Liebraries

Hello there

I like libraries. I like them a lot. I like the feeling of being in a place where everyone simply wants to be left alone to drown in whatever novels or textbooks that they happen to be reading, and will react with great adversity the moment they are disturbed in the very slightest because they know that the majority of people in the building are on their side. I like the idea of a place that is put aside for the sole purpose of being able to be left alone, something that I'm not able to find even in my own room at times, so it's nice to be able to sit down and write completely pointless articles on Wordpad (my previous flame used to be Notepad, but we fell out of with each other after I realized that she gave absolutely no regard towards formatting). So I go to libraries a lot, but not, as one would expect, for the sake of the actual resources and books. Goodness no, I find all of that on the Internet. I come here simply because I like the atmosphere's wetness, probably due to the fountain on the ground floor of the library that has no doubt been exhaled and inhaled thoroughly by countless other people who also come here for the atmosphere.

And there do seem to be a lot of people who don't actually come to the libraries for the books. Many of the people sitting at the tables next to the very bright windows that outshine whatever might be on your computer's screen thus making the tables the exact place that you shouldn't sit if you're going to use a laptop, which is also where all the powerpoints are which makes the tables an okay-ish sort of place to use your laptops, have, not suprisingly at all by this point, laptops with them. They are also open and they (the people) seem to be using them a lot.

Maybe they're here because of the environment or for something else, perhaps the free wi-fi. In any case, they don't actually seem to be here for what libraries exist for: books.

The wonderful and late Douglas Adams wrote an article about this that I found in the Salmon of Doubt (which by the way, Gan, you should read once you emerge from the beneath the waves of programming that you seem to be diving into a lot lately). He basically wrote about how some things have features or components added to them that essentially make something else in those things redundant, and thus need to be removed. For instance, advertisments in magazines. Now that many magazines are online, advertisments no longer need to take up more space than the actual articles in the magazines because of links, which only need to be so large to get your attention, and can lead you to an entirely new page with plenty of detailed information about whatever the ad is about. The idea that advertisments need to be intrusive is removed. Online magazines also remove a lot of dead wood from magazines. Some things become redundant along the way, and should be removed.

But we still see magazines that you can actually hold in your hand. Papery ones as well. Which is puzzling seeing as how almost all of us possess some sort of device capable of accessing the internet. But it really isn't as puzzling as it sounds. Magazines still have the advantage of not running out battery, seeing as how they don't have any battery. People still favour the convenience of being able to take out a magazine and read without having to connect to a wireless hotspot, type in the URL of the magazine and so on and so forth. And in actual fact, we've really just subsitutted dead wood for burning already dead things that have become fossil fuels. We haven't actually removed anything overall.

I've got nowhere to go with this, really. Anything random comments on the tagboard, please.

No one can hear you screen.

Here's a thought about the matter of touchscreens. They're not all that omniscient when it comes to input. You may argue that they're incredibly versatile and that their function is only limited to whatever they are programmed to do, and while this sounds very good on paper (something else that is a lot more user friendly), it really doesn't translate all that well onto an actual device, in terms of one thing: precision. Two things actually, but we'll get to them later.

Some might argue that what we're talking about here is in fact accuracy, but they should stop talking now because what I'm really talking about here is precision, quite ironically the more accurate term here.

First, let me just say that touchscreens are still a wonderful idea. Those that argue for its versatility are indeed, in some sense, right. Touchscreens can be incredibly handy in some cases, especially when you want to target something all the way on the other end of the screen on a handheld device, which would be laborious with something like a button cursor, to the point where you find yourself completely uninterested with what you were going to select by the time you get to it. In this case, touchscreens allow for quick and wide access.

Touchscreens also allow for gestures, which takes the pressure of the poor, miniscule screens that most handheld have to hold a ridiculous amount of buttons on them, and so freeing up the screen for more interesting things like epileptic backgrounds. Gestures also allow for more intuitive control. In the case of the iPhone, a rebel in more ways than one, including the area of proper capitalization, to scroll over lists you simply swab your finger across the screen to drag the list down, thus scrolling. It's very intuitive and those using the iPhone for the first time will probably figure it out quickly.

Touchscreens also remove the staggering limitation of how many buttons a small device can hold before it means that you no longer have the option of not accidentally activating your camera when you don't want to. On a touchscreen, you can simply classify buttons into panels, and swap to the set of buttons that you want to use. This means that the functionality of the device is only dependant on how lazy the developers are, which is something that has yet to be worked around.

So if touchscreens improve the range of functions a device has, as well as allow for intuitive control, then why all the fuss, and why the terrible pain in both my thumbs as I type this out on my tiny Tungsten C keyboard. What is wrong with touchscreens?

The problem with touchscreens can be explored using the analogy of... You know, never mind. The problem is that touchscreens lack two things: precision and feedback.

Touchscreens, while incredibly versatile, can also be terribly frustrating. As a Palm user I can testify to this (Listen Apple people, I'll get to you soon. You just wait for a second). A lot of frustration comes from selecting things on lists. Lists cram many little items together, and it's quite often that I can't seem to select what I want to select, and the reason for this is that my fingertip, being the mystical alpine dwelling creature that I am, often covers two items on the list at a time, this means that I usually end up selecting the wrong item.

Sometimes I try to change so that my Palm will still love me, and use the very tip of my finger to target more precisely, but this doesn't seem to work very well, usually because the screen seems to ignore this completely half the time (That phrase is slightly confusing. I apologize), and not respond at all. Even using the stylus yields the same results sometimes.

But many this is simply due to incompetence on the part of Palm. Maybe another company, such as Apple, the democracy crowned king of the touchscreen after the release of the iPhone, will do better?

In order to avoid stoning by all those that can afford iPhones, (Quite honestly, that makes this quite safe, but they may drop the price, so you never know.) I should preface the Inquisition by saying that there are slight improvements. The iPhone's screen buttons are bigger, as is its screen, thus compensating for user belligerence, and gestures do remove the frustration of trying to target those tiny scroll bar buttons. But there still exist problems.

Behind the safety of my anti-tank obstacles I must say this: the keyboard has induced high levels of frustration, ad subsequently, hair loss. The problem with the iPhone's keyboard is not the disregard of capitalization, but rather the same problem that my Palm has with lists. The iPhone's keyboard is simply too small for fast text input. While it does seem like it's a lot larger than it should be, it really isn't. When using Dom's iPhone for reasons that will not be covered here, I constantly ended up reaching for the backspace, only to end up pressing the P. Precision just isn't with touchscreen keyboards, and is especially irritating when you're trying to input lots of text.

The problem here isn't the touchscreen, really. It's the users, specifically the users' fat, myopic thumbs. Human thumbs are simply that big, and this is unfortunate because they're not going to change anytime soon, unless Aldous Huxley is to believed. Users simply have thumbs that are that large, and while they are the cause of the problem, the user remains quite significant when it comes to any device, and unfortunately, developers haven't figured out how to remove the user, and thus remove the problem.

But precision isn't the only problem when it comes to touchscreen input.
If you take a look at a hardware keyboard on a handheld device, the keys are usually much smaller than that of a touchscreen keyboard's, but for some reason they remain easier to use. Why?

The thing that hardware keyboards have that touchscreen keyboards don't is feedback. Whenever you push a button on a hard keyboard, you can feel the button, and this benefits the user in two areas. It informs you that you have pushed the button, through a next hearty click, and it also means that you know precisely how much force you need to press it. Touchscreen keyboards are fairly ambiguous when it comes to this, because there simply isn't any communication between the two. One is never quite sure how hard one should press to "press" a touchscreen button, and it can be distressing when you press too lightly and end up not pushing it at all, or press too hard and end up inadvertently declaring war on your touchscreen, that declares that it is no longer "your" touchscreen, but an individual touchscreen with its own rights and freedom. Hardware keyboards don't present this problem because of force feedback: you know that you have pushed the button when it clicks.

Another thing that helps when using hard keyboards is that you're always able to feel the buttons. In the event that your fingers or thumbs tread into the terrible void of the region in between two keys, you can feel it and correct that. Touchscreen keyboards, on the other hand, don't give you that because keys and the borders between keys all feel the same. As such, you're never quite sure whether you're trying to press two buttons at once.

And these problems themselves have a problem because they can't be solved. A touchscreen will always remain flat, and simply can't deliver the sensation of touch feedback, for letting you know that you've pushed a button or for letting you know the position of your thumbs or fingers. Hardware keyboards have been doing this for years, maybe unintentionally.

And quite honestly I don't think touchscreens will ever overcome these problems. They may become more sensitive and so on, but the human thumb will always remain stubbornly fat, and we humans, not to be outdone by our thumbs, will always require force feedback when pushing buttons. Touchscreens work for certain things, but there comes certain point where some features are beyond it, simply because of the way users are. Sometimes the tendency to rely only on a touchscreen for input can end up limiting the functionality of a device. Developers, like good ol' Steve, shouldn't be afraid to add a few hard buttons to their devices if it will make input more user friendly and efficient.

Developers have to take this into account. Technology and devices may become more sophisticated and so on, but we users won't change. We like our hard buttons.

And so I must let my poor tiny Tungsten C's hard keyboard rest, and I leave you with an obligatory Bow Chicka Bow Wow.

I would like to point out that all of the above, except for the text with the bad posture here, was typed out using a tiny, hard button keyboard on a Tungsten C. The buttons are truly tiny, smaller than the buttons on most mobile phones. Also, one thousand and four hundred words, my fabulosos.

Max Rayne

Today I went on a random hike.

It was an interesting departure from the usual slog of spending a dark afternoon sitting in front of a computer writing a blog entry, or liberating Omaha Beach of the usual American capitalist scum. I say dark afternoon because it's not actually rainy or stormy of any sort, but rather the kind that threatens that it will be rainy or stormy in a while if you don't start taking it seriously, and eventually does break down into a small sobbing fit in the form of an irritating sort of drizzle.

But enough about the rain, because I"ve genuinely had enough of that rubbish.

After waking up at 12 in the afternoon and feeling very disappointed with myself I left my completely desolate dwelling for lunch at Jurong Point, and rather wantonly declared to myself (on the way there, on a road that was quite populated at the time, much to my embarassment) that I would take a completely meaningless hike from Lakeside MRT to Chinese Garden, for the pure gusto of it.

Halfway through my lunch the rather unstable and angsty sky decided to advise me against this, by dropping me a hint or two in the form of more than two rain clouds that proceeded to blot out any hope of my afternoon's plans.

I decided to give the sky a very mortal and electronegative finger, and proceed with my plans for the day anyway.

I took a very nonchalant and depressed ride from Boon Lay to Lakeside, and by this time the sky was already on the verge of suicide, which was quite uncomfortable for me since I was about to step out in full view of it. After alighting I wandered around the MRT station nonchalantly for a few minutes or so, shamelessly procrastinating like an equally suicidal sky about whether or not I should step into the already prominent drizzle and go ahead with the hike or not.

After a while, my interest in the station's architecture eventually fizzled out from nothing to slightly more nothing, and I stepped out into the rain under the comfort of my shaky, equally suicidal umbrella.

Trudging through what was light rain for a while felt a bit stupid at first. At this point, most people would start getting thoughts like "I'm feeling quite stupid right now", or "I could be on an MRT right now." Although it's important to note that most people don't do this sort of thing to begin with, and thus don't get any of these thoughts to begin with. Although after a while the feelings of stupidity gave way to true stupidity, and I marched through the rain for a good distance.

During this trek I experienced different things.

One of them was getting wet. This is strictly not recommended for anyone, unless you happen to be appropriately dressed for this. In the event that you are appropriately dressed for getting wet, however, you probably aren't appropriately dressed by any other standards. In other words, never walk in the open in the rain, even if you have an umbrella, for long distances without shelter.

But it was through this rain that halfway through my trek, I started to feel incredibly lonely, and maybe even a bit stranded. When my entire left side was pelted by liqueous rounds of water all I thought at that point was "I should probably turn back", but then realized with dismay that I was already halfway through, and turning back would mean an equal distance to an MRT station that carrying on would. I felt incredibly stranded at this point, feeling like I was in the middle of nowhere, or rather in the middle of two places that would each be considered somewhere. It was a very strange, disconcerting void.

And at this point I also had a few thoughts about MRT stations. They seem to be safe points of sort, checkpoints that make us feel like we're connected to the rest of the country when we're next to them or in them. There's this strange sense of relief that I get whenever I see an MRT station when I think I might be lost, knowing that that building can take me wherever I need to go. Without an MRT station, one (and quite literally one, because I might be the only one that feels this way) feels lost, having strayed away from a safe point.

And this made me think about LRT stations, branching out from MRT stations into the further away regions. The whole layout of an MRT map seems a bit like a very confused, multi directional tree, that you must play 50 cents each time to climb. Admitedly, it's a rather large tree, so I suppose it's fine.

Speaking of trees, I got quite a nice picture of a tree on the way, using my phone's camera that kicked and screamed as a put it in full exposure of the rain.



The camera is now in the process of recuperation.

So after a long trek through the unforgiving and angsty rain, I found myself wet and exhausted under the slightly less unforgiving shelter of Chinese Garden MRT station. I had half a mind to go off wandering into the depths of Chinese Garden, but then realized that I was only a few stops away from pneumonia, and postponed that for the day.

I should probably do this again.