adventures of a las vegas dullard

[spatch]

First person to answer "Why doesn't IE on a Mac recognize that if I'm in a text entry window and I hit the HOME key, chances are I wanted to go to the beginning of the text line and NOT the beginning of the page?" without using the words "microshaft" or "internet exploder" or any tiresome "use some other browser" bullshit wins the privilege of not being socked in the snoot. I don't feel like explaining or justifying myself to zealots. It's just that I can't do what I want with what I've got, and I'm rather ... mystified. Some developer never did much online writing, that's for sure. (-1, I Am Tired)

I stayed up most of last night on the 20th floor of the Sahara, window open and Stratosphere blinking ahead of me. Had a lot to write about, but now that I'm actually in front of a computer I don't have anything to transcribe because, well, the paper's all back in the room. Hopefully being read by the housekeeping staff. If they can decipher my scribbly late-night handwriting, more power to 'em. As it stands I feel like the biggest dullard in Las Vegas right now, not having gambled or clubbed or even bothered to throw away money on anything except food.

There were some ideas percolatin in my head about what to do while I'm here. Unfortunately the Young Electric Sign Company has its neon sign boneyard open "by appointment only" and getting an appointment involves making a minimum $50 donation and hanging around on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. So it goes. There's a group that's taken a few of the signs from the boneyard, refurbished them, and stuck 'em around Fremont Street if you wish to take a free walking tour, but it involves hanging around Fremont Street at night.

I am going for Pho though. You cannot deny me my weekly bowl of beef noodle soup, no matter how hard you try.

There was a loudmouth tourist on my flight out. Lord I can't figure out who I was more embarrassed for: him, or the rest of us. He was on his second or third vodka tonic (eh?) and was loudly explaining to his seatmates why he loves Vegas.

"CAUSE IT'S SIN CITY, BABY, I LOVE IT, THERE'S NO RULES, YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT, IT'S AWESOME, I CAN'T WAIT TO HIT THE BEE JAY TABLES, AND AFTER THAT I'LL GET THE OTHER BEE JAY IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, YEAH, YEAH, LOOK AT HIM, HE'S NODDING, YOU KNOW HOW I ROLL, BROTHER, HEY BABE CAN I GET ANOTHER ONE OF THESE, YEAH, BOY THEY SURE KNOW HOW TO PICK 'EM ON JETBLUE DON'T THEY, DO THEY LET YOU OUT OF THE AIRPORT HONEY? DO YOU WANNA PARTY WITH US? I BET YOU'RE A PARTY GIRL, YEAH, I WENT TO BODY ENGLISH LAST TIME I WAS HERE OH MAN I HAD A BLAST, I COULDN'T GET INTO PUR OR RAIN THOUGH, I'M NOT SURE WHY, BUT I'M GONNA POUND EM BACK LIKE NOBODY'S FUCKIN BUSINESS NO MATTER WHERE I AM, YOU KNOW, OH YEAH, HE'S WITH IT, YEAH WE'RE GONNA PARTY IT UP, NO RULES IN THIS TOWN, NUH UH, IT'S LIKE OH SORRY COMMISSIONER, I DIDN'T KNOW SHE WAS YOUR DAUGHTER..."

I sat in my seat, headphones over my ears, and silently said little prayers like I hope you get fucking taken for every cent you've got, you bastard. I hope they roll you right outside Cheetahs. I hope you "roll, brother" to some strip mall and end up gettin that Bee Jay from someone named Coco, and I hope she rolls you, brother, for all you've got.

But that's just how I roll, brother.

Comments

[eeka13.livejournal.com]

Don't sock me in the smoot!

Apple-A, then left arrow?

[kizlj.livejournal.com]

hey, how long are you there? I get into Vegas tomorrow. If you're free and bored, I have a dinner reservation tomorrow at one of the Wynn restaurants. If you want to impersonate an SAP customer and we pretend to talk about ERP software, I can even expense the thing!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

First person to answer "Why doesn't IE on a Mac recognize that if I'm in a text entry window and I hit the HOME key, chances are I wanted to go to the beginning of the text line and NOT the beginning of the page?"

It's because it's on a Mac. "Home key to go to the beginning of the text line" has never been a widespread standard in Mac applications, as far as I know; the usual behavior, enshrined in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines and such, is that Home and End go to the top and bottom of a page. I think this was established before Windows came up with the standard that they go to the beginning and end of the current text line.

These days, Windows (and Linux) users are almost always tripped up by this when they use Macs, so I wouldn't be surprised if Apple went to the Windows behavior someday soon. But I'll be sad because I'm used to the Mac behavior and it always trips me up when I'm using some other OS and can't get to the top of the page with Home.

(You're now going to show that I'm wrong, I'm sure, by listing a long string of Mac apps that actually do the Windows behavior, which I never discovered because I never think of trying that.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't know about Mac IE (haven't used it in a while), but command-leftarrow and command-rightarrow work in Safari (if you're editing a text form; otherwise they do Back and Forward).

[archangelsk.livejournal.com]

I think it would be more fun if he did find out about Coco — but only if he were the last to know.

[elvisclooney.livejournal.com]

The original MHIG was also written for (and probably) on a Macintosh keyboard that did not feature a standard cursor pad and the whole help/del/home/end/pgup/pgdn cluster. Sure, Apple also had the Extended Keyboards I & II, but realize that the de facto 101-key keyboard wasn't standard equipment on a Macintosh until the Apple Design Keyboard. Not to mention the original Apple USB keyboard that was introduced with the iMac (and in turn forced upon the non-ADB G3/G4 PowerMacs) looked more like a laptop keyboard than anything else. It wasn't until shortly after the Apple Pro Keyboard was introduced that the "101" key lineup (108 technically) was readily available for the Macintosh Masses.

However, keyboard shortcuts are never really published for the masses -- Win or Mac. So, to help: command-up arrow == Win "Home" (beginning of text document, command-down == Win "End" (end of text document). Command-left/right arrow == beginning/end of line. Option-left/right arrow == next word. Also, somewhat unique to IE for the MacOS, double-click a word to select the entire word, triple-click for the entire line, quad-click for the entire paragraph (that may have changed recently, however). Safari, however, will only do up to the triple click, but it selects the paragraph.

[spatch]

Oh, ERP software? I could talk for hours about ERP software. Me and ERP software, we're BFF, totally. So much, in fact, it should be called BFF software and not ERP software! Migosh!

...how's that?

[spatch]

"Sir Richard Pump-A-Loaf"

[clickie]

The standard reply (not the best reply, mind you) to "why does IE on the Mac do blah?" is that IE on the Mac hasn't been updated in years: last update was in 2003. So that sucks. Any Mac user using IE is crazy; that would be like still using Netscape Communicator or something.

[clickie]

Also, I wrote that fully knowing that I will be socked in the snoot.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, this particular question isn't one for which "stop using IE" is the most relevant answer. However, there are others for which it is.

On the other hand, it always bothered me around 2000-2001 when Mac users complained about "Micro$haft Exploder", since for a while, IE 5.x for Classic Mac OS was actually one of the very best Web browsers available on any platform. Yet there were Mac-zealot Web pages at the time explaining that Netscape 4 "rendered pages better", a statement that was wildly incorrect according to W3C specifications, however it may have made sense according to someone's resentments against Microsoft.

The Mac OS X version, on the other hand, always felt like a not-very-smooth port of the Classic version, and with little work being done on making it better, it was eventually overtaken by the Mozilla-based browsers and others. But it shipped as the standard Mac OS X browser until Safari came along, so on many older Macs that are not yours to install software on, you're likely to be stuck with it.

[yuda.livejournal.com]

In this case, "stop using IE" is part of the answer, though. Mac/IE was very good software for its time, but that time is long past. I go back and forth between Safari, Firefox and Camino, myself. Safari is winning lately.

As to the home/end usage, I'll reiterate what was said above about the original mac guidelines, but I'll also say that, in many cases, I think the Windows guidelines are more intuitive: if I'm in a text editor, the beginning-of-line/end-of-line function is much more useful.

However, in a web browser, home and end going to the beginning and end of the page makes an awful lot of sense and is behavior that I hope never goes away.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my usual behavior on Macs is to use Safari and switch to Firefox for the few sites that Safari can't handle (usually complicated commercial or finance sites of some sort). I prefer Safari but they're far more likely to have actually tested it with Firefox. It's possible that I may be able to use Camino for some of those sites instead, but I haven't done enough experiments, since I only just started looking at Camino again after a long hiatus.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Maybe the airplane loudmouth was JAM after a few drinks.

[heliopsis.livejournal.com]

I was flying to a conference in Los Alamos once, and behind me was a herd of tourists from Ohio. It was june--Scientific conferences always take place at unappealing times of year for their destinations--and as we flew over Arizona (from arid meaning dry, desolate, desert) an increasingly drunken Ohioan could be heard complaining, ever more loudly, "It's all brown! I thought it would be green! It's so brown!" No doubt she eventually poured herself into a golf course attached to her hotel, and got some green; but then she probably complained about the absence of willows. "I thought there'd be trees! And ducks!"

As for the home key--this is not an answer, merely my own musings. I have never used a home key in my life. Macs don't have them by default, and I have no idea what I would expect such a thing to do. Windows computers have dozens of extra keys that I loathe: forward-delete, for instance, or insert, each of which causes the computer to do something I never, ever, ever want it to do. I liked the fact that the original Mac keyboard--I still have one!--had only 50 or so keys. Letters, numbers, punctuation, shift, space, tab, backspace. No function keys, no number keypad, no cursor movement keys. Just keys that put actual symbols on your screen. I loved the simplicity of it.

My least favourite key is insert, which throws Word into the most loathsome state ever with no warning whatsoever. If you're a touch typist, you can easily destroy a whole paragraph before you figure out what the hell is going on. My second least favourite is the unspeakable one that has a picture of a menu, and which makes things pop out all over your screen for no good reason, and the only thing to make them go away is to click on one. With the mouse, of course, because why in hell would I use the keyboard to select menus? That's what God made mice for! (You may not have realised that the mouse was divinely inspired; many people think the mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart, but God spoke to him in a dream. He just won't admit it.)

There, I'm glad I got that off my chest.

[annilita.livejournal.com]

On my flight back from my 6 months in the UK, I followed a trio of Big, loud-mouth Bostonian goons down the jetway. The whole time, they were loud and crass and completely dissing on Britain, despite the fact that we were still in Britain, and that a good 50% of the people around them were Britons.

They were really loud and obnoxious the whole flight. At one point, I got up to use the bathroom, and had to stand in the aisle and wait. THe next one to open up was vacated by one of the goons, and when I went inside, he had peed everywhere.

Sometimes I am so embarassed by my fellow humans.

[annilita.livejournal.com]

Whoever invented the insert key needs a sound beating.

Insert This

[mdm-sosostris.livejournal.com]

Darling John Olson,

I must direct your attention to this:

An Open Letter to My Computer's Insert Key

I believe you might be able to sympathize.

[spatch]

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

*snork*

[tyopsqueene.livejournal.com]

If you have to talk up a holiday that much, I guess you must be pretty worried about it actually turning out to be a disappointment.

[malconstant.livejournal.com]

Under OS X, there's an easy fix to make the Home and End keys work like Windows/Linux/Palm/et cetera. Key bindings are stored in a text-based configuration file that is easily edited. I did it years ago, but I can't remember the details as I haven't had to re-do it. For a while, I was doing most of my text entry on a Palm (via a Stowaway keyboard) and became used to it.