboard controls in Gnome-Blog and add suppport for lists.

(Oh, and one last thing: while cute, annecdotal evidence suggests having the time displayed as ’It’s nearly half past eleven’ and the like might actually increase the chance of misreading the time.)