For the next few days at least, I am back on my Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
The reason for this is that my Kinesis Advantage keyboard went belly-up last night. At around the time that Sweden scored their last minute equaliser against England, it suddenly decided to stop responding to some of the keys. Fortunately it is still under warranty so I will be sending it back to get fixed in the next day or two, but having said that, it is still a little bit annoying.
On the other hand, I’m not missing it too badly as of yet. While the Kinesis is more comfortable in some respects — it seems to have knocked a couple of my bad typing habits on the head and the mild discomfort in my right arm has more or less gone now — it does have a few niggles. The curly brackets and the +/= key are in totally the wrong places if you are trying to code in a C-style language such as C++, Java, Perl, PHP or C#, for starters. You have to curl your fingers on your right hand underneath your palms to get to the curly brackets, which tend to get used pretty heavily in the aforementioned languages, and the +/= key is placed counterintuitively in the top left hand corner of the keyboard. The position of the arrow keys is just horrendous — directly below the C, V, M and comma keys, where I am constantly pressing them by mistake, sometimes with fairly annoying consequences. To be sure, you can reprogram the keys if you like, but I haven’t done so as of yet, mainly because I haven’t been able to decide where to move them to or what to put in their place.
I will probably keep it once it’s fixed, but all in all I’m not sure that I would go out of my way to recommend the Kinesis keyboard. At £225 including VAT and delivery it is probably overkill, given that the Microsoft Natural Keyboard is a fraction of the price and you are likely to find it perfectly adequate as it is. On the other hand, if you are concerned about RSI and have to type a lot of ordinary text rather than C# code, it may be worth considering getting a second hand one. One thing is clear, however: both are a vast improvement over the horrible traditional flat keyboard layout.
Update: It was fixed under warranty.
The idea behind ready meals is that you put them straight in the microwave, press a couple of buttons, wait ten minutes or so for the beep, and you’re done. Unfortunately, things are never quite as simple as that.
The ideal microwave meal should be suitable for home freezing, so you can buy them a week in advance. (Some aren’t.) It should also be suitable for cooking in the microwave from frozen, so you can decide at the last minute what you’re going to have, bung it straight in the microwave from the freezer, press a button, and come back in ten minutes when it beeps. (Some demand that you defrost them first, or cook them in a conventional oven, which isn’t all that helpful if you don’t have such a thing in the office kitchen.) And it shouldn’t require user intervention halfway through cooking, such as peeling back the cover and giving it a stir, so you can get on with something else while it’s chuntering away.
It should also be easy to dispense. Some meals come in a tray that is divided into two sections. This makes it impossible to just pour out the contents into a bowl or a plate without making a mess all over the place — you have to spoon the contents out, which takes half a minute or so longer. If your meal does come in two halves like that, they should be easily separable. And it should be easy to remove the cover without having to hunt around for a pair of scissors and then scald your fingers in the process.
Finally, it needs to taste good and present you with a balanced, healthy diet, rather than a whole lot of stuff concocted in some undergraduate chemistry lab or other. It shouldn’t be so smelly that it annoys everyone down the corridor from the kitchen. And when it says that it’s chicken casserole, it should contain a decent amount of chicken, and not be 95% dumplings.
When you’re a stressed out programmer working to tight deadlines, every little thing like that helps.
It’s great that our church makes good use of all the technological resources at its disposal to spread the Gospel. We couldn’t make it to the service yesterday morning, so we got the live stream over the Internet. It’s wonderful that modern technology makes it possible for you to get church to come to you when you can’t get to church.
The new video blogs look set to be quite promising if they do it right. It’s just a bit of a shame that there are no RSS feeds — I’d love to plug them into my news reader. C’mon guys, once Windows Vista hits the shelves in a few months, RSS is gonna go mainstream big time.
So another World Cup approaches, and yet again we find ourselves asking whether England will win this year. I don’t remember the time when they last won, as I had not yet been born, so it’s about time they did. I guess Gary Lineker will be one of the BBC commentators as usual. I still find it a bit freaky when I see him in that role on TV in a suit and a tie. When I was a teenager he was the star player of the England squad. Proves I must be getting old.
Admittedly I never used to be into football, or indeed sport of any flavour. As a kid, I was totally unathletic and proud of it — so much so that when two successive school reports in my early teens put my abysmal performance down to lack of co-ordination rather than the usual lack of effort, I was deeply offended. Okay, so I may not exactly be a circus knife thrower, but I did wonder what kind of politically correct claptrap they were spouting. Unathleticism was my high ideal in those days, after all. Heck, I even defied the attempts of three successive schools to teach me to swim.
Needless to say, my attitude towards The Beautiful Game has mellowed considerably since then. Maybe not quite to the extent that I’m actually playing it — I may have embarked on a bit of a health drive at the beginning of the year and started cycling in to work, but I am still very much of the opinion that football is best enjoyed from your armchair over a curry. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how well England do this time round and I am of course hoping for victory on their part.
One caveat is in order, however. You may recall the England-Argentina match at the last World Cup, which England won. This match attracted the greatest amount of interest round here by far, as Argentina had hitherto been subjecting our boys to one humiliating drubbing after another ever since the Falklands war. It seemed almost as if it were more important that they won this particular match than the entire tournament. Unfortunately, this made it an extremely bad time to have an optician’s appointment, as I did, right at the start of the second half of the game. Naturally, they were showing the match live on TV in the waiting room, and it was painfully obvious that the optician wanted to keep the length of my appointment to an absolute minimum so he could sneak in a few more minutes watching the game before seeing to his next victim patient. Moral of the story: if you need to book something like a contact lens checkup or root canal treatment, make sure you steer clear of all the important matches.
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Posted at 23:20 in Miscellany 
