Month: August 2010

Attention, People of the Future (Oh Wait, That’s Us!)

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

Steve Spalding reminds us of just how amazing the age we live in is (at least for those of us privileged enough to be enjoying it),

Right now, right this very second, hovering above your head is a series of satellites that can tell you, to within a meter, exactly where you are located at almost any point on this planet. To access this magic, all you need is a device about the size of a deck of playing cards that you can pick up at your local Best Buy for $100.

In your pocket or by your bed, or socked away inside your glove compartment is another device that allows you to call anyone on the face of the planet, surf the web, write an essay, or shoot HD quality video. This device costs you about $70 a month, and you recently bought one for your 8 year old daughter so you could keep track of her at soccer practice.

On the other hand, can you image telling someone at the start of the 20th century that there’d be this worldwide network of computers that would be used extensively (primarily?) for transmitting explicit sexual images around the world?

When I was a kid, I had to guilt trip my parents into getting me an Apple IIe and then a Commodore 64 and thought I was uber-1337 for pirating the hell out of games for both systems (passing floppies of Archon around at lunch — good times!) Kids these days don’t realize how good they have it with torrents … at least that’s what I’ve heard …

Damn I’m glad I grew up to live in the future.

Unicomp Space Saver Keyboard

Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have these crappy mushy USB keyboards. We had keyboards that took up most of the desktop, weighed 15 pounds and sounded like a dot matrix printer going full bore when you were typing on it. And we liked it!

Seriously, I type about 150 WPM and detest most keyboards made over the past 10 years. I finally got fed up with this a few weeks ago and decided to go find an old school clicky keyboard. After a bit of research on the Internet, I hit up the Unicomp site.

Unicomp makes keyboards based on technology from Lexmark International which manufactured all of those wonderful keyboards for IBM back in the day. And their keyboards are every bit the awesomeness that I remember from hacking away at an IBM PC during a summer job at the Department of Defense in 1984.

I bought the space saver keyboard below for $69. The “space saver” designation is a bit of a misnomer as this keyboard is larger than most of the recent keyboards I used. Its just not as ginormous as the full-sized IBM-style keyboards which are fraking huge.

It definitely has that clicky-ness to it that some people apparently find annoying, but it is not so loud as to disturb anyone unless you have extremely oversensitive coworkers or roommates. Otherwise, the bottom line is this is simply how a keyboard should be.

WTF Indeed, Glenn

Surfing the web a few weeks ago, I ran across this bizarre entry on Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit blog. Now, personally, I would have thought that Reynolds would be opposed entirely to naming buildings after terrorists, but apparently not so much:

HMM: University of Texas regents take KKK organizer’s name off dorm. Does that mean that all those buildings named after Robert Byrd in West Virginia will have to change?

UPDATE: Reader Mike Ferrante writes: “Seems like we’re getting like the old Stalinist Russia where we erase the people who have become unfashionable. WTF.”

Now personally, I’m not a fan of Robert Byrd and, yes, his name should come off all those public buildings. By his own admission, Byrd’s infatuation with the KKK was short lived and he apologized for his involvement in it repeatedly, but it also seems clear that Byrd was most upset about what the KKK association did to his political career more than any actual intolerance he perpetuated (as late as 1997 he warned aspiring politicians not to get involved with the Klan because of the albatross it would place around their careers!)

But Byrd’s sins are relegated to the awful, bigoted things he wrote in letters and said in public forums. William Stewart Simkins, the lawyer who had the University of Texas dormitory named after him, was an out-and-out terrorist. As Dr. Tom Russell, who wrote a paper on UT’s history, notes,

After the Civil War ended, William Stewart Simkins dishonored himself by becoming a criminal and terrorist. In late 1860s Florida, Simkins and his brother Eldred were Klan leaders. A masked, armed nightrider who admitted terrorizing freed slaves, William Stewart Simkins proudly spoke of beating a “darkey” with a barrel stave. He robbed a train of rifles intended for the state militia, and the Klan used these guns to terrorize African Americans. Simkins threatened an African-American legislator and kept blacks from the polls. In just one of the Florida counties under his command, Klansmen murdered 25 freed slaves during a three-year period.

It is obscene for Mike Ferrante and Reynolds to suggest that renaming a building to register disapproval for a terrorist is making us like “the old Stalinist Russia” and to bizarrely suggest that Simkins’ acts of violence and terror have merely become “unfashionable.”

WTF indeed.