We had a tough time getting out of Encinitas yesterday. It seems like everything was going wrong. I'd forgotten to order food for a sick aunt and her family in New Jersey the night before, so I was scrambling with apologies and new orders all morning. Then, when we finally got out of town, we hit traffic for about an hour near Santa Ana. Blech! Fortunately, it's a nice stretch of California highway, and we could see Catalina Island off on the horizon to the west.
Our Christmas-eve-eve (or Festivus, if you will) was spent at Maj's parents' house in Long Beach, with about 30+ Jenkinses plus various offshoots and friendly relations. They have a huge house near Long Beach/Belmont Shore, with a giant tiled patio area that goes right into the house. It was a good place for a party.
Amita June got some nice gifts from family, including a screaming monkey doll dressed as Superman. Yeah, we already have one screaming monkey doll with an "I ♥ LA" t-shirt, so this new one will join our growing collection of screaming monkeys with poor sartorial taste.
tags: christmas belmont shore festivus long beach amita june
Typewriters are broken
Yesterday Amita June and I were playing with pyKeys, from the awesome pyToddler suite of tools, and I realized that typewriter keyboards are broken.
I was showing her that when she pushed on the key marked "Q", a "Q" would appear on the screen. But that's not what happened: instead, a "q" appeared on the screen. That's not a bug in pyToddler, of course: that's just the way typewriters work. If you click on the button marked with a capital letter, it prints the lowercase letter on the paper or screen. To get the capital letter itself, you have to put the keyboard in another mode, or use a modifying chord key.
I'm not sure why this is the case. It's clear why we use modifier keys to make capitals, since we type lowercase keys much more often. But why do keyboards show the capitals printed on the keys, then?
tags: typewriter keyboard pytoddler pykeys
Free Culture Christmas
If there's anything that gives a bracing jolt of Christmas cheer, it's 235 Creative Commons Christmas songs. Thanks to Uwe Hermann for compiling this fine list.