Wheeled bags May 22, 2006
Whenever I travel, I see lots of crimes against humanity.  One of the most common is the misuse of wheeled bags.  Some people think that anything with wheels should be rolled.  I think they're wrong.  If it's small enough to be confused with a purse, it shouldn't be rolled.  The most common perpetrator in this case is businessmen.  They usually have a nice little leather bag that holds their newspaper, their passport, and a banana.  It's really too small to hold anything else.  And like little nancies, these "professional businessmen" wheel around their cutesy little bags because they're too stupid or too weak to pick them up.  They should be ashamed.  A disgrace to the male race. 

The other major crime also concerns bags, though not necessarily wheeled.  I've come up with a rule of thumb that should do away with this problem:  If your bag is too big for you to handle, you shouldn't be allowed to have it.  Simple as that.  If you pack so much stuff that you need one of those rent-a-carts, you really shouldn't be traveling by plane.  You should get your own stupid plane.  Or maybe you should have your stuff shipped.  Obviously you haven't quite grasped the art of traveling.  It's all about sacrifice.  You can't take a different pair of shoes for each day.  You can't bring your bowling ball and your typewriter.  You need to make a choice.  Either you travel light or you don't travel at all.  If I had my way, that's how it would be.  I'd stand outside the airport and turn people away if their bags were too big.  "Nope, you're gonna get in my way later."  "I don't think so, sister.  Take the bus." #travel
Comment Quicktags May 22, 2006
I disabled the Comment Quicktags plugin, but kept the same functionality by editing my theme files.  The plugin inserted a call to two javascript files in the header.php file, which is called in every single template file.  The quicktags are only used for commenting, so I inserted the call into my comments.php file. #technology
Pagebar May 22, 2006
I enabled the Pagebar plugin, which creates a few links to different pages in the series (more than the "Previous" and "Next" that were in use). #technology
Attention span (2) May 22, 2006
I think I have a frighteningly short attention span.  This is mostly a bad thing.  As I sat through hours and hours of meetings last week, I was constantly surprised at how certain people could pay attention and continue to be involved in presentations and conversations for hours on end.  I couldn't stay focused for more than a few minutes at a time.  Probably 2 or 3 to be exact.  And even at the end of a long day of meetings, certain people wouldn't quit.  They'd still bring up topics and ask questions and make their speeches long and drawn out.  I don't know how they do it. 

I have a possible explanation:  What if years of TV-watching and school-attending have turned me into a time-abiding robot?  What if I can only focus for 30 minutes at a time, or more accurately 23 minutes (the running length of a typical TV show, sans commercials)?  What if my attention span is limited to 44 minutes because that's how long every class in high school and junior high lasted for?  It makes some amount of sense.  In high school, you knew when class was over.  You didn't have to look at the clock.  You could feel it.  Maybe that sixth sense has continued into my post-school life, forcing me to switch gears every 40 minutes or so.  I wonder if there's a way I can undo this... #psychology
Computer illiteracy May 22, 2006
A lot of Americans know how to use a computer.  My grandmother doesn't, and that's fine.  She has no use for strange electronic gizmos, and my grandfather was a bit resistant to change, as evidenced by his frequent criticism of "rock and roll music" as "a bunch of weird guys just jumping around and screaming".  But even my mom and dad are computer literate.  My mom knows how to use fancy things like mail merge (I have no idea what that is), and my dad was one of the first people I knew with an internet connection. 

With this is mind, it pains me to see people who should be adept at using computers instead having trouble performing simple tasks like copying and pasting.  I work with people who have been using computers since mainframes, punch cards, and vacuum tubes.  And yet these same people don't understand how to do basic things in Microsoft Excel.  One woman was a very important person on a big project, and she knew about useful little Excel tidbits like using a single quote at the beginning of a cell to force it to display text instead of a formula.  Yet she wasn't completely comfortable with using Enter, Tab, or the arrow keys to move to different cells.  She would type something in one cell, click another cell, and start typing there.  After a few seconds, I almost had a nervous breakdown.  One of my professors used to open a separate instance of a program for each document he would open.  So he would open Microsoft Word and File - Open a file.  When he was done with that file, he would close Word, reopen Word, and File - Open another file.  It was more than painful to watch.  Another thing that gets to me is people's inability to find files on their computer.  They'll be working on something and save it in a location that's easy to remember and find.  Then they'd struggle through minimizing all their windows and displaying the desktop so they could find the link to Windows Explorer.  When they couldn't find the icon that literally says "Windows Explorer" (even though My Computer and My Documents do the same thing), they'd clumsily bumble through the start menu and open and close every single subfolder.  Then when they finally found Explorer, they'd try to find their file in the Windows folder or some other place that never stores files you're working on.  I think I had an aneurysm while watching this. #technology