I’m setting me up an 8.5*11 template in InDesign®. This may make me quite literally the only person on earth to use exclusively use vim and InDesign® for personal correspondence.

It doesn’t look so great from the inside, but I sure like the idea of a society where anyone can sue anyone for anything. It discourages some more reasonable ways of settlement and costs too much for regular folks, but it’s better than not having a way of people holding each other to the law. We should have more torts, though. (We’d need to to have a properly literal interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.) More and more I’m thinking of cities as essentially barbaric and small towns as civilization.

I’m telling you — vim is real cool, but the whole modes idea is goofy. It might not be that hard to turn it all (or all the stuff I use) into mod-key combos, though I guess most would have to take args. I’d be cooler with ctrl-w n a m e enter than escape w space n a m e enter, for a start. Modelessness is one of my favorite Macintoshisms, right up with good menus and vicious standards.

Where do those fools get off, writing MacIntosh and MAC? A MacIntosh is a Scots or an apple; MAC was an old computing project with no particular relation to the Mac. And Apple Macintosh: these days Apple is the only outfit making Macs (sniffle ... I miss you, StarMax and PowerComputing), and even when they weren’t, people called the clones Apple Macs too. Why? To distinguish them from the fruit MacIntosh? I mean, get real. I can stand people calling Macs Apples, and saying Macintosh where I would say the Macintosh (I’m still not sure of that one), and so on, but surely you’d have to be trying to keep calling ’em MACs. You’d have to keep noticing and being annoyed that most people didn’t do it that way, but never actually look it up. I mean, sheesh.

More diatribe? Comin’ right up!

I was reading PC Magazine today (carefully following biohazard procedure), and happened upon some columns by one Dvorak who considers his middle initial more important than .25 square inches of blank paper. Man is he not right. It’s not even the issues so much as the attitude: stand aside, pleblians, for I am on Imperial business. Stand aside, I say, or I shall smite you! Ohh, you got it coming! I fully intend to smite you in such a way that the remains of your corporeal entity are to be so scattered that they do not even in any way resemble their former co-configuration! I carry News of the PC, and nothing can stop me! Not even you hippy-dippy fools with your so-called Linux and Macintosh, for I am close personal friends with Bill Gates, and I understand The Way of the World and the Will of the Consumer better than you pathetic middle-class non-MBAs! Yes, I have just smitten you mightily not with a blow but with rational, reasoned argument, such as transcendently intelligent and rational beings such as myself use on pitiable self-deluded navel-gazers such as your worthless self. Stand aside, I say! I mean, it doesn't even make sense. He implies that he’s making Important and Well-Reasoned Points of Brilliant Insight, but I saw just a lot of not-particularly-original undocumented conclusions. I think he’s what I’m afraid of becoming.

Verbal computer interfaces won’t work until we have Turing-complete software. English is not a command language, and its bandwidth is itty-bitty; the only advantage over keyboards and mice is pleasant familiarity to the user. We use it, with its famous problems, (a) out of habit and (b) because its sidebands and subtexts can carry orders of magnitude more information than anything else we do besides painting, love, and music. This is great for us, but computers are no good at any sort of idiomatic human-to-anything-but-computer interaction yet and they don’t need to be until they get there naturally. For now, their faces, simulated workspaces, and language all seem strained and presumptuous; the solution is to not see this as a problem. Until computers can handle crazy stuff like poetry, there’s no point in trying to use such a poetry-optimized medium with them. Quantum computers — well, that would change everything; any ignoramus could replace the most hairy, shambling code of today with a long but comfortable set of musings (not even instructions) in plain English. Imagine getting in the habit of thinking aloud to your computer, metaphors and all, as it continually runs your babbling to see if it would be the sort of thing you’d like to see on the screen. It would be about halfway between a net portal circa 2001 and an exceedingly well-educated butler circa 1920. But that’s the equivalent of asking for a computer you can chat with comfortably about anything at all, which is Turing-victorious. (Plus some, ’cause users will expect their computer to act like a really good computer as well as a customizable person.)

I played with Speech Recognition (another of the many astounding, ten-years-early Apple tricks that no one remembers) when it was practically new, and it got me pretty well convinced that speech has a place: I actually got sort of used to being in another room and yelling Volume seven. What's the date? Volume one. and so on. It ran at 117 MHz without anything seizing up (more than otherwise — System 7.6.1 and all that), played well with others, and was actually well-thought-out: take a list of files from the Speakable Items folder, convert it to phonemes through text-to-speech (another Apple coolness), and launch files whose phonemes sorta match the sound-in. (Everything was a file: very Unix.) It was remarkably accurate even on slow boxes and bad mikes, reduced the national debt, prevented hair-loss, et cetera; in short, it was an excellent implementation of a good idea. But no one cared. You can barely find it mentioned anymore. If its relatives have a future, it’s only in cars and sunglasses, where speech is the best medium short of gaze and telepathy. English is a good backup, but the things we call computers use mice and keyboards. There’s no point in trying to force speech-recognition on them; we should be molding our computers to our ideas.