Suddenly, I thought to go to the coat closet and bring out a bit of history for them: My grandfather’s jacket^*.

Sometime in my youth, before or during early college, I was given the choice of a gift of jackets: my father’s old denim jacket, or my grandfather’s old denim jacket. I chose my grandfather’s, as he had passed away some years before and my father was still alive. Heck, I was living in his basement.

I wore that jacket through my first years at college until it was supplanted by my trenchcoat my senior year. If you look closely to the back, you can see the worn shoulder where my backpack strap rested.

My grandfather was a bulldog himself, so the sleeves were a little short for my simian arms, but that didn’t matter. Ever since I was in high school or maybe before, I’ve preferred to bare forearms, so I shoved the sleeves up over my elbows. If you see me in a sweatshirt or sweater these days, the sleeves will be shoved up, and I wear the sleeves on my more formal attire rolled up a couple times, if not over the elbows. I don’t do this with trenchcoats, however. But the denim jacket was a piece of fashion, part of the Canadian tuxedo that was my style statement during those years of college. I didn’t take it off for class.

If you look at the button on the right front pocket, you might see its button is tearing away from the pocket. For the years of school, I carried a small panda bear in it to break up the normal Noggle grimacing and intimidating demeanor. It didn’t work. But when Noggle hopped onto the city bus bearing him from Marquette University through the Core and onto his urban environment, I closed the pocket. There’s no point asking for any more trouble than being a member of the minority on public transit already does.

I don’t know how many years my grandfather wore this jacket; I wore it for three. Since I got into the trenchcoat and fedora look, I have not worn it that frequently, although my wife mentions I wore it when we were dating.

But I have it at the ready in the coat closet if I have the urge. And, more importantly, I have an artifact of the legendary members of the family of whom I speak to my children and who my children will never meet.

^* There is a slight chance that this is not my grandfather’s jacket at all. As a youth, I was also given a choice of hats between my father’s and my grandfather’s, and I made the same decision. The hat decision took place when I was in middle school, and the legendary chewing puppy we got when we lived in a mobile home in Murphy, Missouri, claimed that hat as his own. So I might be misremembering the jacket thing and bought it at a yard sale in 1989. But I don’t think so.

I remember some of them, but certainly not all. Most of them stem from mistakes on the technical end and not on security breaches, which do not allow for a wry commentary.

An amusing read. It reads like a series of blog posts, with each individual story only a couple hundred words, which makes it perfect for a nightstand book you want to pick up and put down quickly. The end of it includes a “Mail me your stories” bit which indicates the author might eventually have or might eventually release a sequel that I wouldn’t mind reading.

Books mentioned in this review:

As I was looking for some safety pins the other day, I dumped a couple of bins in my “pen” drawer, which is the desk drawer on the second desk in my office that I never really look into for pens. I unearthed a twenty-year-old watch, but no safety pins. And as the items of dubious value spilled out, I got rid of some.

Including:

1. Four risers for a monitor stand. Some decade ago, back when I still had a smallish CRT monitor, I bought a stand to raise the monitor to an ergonomic height. The stand had four sets of risers of varying heights that you could stack to make the stand higher or lower to accommodate your monitor or your sense of ergonomy. I had four one-inch sized risers left, little cylinders with a fluted end to fit into the other cylinders. I tossed them into the drawer in case I’d ever need to raise the monitor more. In case I got a smaller monitor, I suppose. Or because I just save things. Soon after, though, I got a 19″ monitor that needed no stand at all (and then bigger LCD monitors since then). I’ve long since donated the stand itself to Goodwill, but the risers rested comfortably in the drawer, moving into two different houses some hundreds of miles from their origin, before I decided that I would not, in fact, ever do anything with them. I can’t even imagine any sort of craft or modern art I’d use them for. Now that they’re gone, though, I’ll need something just like them next week.
    
2. A broken wine opener. For some reason, I’ve kept a wine opener whose wings section broke off from its bottle-holding portion in this drawer for five or six years. In case I ever took up welding as a hobby, I guess. Out they go.
    
3. A non-functioning dry erase marker. I have a dry erase board in my office; I’ve had it, again, for a dozen years or so, since the Casinoport house and its blue-on-blue office. I’ve had a number of things on it for a long time–it bears a little handwritten encouragement that my mother-in-law wrote on the bottom of it when she left after assisting us through our first week as parents. The tasks, though, are less than three years old on average. But for some reason, and I’m sure they were good reasons at the time, I bought a couple of packs of dry erase markers in various colors, including some lighter pastel shades. For clarity. I threw them into my Drawer of Holding, and they’ve remained there until this week, where I tested them out and put those that worked on an easel with a dry erase side that my mother gave to Jimmy on his first Christmas. I found one that didn’t work, and I threw it out.
    
4.  
5.  

Okay, that’s only three things. But it’s a step in the right direction. Next up: Shredding my credit card statements from the 20th century. Maybe.

What the dickens, I thought. Those guys at RCA are just crazy.

Of course, the answer is automatic for you, Charles, but I had to puzzle it out.

You see, I’m listening to these on the little Crosby. But I hearkened back to my youth, when we had a real stereo and then a console stereo. With spindles that could handle multiple records.

You put the stack of records on the special spindle, and it would drop the bottom one and play it. When that one was done, the second disk would drop down and play. And so on.

By putting the sides of the records thusly, RCA made it so that listeners could stack the records, put them on the spindle, and then when the two or four disks are done, turn the entire stack over to listen to the other half.

The answer didn’t come to me automatically because I didn’t have or I didn’t listen to these sets when we had the stereos that could accommodate them. We just put individual LPs or 45s (on a special spindle for them) and let them play.

I could puzzle it out, though, because I had experience with the spindles in my youth.

Sometime the middle 1980s, when digital watches broke the barrier from technical marvel to status symbol for middle schoolers, I got my first watch as a gift. I wore a series of digital time pieces until college, where I got a real name brand watch for Christmas as a gift from my then-current sweetheart.

I remember that the watch had real hands on it; at some point in my midpoint generation, the anachronism of hands instead of LCD digits implied some status as a grown-up. This particular model offered an elapsed-time ring that fit around the edge of the watch. You could twist the ring so that the zero lined up with the big hand. Whenever you finished your activity, you could look to see where the big hand was to see how many minutes had elapsed. Unless, of course, the minutes exceeded a full hour, at which point the digital-dependents who didn’t know what the little hand was for would be lost. The elapsed time ring lasted only a few months, until a devastating encounter with a potato bin’s edge taught me to wear the watch on the inside of my wrist. I wore that watch longer than I remained with that particular soulmate. I can’t even remember the circumstances where that watch failed, nor can I remember what it looked like when I laced that band up onto my wrist. But those salad days of collegiate vigor end like inexpensive timepieces.

While tossing my desk’s pen drawer, I dumped a bin of pens I’ve accummulated and not used for decades, and low and beleft: The very watch in question.

A twenty-year-old watch that has not worked in probably fifteen years, to be charitable. And I still have it.

Perhaps I shall have to try replacing the battery to see if it works or if it actually suffered a catastrophic failure of some sort. As I do have a watch already, maybe I’ll donate it to some church garage sale or something.

Because it has crossed my mind, briefly, in recent days that I might just possibly keep too much stuff.

—————————————————–

I first worked a keyboard twenty some years ago, a Smith Corona portable typewriter. Qwerty confounded me with its elegant design created to keep mechanical type arms from clogging at the little crosshairs on the paper. I quickly moved onto the computers of the day, such as they were, with the same Qwerty layout, a keypad, and a couple of function keys on the Commodore 128 to keep me company. But sometime circa 1990, I got my first IBM clone—that’s what they called them in those days, when International Business Machines made actual machines of one sort and another—and its 104 key keyboard. Probably not a soft click, since the keyboards of the pre-Clinton era produced a mighty clack-clack-clack that served the old alarm-clock-for-a-puppy role of soothing typewriter users who were skittish with the new technology and the plethora of keys that lacked the end of the line ding or the buzz of an electronic carriage returning.

Because I got started with the keyboards early, I skipped through the whole high school typing experience and forsook the home-row based touch typing in favor of my own organically-developed claw-and-peck which allowed me to accelerate to 30-40 words a minute with only the occasional glance at the keyboard to orient myself. After taking a position in the computer industry, I began using the upper range of the 104 character keyboards, including the esoteric function keys as well as the Print Screen, Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, and Page down keys as well as the number pad. Over the intervening years, I have become accustomed to the standard keyboard layout present on every keyboard that came standard with each Packard Bell I purchased new or, later, at garage sales for five dollars. I can easily jump to the end of the line in my word processor or to the end of the my e-mail inbox. I can easily take a screen shot to illustrate what I see or what the user should see. Aside from the whole glance every once in a whole to ensure that I’m typing my password correctly, I can manipulate the standard keyboard like a professional.

But within the last couple years, manufacturers have begun to conspire against me, possibly the only regular user of the extended key set. They’ve begun to move those keys into new configurations as some sort of practical joke shared by their engineers or usability experts.

I first noticed the shift at a previous employer. When I started, the company provided me with a fresh Dell computer, direct from the factory. That keyboard was almost standard. On a standard keyboard, the extended keys are laid out like this:

However, Dell added a handy set of keys designed to handle those pesky power-related functions of your PC: Power Off, Reset, Sleep. You know, functions previously reserved for the front of your computer case but lately (or at least since 1998) relegated to buttons on your operating system desktop. To make things exciting for its users and to accommodate these functions within the size of a regular keyboard, Dell put these keys into the position at the top of the keyboard, where the Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause/Break keys go and simply pushed those keys down a row:

I couldn’t use the keyboard, as I often toggled the scroll lock setting when I meant to go to the top of the screen, so I brought in a stained, clicking keyboard from my personal collection. Fortunately, I avoided any catastrophic errors, unlike a couple of coworkers nearby who meant to do something and ended up resetting the machine in the middle of some standard, but given their salaries, costly operation. Thanks, Dell!

Of course, it’s not just desktop Windows machines that befuddle my fingertips, but also laptop keyboards. For reasons unknown to usability, laptop and notebook computer designers have intuited that notebooks and their keyboards must not exceed in size an eight by eleven sheet of actual notebook paper, no matter how many keys it needs to hold. Not only do they make the keys smaller, but they replace the CTRL, the ALT, or the Windows key with Fn keys whose esoteric multi-finger gymnastics don’t transfer to real computer use. I pride myself on the ability to use hotkeys to navigate through applications without the mouse, but I’m rendered dependent on the mouse by the understudy keys laptops. Of course, laptops don’t actually have a mouse, so I depend upon whatever unreasonable facsimile the laptop provides. Unfortunately, my Mesozoic IBM Thinkpad doesn’t offer a touchpad; instead, it has a small joystick to move the mouse pointer. A joystick located between the G, H, and B keys that helpfully prevents me from pressing those keys half of the time. Thanks, IBM!

The consternation of glyph constellation extends to Macintoshes, or Macintosha, or Macintoshi, or however you pluralize those cute iMac and eMac boxes with their USB keyboards. Their stock USB keyboards sport concave shapes where the normal keyboard feel convex. Instead of the ALT key, we have the open-Apple key. The keyboard comes with an extra four unfathomable function keys, and the corner of the keyboard most prone to walking cats or tumbling stacks of papers offers a sensitive eject key for the CD/DVD drive. As if the mere alien nature of the keyboard didn’t make me feel enough like a stranger in a strange land, Mac OS X conspires to make my normal shortcut keystrokes into ineffective fat-fingering. The standard CTRL+C keystroke, welded to my psyche through a decade’s use, doesn’t work on the Macintosh as Steve Jobs, in a fit of pique no doubt, decreed that the Control key do nothing and that the open-Apple key, placed conveniently where the Alt key belongs, should handle all common intra-window shortcuts. So not only do I not know where the keys are, but I do not know what they do. Thanks, Steve Jobs!

I know the frantic change within the computer world brings us abundant technological wonders which I’ll probably understand for another decade or two, but I wish that the computer makers could at least not rearrange the keys more frequently than a bored housewife. Would Beethoven have created his master works if the piano keyboards in Vienna all alternated or altered the shape and locations of the keys yielding a particular note? Of course not; he would have spent all of his time adjusting to the medium instead of directing the medium to his wishes. So if I never become centuries’ worth of famous in any keyboarding art, I’ve already assigned the blame.

Hey, did you hear they’re remaking Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with that guy from Twilight as Ferris Bueller?

Now that I’ve put this unfounded rumor on the Internet, I fear this weekend is going to be like a live performance of the 1812 Overture with the popping of Gen X craniums instead of cannons.

…and you name the call the artist Rodriguez instead of Rodrigue?

All my alleged learning and education and pomposity shot down in an instant.

Maybe you’re lucky enough not to have conversations before 8am talking about contemporary New Orleans-based American artists. Or smart enough.

Books mentioned in this review: