Changing keys

In a recent PCMag.com column, John Dvorak writes, of the caps lock key, "This is a key that should be nowhere near any of the normal keys because typists often ACCIDENTALLY HIT IT AND THE NEXT THING THEY KNOW, THEY ARE SCREAMING."

I've heard other calls to demote or do away with caps lock. In the name of all that's holy, no.

Thing is, all but the most accurate typists accidentally hit wrong keys all the time, and not just caps lock. This is in the nature of typing. But good typists realize right away that they have accidentally hit caps lock, because their eyes are where they're supposed to be, on the screen, not the keyboard. Dvorak is describing a scenario that would occur only if the typist were looking at the keyboard. And the typist shouldn't be doing that.

It doesn't make sense to eliminate a key just because someone might accidentally hit it, especially a useful one like caps lock. Under most circumstances, writing in all caps is definitely a no-no, but when it comes to acronyms -- SMERSH, say -- caps lock is the only way to type in all caps and keep all the fingers on the home row, where they belong.

Dvorak is identifying a problem that's less about a particular key and more about a nation of untrained typists. How much more productive would our economy be if everyone who uses a computer learned to touch type properly? Seriously. I learned to touch type from a shareware computer program in 1993. It took about two weeks, and it was excruciating. Then it was over.

R.I.P. Earl Scruggs

Here's an interview I did with the late Earl Scruggs back in 2003. I love his music.

 

Music everywhere

If you're like me and you use VLC Media Player to stream audio from vinyl to a computer in another room, know that you can load VLC as a Windows service. That means it starts automatically, and you don't have to run it in the GUI. Just enter a command like this one:

vlc -I ntservice --ntservice-install --ntservice-options="dshow:// :dshow-adev=\"Line In (Realtek High Definitio\" :sout=#rtp{dst=239.255.1.1,port=5004}"

Note that the parameters in quotes include a parameter in quotes. You have to designate the quotes in quotes with an escape sequence (\").

Here's what a command to run VLC as a service on the client machine looks like:

vlc -I ntservice --ntservice-install --ntservice-options="rtp:\\@239.255.1.1:5004"

To uninstall the VLC service, enter this:

vlc -I ntservice --ntservice-uninstall

Now you too can play a Foghat record in one room and listen to it in another. Or you could do it the easy way and run speaker wire. But why do it the easy way when there's a complicated way?

As if it never happened

Not long ago I watched "Eyes on the Prize," the inspiring, agonizing documentary about the U.S. civil rights movement. I'm a native of Nashville, Tenn., and I paid close attention to the parts about the lunch counter sit-ins that roiled downtown Nashville in 1960.

Those nonviolent protesters are national heroes, but when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn't hear much about them. I certainly don't recall any commemorations befitting the significance of what happened. There is some of that now, including the downtown public library's marvelous civil rights collection, which was dedicated in 2004.

I have wondered whether I missed out on this history simply because I was a kid who wasn't paying attention. But yesterday I came across evidence suggesting that Nashville indeed had a case of amnesia. In a library at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, I was looking at old issues of the Nashville Banner newspaper on microfilm. (Yes, that is how I spent my winter vacation.) The lead story of the Jan. 10, 1986, Lifestyles section is about luncheonettes, a bit of old Nashville that was fading away.

"I mourn the decline of the luncheonette," the writer muses, and he singles out the counters at establishments like Harvey's and Woolworths -- where the sit-ins took place, not many years before. It's very curious that the writer makes no mention of the protests, of this crucial Nashville history that's so profoundly entwined with his subject. I've wondered whether the rancor of the sit-ins even hastened the demise of the Nashville luncheonette, but there's no mention of that in this article about the demise of the Nashville luncheonette.

Market conditions

Unions are so gay

Anti-gay website: Here is proof that unions are gay.

Commenter #1: Gays are Nazis too.

Commenter #2: WTF, how can you say gays are Nazis.

Anti-gay website boss Julaine Appling: We have reviewed the comment and determined it does not say gays are Nazis. And, free speech.

Commenter #1: Except gays are Nazis.

FIN

Good word

"Madonna’s message boils down to a complex truce between love and narcissism."

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum