The morning is still brisk but here in the foothills of the Sierras we're gazing ahead to the warmest weekend of the season. I walked with my daughter and our dog as I normally do when she started to complain, my daughter that is not the dog, about the amount of homework one of her teachers continues to give her. She couched it in the context of the damage it is doing to her back. I can attest to her suffering through my own shouldering of said burden. Her pack does become ridiculously weighty at times. I plunged into my fatherly ramblings of questionable wisdom. I said that maybe her children will be pardoned of that slavery to the clear cutting of the forests of Borneo (my actual phrasing was not so flowery). Her children would be adorned with only a slim laptop. My thoughts then jumped to the input of the multitudes of data the fruits of her loins would have to submit to their silicon journals. I said that our clunky qwerty keyboards would also be relegated to the "dead-tech" museums. Her reaction to my musings surprised me mildly. She wondered why I thought that current keyboards were inadequate. My thoughts quickly juggled my reaction to her comment and my response which included a clumsy explanation of how keyboards are currently laid out to slow the typing process. I told her about an input device I had read about that was easier to use. It was something like a half-globe with keys that could sit in someones lap allowing a more natural and less physically strenuous positioning of the hands while inputting text. My daughter and I parted at the prescribed point and I started back home with the dog. I then thought that by the time my daughter walks her daughter to school input might not need fingers at all. Voice recognition is here now. My grandchildren might not even need to decide between post-modern input devices and ten-fingered typing. My wife popped into my head. I remembered her "chatting" events with her friend in Germany. When her friend wanted to switch to Skype or maybe even a "oh-so-20th-century-telephone" (remember those), she almost balked. She liked texting. She liked entering a whole long thought string. The long pauses waiting for responses also allowed her to catch up on her ironing. That led me back to my potential future grandchildren and their yet to be determined experiences with data input. Voice input might not be so desirable. Imagine the cacophony in the classroom. Silence (besides the tapping of fingers) during recording does have a distinct advantage...
Last Updated ( Thursday, 10 April 2008 08:18 )
Dancing Eggheads goes Joomla! 1.5
Written by Administrator
Thursday, 14 February 2008 21:47
Well I finally took the plunge and migrated to Joomla! 1.5. After a couple of years of using the very usable and stable phpWebSite from Appalachian State University I decided that the range of extensions and enhancements for that CMS are currently too limited for my plans for the future of this website. Joomla! has the most varied and active community of developers, constantly creating and updating enhancements for the Joomla! CMS. I am currently clawing my way up the learning curve to take full advantage of all the features of Joomla 1.5. I have implemented one Joomla! 1.0 website for a client at Emma Lea Books. I am available for consultation and contract work in the design, implementation and maintenance of Joomla! CMS based websites.
Check out all currently active websites that Dancing Eggheads has developed in the Web Links.
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 20 February 2008 14:25 )
