Wally has 6 sets of face whiskers.. two eyebrow, two rear-jaw, and two front jaw. From what I read, cat whiskers are very sensitive, able to pick up air currents with great precision. I wonder how it compares to bare skin -- cats don't have much of that, so perhaps it's primarily there to adapt for that. There's something wonderful about programming or doing homework with a snuggly cat in front of you -- it's very easy, when I just want a moment's distraction, to reach out and scratch his chin or look into his eyes..

I keep having a dream drift in and out of my consciousness -- something about people needing something, and seeking or trading it, and something about transformation or changes. Again, it's just a string impression that doesn't really form anything coherent.

A question, a tricky one, for those advocating the computer-centric way of life -- what do you do when something like email stops working if you're not a super-geek like me who can manipulate the hell out of data, and can debug until it's fixed? Email is very personal, and it also can be very important. And yet millions of people, non-techies are putting something so central to life into the hands of a capricious system they often can't fix or troubleshoot. It's far worse than a car -- I'm clueless on that, but if my car breaks, I could rent another, or buy a new one, or bike or use public transport (actually, it would impact me a little less than once a week). Communication is inherently more central to human life than vehicle transportation. Yeah, computers give us more flexibility, and let us copy stuff around like there's no tomorrow, but it's us geeks who know how to do that. For your average person, paper letters are actually much better than email for important things. It's really kind of sad how that works out. I might suggest that people will eventually become much more computer literate, growing up with this stuff. That may be true (comparing my sisters, for example, to my mom or other people of that or older generations), but their sophistication with the computer still isn't deep enough, I don't think, to really give them the deep understanding that they'd need. Could computers be made simpler for end users? I've occasionally chewed on ways to do that -- there was once a product called AtEase, which was a replacement shell for end users on MacOS that made things really simple .. well, kind of. It just was a simpler version of the OS shell (finder) -- it couldn't make application software easier. Still, it was a good design, and raises interesting issues for software design for that segment of the population. But no, that still doesn't help that much -- software needs to either be bulletproof, or sufficiently simple that people can fix it when it breaks. Hmm.. It's not really as simple as putting a pretty face on things as AtEase did, even if that's a part of the solution. Is the solution to split software up for different kinds of users? Maybe, but will users keep graduating to deeper knowledge if they have big gaps between the level of sophistication of interaction? Some software design advocates think that it's possible to make software that's simple AND powerful. This is nice to the degree that it works -- a lot of really bad design in UI is when powerful things have awful interfaces, but there still an inherent tradeoff there, and once you reach it (trimming off the third comprimise with laziness in design), you can't pretend there isn't a tension there. I cannot, for example, think of an email interface that both me and joe random windows user would be happy with. I not only want a lot of options, I want them exposed, with lots of information flying my way, while that kind of thing is exactly what end users should not see. Aha!, let's make it configurable, says the designer. That's nice, and theoretically doable -- provided a spool format could be agreed on, it might be possible to have a single binary spanning the range between pine (which I use at work)/psmail (which I wrote, and use at home) and Apple's NeXTMail (or whatever they call it these days, which is very simple and pretty). However, the user experience is so different and noncontinuous that they might as well be seperate program.. So long as they use the standard mbox format (which most mail programs do) or agree on an alternative (my email program and mh might coincidentally share a format, or at least be close enough that munging would be easy), there's no reason for them to be shared ... well, no, that's wrong. There are standards for the format used for the mailboxes themselves, but not, sadly, other preferences, address book data, or any of the other stuff mail programs store. Damn.

PUSH went really well tonight. It was probably helped that we planned for this meeting, and the person speaking at this meeting (a group memeber) did a good job, and that our new posters totally kick butt. We had 12 people, and lively conversation.

Well, I'm still exhausted from last night's staying-upness, so I'd best hurry with my homework and get back to bed.