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I copied, I want to paste
Wednesday, September 26 2001
Last evening it was crisp, and this morning it was cool. It was even cooler than light jacket cool, but perhaps not quite as cool as, say, Fonzie cool. Autumn is a very good thing. I like the way it smells, which is nothing like Los Angeles.
Gretchen had left for her parents' place for a gratuitously traditional celebration of Yom Kippur, so I hung around the house, watching teevee and being solicited constantly by Sally for yet another walk. Lately she's developed a habit of clambering up into my lap while I sit in front of my computer. It's bad a enough with a kitten in my lap; you can imagine what it's like with a lanky pit bull/Labrador hybrid, all awaggle and alicking.
I was also trying to work out some of the problems with my Linux computer, which has an installation of the Mandrake 8.0 release. I didn't really know what I was doing, so I kept reinstalling it from scratch and getting wildly different results with identical installation actions. It was extremely frustrating. Along the way I made a few mental notes about flaws in the Linux KDE desktop that someone needs to fix:
- The default font sizes are unreadable, especially in the various web browsers. And what are these fonts anyway? They're ugly even when you can read them. Is it really so difficult to design a freeware font?
- How come I can't select some text, copy it, and paste it somewhere else? In Windows, there is very little screen text that can't be cut and pasted. In KDE, it's rare to find a place that allows cutting and pasting. Wouldn't it make sense to allow pasting into form fields at a minimum?
Gretchen called from Silver Spring wanting me to videotape the premier episode of the latest Star Trek prequel show for her parents, since they were all out on the town and far away from their consumer video equipment. Try as I might, however, I wasn't able to find this show on any of the 500 available digital cable channels. But even if I could have found it, the VCR, which I thought I'd programmed to start recording at 8pm, just sat there inert at the appointed time. This performance is not the stuff of open source geekyness.
And so while geeks nationwide were losing themselves in the latest Star Trek lore, I was paying attention instead to something far more to my liking: two hours of a PBS miniseries about evolution. I'd half-expected it to be a rehash of all the ideas and examples I already take for granted, but no, it was an excellent program, with all sorts of evidence of evolution as an ongoing process. It started out with the case of a species of highly-poisonous newt, having the power to kill hundreds of people with the toxins from a single individual. But why is it so toxic? It turns out that it is engaged in a chemical arms race with a species of garter snake having a highly-developed resistance to this particular toxin.
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