fine whine

Yesterday I talked about the sadness brought on by a badly designed ATM. Well, just past sadness is the land of Irk. Many technologies worse than that ATM have the potential to irk me.

Very irksome is the now common percent key on desktop calculators. Somebody now can hit 100 and then plus and then 5 and then percent and equals and it will spit out 105 (I am using deliberately simple numbers to make my point all the more straightforward). This bothers me. While it is a neat trick, using the percent key means that a whole bunch of people who have come to depend on these calculators do not understand percentages. While that may not bother you it doesn't sit well with me. I don't even know if any of my calculators has a percent key because I would never use it. To consider it a shortcut for the mental two digit shift is a telling sign of the continuing dumbing-down of the calculator dependant. To do the calculation I mentioned before, I (and most people who know what they are doing) would merely multiply 100 by 1.05, or if need be multiply 100 times 105 and then divide by 100, which sounds ridiculous from my choice of numbers, but it would work all the same. Then again, I can always calculate a fifteen percent tip (drop a decimal place and then add half of that result) whereas others are hampered by less useful shortcuts such as doubling the tax. So I'm not the same as other people, I guess.

It is far easier to differentiate oneself from others than to show similarities. Yesterday I flipped through the most recent PC Magazine and found myself even further distanced from their readership than usual. Unlike one columnist, I don't have thousands of digital pictures and documents needing to be backed up, nor am I bothered by the lack of PDF copies of my online bills. Moreover I would never consider scanning my other documents, such as tax records and (eventual) kids' homework. What does this guy have against paper, especially considering he pays for his expensive digital habits by contributing to a dead tree publication? Also throwing his hat in the columnists' ring is John Dvorak, who insists everybody should go out and buy a $2300 laptop to show off and start conversations. I'm sorry, John, but when I have a laptop with me it's to get something done, not to spur a geek pissing contest. Also in the magazine can be found an overview of IM slang, and within those confines listings of smilies and common chat acronyms. I myself don't use abbreviations those that they mention, and as usual had never heard of most of them. I'm no newbie to the whole chat world, having haunted IRC rooms and BBSes before them, but somehow I have always survived sacrificing typing efficiency for modest eloquence. Again, I'm not really the sort of reader they're gearing toward.

But as distanced as I find myself from their intended targets, I cannot get away completely. In the same Dvorak rant I notice that he's completely unaware of the strains of Linux that run on (mostly Mac but not exclusively) PowerPC systems, as he assumes that Microsoft is threatening to move to that architecture for future generations to stop people from hacking X-boxes to run the free operating system. Moreover I find issue later in the magazine with a sidebar describing memes. According to them, manipulated images boasting "All your base are belong to us" predated the whole Bert is Evil phenomena, which is false. Admittedly a news photo showing, on extreme closeup, a picture of Bert and Osama in a collage post-dated the AYB boom, but the Bert and Osama picture was older than that news photo and in fact had its roots in a website available to all back in the late nineties. So how can I think myself below their radar and yet look down on them? I can only give them props. as it were, for pointing out that Bert's appearance in these pictures was Zelig-like, though Gump-like might be more appropriate. They tried, and that is what matters.

Yesterday I heard a newly coined word, and for once I liked it. I'm not a great fan of "earworm" in particular for reasons I cannot articulate, and I still have not warmed to the term "blogger" despite apparently being one. The way that words like "authentic" and "new" have been shanghaied grates on me and I will likely forever be against the wholesale verbing of utterly inappropriate nouns. Yet as much as I am against these "evolved" contributions to language, I find myself liking "emblemish", mentally bookmarked from an NPR feature about some violinist who takes liberties with classical pieces. I'm sure that idea gets some people as aghast as I do when I hear something like "innovationeering", but nothing in the segment stood out until some mention of the producer making a distinction between embellishment and emblemishments, and I've been trying to come up with a way to co-opt it into my regular speech.

For the meaning I mentally assign it I can find a great many examples of things of which I am not fond. To me an emblemishment is unnecessary and superfluous additions something, such as excessive body cladding and a rear spoiler for a front-engined commuter car. It's what some people call feature creep, the addition of unnecessary features to something that was already perfectly usable. If Word had ever been useful (I didn't use it in its early days so I cannot say) then Clippy and his ilk are emblemishments. The Crayola crap and bubbly interface of the default Windows XP interface are likewise emblemishments. The logos for formats and manufacture and model names all emblemish my DVD player, just as dealer's license plate frames and bold lettering for ABS and engine sizes emblemish the majority of cars on the roads. The CZ "diamonds" ringing the face of so-called bling bling watches on ebay are very much emblemishment. And they're gaudy, too.

Bah. More negativity. I can't wait until spring. Spring always makes me happy.