[Cube] impatience or bring back dos

[George Pepper]

Exactly.  If you are a highly motivated and driven individual, then by the time you get to be my age (47), you are pretty choosy about what you are and are not willing to spend time on.  I'll spend two years polishing up a piece of music I wrote, but if a computer program is not adding to my productivity factor within ten minutes, I will not waste another second on it (And I refuse to waste any time on relationships according to my ex-wife, but, whatever ;^)).  That's entirely arbitrary in one sense, but relates to my attention span before frustration sets in in another sense: As soon as a computer program becomes frustrating, I drag it to the trash and remove it from my computer.  I don't need a computer program to force me to learn stuff, I need it to allow me to accomplish stuff.

I don't doubt but that you know what you are talking about with TextEdit vs. Word, but MY TextEdit duplicates the font I copy using the copy/paste function right down to and including color and HTML stuff, and MY Word imposes it's own font on everything I copy right down to and including the color Word "choses", and MY Word does not copy HTML (Probably a setup thing, but I'm not going to waste any time with it: TextEdit works, Word does not and that's all I need to know).  The reason I can't get Word to behave in an ASCII fashion is because I REALLY don't know what ASCII is (I don't even remember what ASCII stands for) and Word won't tell me.  All I know is that there isn't a font in the list called ASCII or labelled ASCII, and the Help function doesn't "help", so Word will not allow me to do what I want to do with it.  So, I stopped using it and only use TextEdit now.  Simple, really.

The main problem with the vast majority of programs for people like me is that they have WAY too many features: I'd rather have a dozen small programs that only did one thing each that one big one that can do all twelve, because the "twelve-in-one" program is not going to be nearly as simple to use.

Oh, and I used to write computer programs that would generate fractal and summation series-related musical themes and such back in the day, so I can learn a program and learn TO program if I'm motivated to do it, but at this point a computer is just a tool to me and a program is just a productivity aid, and so I refuse to cut lousy programmers slack for writing sucky user interfaces with obtuse protocols.

Pep

On Saturday, June 18, 2005, at 00:40AM, <mac at neuroportal.net> wrote:

>Hi
>
>The reason that text edit works and word doesn't when you paste in a 
>tab is quite simply the font.
>
>Im a programmer, and sometimes use 5250 terminal sessions. I also need 
>to send some text to someone else off that screen and if you paste into 
>ANY wordprocessor you need to make sure you use a fixed width font.
>
>Mow this is not the valued knowledge of a trusted few individuals - 
>this is widely known.
>
>I would argue, and believe me that I suffer from this myself, that you 
>are impatient, wanting to just get on with a job as opposed to spend 
>time to find out things that let you do things the way you wanted to do 
>them in the first place - yes that does feel like wasting time - but if 
>you dont then you will continue to feel frustrated with technology. If 
>stuff worked the way you wanted them to - that would pretty much screw 
>up our expectations of technology.
>
>In short, if you fond a way to do something and you want to stick with 
>that way then cool. But because you dont understand the way things work 
>the way they do dont think that technology is too complicated, think 
>maybe you are not willing to invest the time. Which is fine...
>
>Ben
>
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