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bad ergonomics, good electronics
Thursday, August 5 1999Every morning as I ride my bike to work, the same osprey is perched atop a lamp post above the San Diego River . I guess he's waiting for large fish to present themselves, since that's pretty much all that ospreys eat. They're fish eagles after all. No one else seems to notice the osprey at all, not even the Mexican fisherman near enough to be shat upon. This morning I saw the osprey take a dump; little white droplets flew out at least a dozen feet in a big disgusting squirt. Birds don't piss, you see; their feces and urine all comes out as a milky emulsion. And they only have one hole back there; all of their sexual activity is technically illegal in states with sodomy laws.
Yesterday I went out and bought the cheapest personal digital assistant money can buy, the $99 daVinci. Its "character recognition" capability is absolutely pathetic, but I thought ahead and also bought a little fold-up keyboard. The hope is that I can type text on the road and not have to remember as much when I get back to a the modern world. But in playing with the thing, I can see that I'm going to have to make lots of physical modifications to have a usable typewriter with which to document, say, Burning Man. I'm going to have to glue rubber slip-stops on the bottom of the keyboard, develop some sort of keyboard lock to keep it from folding when it's in my lap, and then I'm going to have to build myself a special stand to keep the PDA itself at a reasonable reading angle. What's more, the keyboard is significantly more awkward than it needs to be. For example, delete requires the shift key and the single quote cannot be produced without two key strokes. The thing needs a bunch of ergonomic improvements, though its electronics are reasonably advanced. It has 2 megs of static RAM, for example. That's a lot of text.
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