Okay the weirdest thing happened to me today. I’m just going about my business, and chatting with a few people online, when all of a sudden everything I type goes in backward. The cursor would stay at the start of the line and the letters would just go in normally, albeit in the wrong order. At first I really didn’t even notice, because I was typing and looking at my other monitor. Then it started worrying me. What could have caused this? Did I somehow activate a international feature in Windows for languages that read right to left? Well I racked my brain, and also kept up my conversations on instant messenger, mostly because it was really funny seeing different people’s reactions to it. To my surprise no one at all had trouble reading the backward text, and they all recognized it immediately. Two people were cracking up while another was convinced I had downloaded some program to do it. The other possibility of course in the back of my mind that I had gotten a virus with a sense of humor. I suspected this doubly because I never get viruses in my email but today I received (and Norton caught) four of them.

Anyway, back to the mystery of the backward typing (gnipyt sdrawkcab), it turns out that when I had gotten a call I put an hard drive down on my desk, however it was on top of my wireless keyboard. Specifically, on top of the left arrow button! Try it, hold down the left arrow button with something and then start typing. It was a very chance thing as well, because if had been in Word or a text box like I am now I would have seen the cursor whizzing by and suspected a key down, but in the chat boxes there was nothing to indicated that the cursor being pushed to the left. Now I better go before they take my geek license away :). (Actually, I was installing GNU/Linux on said other machine so they let me keep it. Whew.)

Well as per my previous commitment, I’m putting my third paper for my Human Situation class online here. It is not my last paper for the class though, as I found out much to my chagrin today. Don’t you love it when they spring these things on you? You can read the text of the paper below as part of the extended entry, how I would highly recommend you read the PDF version of it instead because it captures not only some additional text that I haven’t put below, but also the presentation and layout, which I put a lot of effort and thought into. Also the raw text below doesn’t have citations and other things which are cumbersome to put into HTML right now. I’ve embedded the fonts and such so you can get the full experience as well. If you have any thoughts or criticisms let me know, because although this paper has already been graded and done (I got an A) I’m going to file it as a topic to examine again perhaps later in college. Again you can get the PDF here. Without further ado . . .

Continue reading An Examination of Group Forms →

Very seldom do I read anything on the web as well-written or as well-researched as Understanding Web Typography. It was a long read, especially with all of the juicy links, but I enjoyed it immensely. Via Anil Dash

Well I tried out everything, except Eudora which for some reason wouldn’t install, and I’m back to using Outlook Express, which in my opinion is simply the best IMAP email client out there currently. The application I’m going to start looking at closer is Outlook XP, because I think it does everything I want it to do, it’s just clunky. Perhaps with some more customization it could be what I need though. Honestly though I’m glad I don’t have to deal with Outlook’s bloat anymore.

Update: It’s now about a year later, and Mozilla Thunderbird is by far the best IMAP email client around for Windows. Give it a try.