My Technoboobery

Despite my admitted technoboobery, Jim Hoft invited me to guest post at Gateway Pundit this week. Jim’s blog gets high visits due to its content of interest to readers, snappy multiple links, and many photos and graphics. My blog usually gets less visits due to topics of lower interest to readers (like healthcare and Vietnam), wonkish essays with links to (even) longer ones, and my laziness and inability (blamed on our outmoded blog software) to embed photos and graphics. Jim sometimes helps me. He invited me to guest at his blog anyway, graciously saying “I asked you because I like your blogging.”

Last year, I tried to liven things up here by running about a hundred daily Interesting Stuff columns, linking briefly to some of the fascinating discussions I ran into around the web. It soon wonkishly grew into extended excerpts, becoming a major chore, so I stopped. I couldn’t restrain myself to be Hoftian or Reynoldsish. So as to not destroy Gateway Pundit’s popularity, I’ll try again at Gateway Pundit to be brief(er).

I started preparing to be Gateway Pundit’s guest by asking Kurt Hoglund of AJacksonian to send me the code by which he posted at his blog a telling photoessay “Vietnam Then And Now.” When I couldn’t figure out what he’d sent (“I haven't a clue what you just said”), Kurt sent me an essay that I could, just, fathom, below. It struck home.

I took Fortran in grad school to employ the most sophisticated statistical analyses of humongous data series, developed a management accounting system for my Fortune 100 employer that was more advanced than anything IBM had at the time, could program early minicomputers, delighted in doing fancy tricks with programmable typewriters, and worked at pioneering personal computer companies. I, also, was able to work on ‘50’s and early ‘60’s cars. Then something changed: it became too “simple.” More reliable, yes, but simple NOT, unless one has hours and hours and hours to RTFM, and decipher. (Even harder with the online manuals; Some see online manuals coming for medical diagnoses and treatments: I’ll let someone else be the beta test of that surgery!)

Kurt emails me and describes my technoboobery:
NOTE: This proves it. Kurt's email prints out normal, and this post prints out normal, but for some reason buried in Kurt's soul or something it appears with lots of line breaks.

heh! The mystical powers of technology delivered to the fingertips of the unknowing... poor Mr. Franklin must be smiling from beyond on that: the power to craft words so deeply embeded that they are overlooked. But then, my capability to do something simple to my car's engine went away the moment those high voltage lines appeared, also. Technology made the art of maintining one's own car into a science... and the digital tools for easy display of words, images and ideas have also made difficult the understanding of what makes it run.

As an individual who learned computer programming at an early age and
has utilized digital tools for almost two decades, now, I do understand. Yet the heart of a modern nerd is: being damned lazy.

Once upon a time crafting code was done by hand, with line upon line
typed out with one finger on each hand utilized by those with pocket
protectors in dark rooms living amidst a sea of coffee cups. Soon
they realized that they had just coded the same damned line for the
Xth time and were dissatisfied with having to do that, and uproar was
heard in the basements of offices and schools and homes throughout the
land! Yea and verily, would those hand coders not put up with *that*
anymore! And so they used the tools at their disposal to make things
so very easy... and yet cloak them from the rest of humanity by inventing all sorts of new words and concepts and phrases so that
mysticism poured over the tools and some degree of mist called
'technical manuals'.

This first generation had no need of such things and when the second
came up they received the vaunted disdain of generation one: RTFM!

Read the F**king Manual.

And, lo! The manuals were (and are) poorly written, obtuse and
amenable only to having an instructor paid at $60/hour to explain
them, and so life is good for the technologically inclined, as they
now have made a source of everlasting revenue upon the backs of the
unenlightened who would come after them. But, within these vast piles
of unreadable junk the actual gems of how to work the damned stuff is
hidden from view, so that only those who delve in these murky depths
of binary, octal and hexadecimal can the 'easy way out' be found: all
others are lost in a maze of poorly written and documented commands
and instructions and forever decrying that technology is too difficult
to understand... and lack the $60/hour to spend learning it from a
guru or the ability to actually figure out the manuals on their own.
That was by design, so that they *easy* tools would be lost.

Still, for all of that the keys to simplicity abound because, to those
who work in same, they hate to spend time typing and thinking on mechanical things and just want to get the work done... and then goof
off for $150/hour or more.

And so, bequeathed unto you is a simple way to get the TEXT ONLY
version of your web browser to go! Yes, an awesome tool, indeed, as
the clan of techno-elite will only spend time looking at pictures if
it has a high degree of skin tonal content, by and large.

In the land of Microsoft Explorer one may go to 'Internet Options',
either via the browser's 'Tools' or from the 'Control Panel'. From
there one may go to 'Advanced' and find those settings for 'Show pictures', 'Smart image dithering', and likewise all things in the
'Multimedia' area and uncheck those one does not want.

Once done, so long as the mighty asterisk is not involved, a reload of
the webpage will now remove those things that are unchecked and only
show those that are checked!

And life is good!

Even better one may go to a browser command called 'View' and then go
to 'Source' and, yea and verily, a notepad of the actual HTML code to
make the web page is delivered unto you in editable format. Like the
manna from the heavens, the text from online is now fully available
for you to hunt and seek and use the slothful copying and pasting
technique to move into a real word processor for further work! Such
things contained between greater and less than signs are code to tell
how things are displayed, so that < p > begins a paragraph and < /p >
ends same... do note that there are NO SPACES involved, but are added
in case one has a rich text editor so that things do not get, yea and
verily, CF'd. Likewise such things as the < div > for divisions is
also seen and the < a > for inline linking of the text between it and
< /a >. Also seen are such things as img and src, to denote image
link and source link.

Knowing such things allows one to decipher the vagaries of HTML,
invented solely for the purpose of adding on to SGML which itself was
a created abomination to make things easier for display, and difficult
to learn and code. So when, three generations of technology later,
the first of the general populace first hit these things the cry of
WTF? was heard throughout the land. In a mere decade would show up
regularizing of such things to the point of sources available for free
on this internetworked concept so that the unintelligible manuals
would be broken down into their unintelligible paragraphs verbatim and
then *explained* in even more tortuous context... like at this link
place, known as the W3Schools online http://www.w3schools.com/ .

Such is the benificence of these tech gurus that they have become so
slothful as to propose that source code and programs be made available
for free so that, once typed in and verified as good within the bounds
of utility that no one need ever retype it *again*. Thus this place
called Source Forge would come about from those in the Open Source and
Free Software communities, to share in their unintelligible bounty
with the greater mass of humanity which can, of course, make neither
head nor tail of it and wonder why it is given away for free with the
downloading of it? Yet the greater population does not understand the
sloth involved with those that would much rather be downloading images
with high skin tone content or being involved in a virtual world in
which the +10 Vorpal Sword of Utter Massacre is a worthwhile journey
spent, and coding is drudgery. Thus the aforementioned, poorly
documented HTML tidy is grand for doing all sorts of fun things with
said HTML if one bothers to RTFM. And as most do not, the common
settings are good enough, save for blogger... and MS-Office and
OpenOffice which make HTML look horrible.

Thus the HTML tidy need was delivered to those poor techies stuck with
Microsloth productions and they, too, bemoaned that OpenOffice had an
abhorrent method of making HTML and that all needed cleaning up,
forsooth! Even with that the tidiest of HTML from HTML tidy still has
needs and tweaks in its commands to tidy it even more so that the
vaunted and disdained blogger actually can make it look so-so. To
date no one has made that template and I just make it up as I go
along, but would prefer a good template, if my mind was good enough to
figure that out... which is a different story, indeed.

Being from this community and many others that have similar outlook I,
for one, can say, that the tools provided on my desktop today, for
free are far better than what I had on my desk as a government employee a mere 5 years ago *involved* with the geo-spatial content of
intelligence and mapping. And that is because I know just enough
about so much as to be incredibly dangerous! Yet I have not stepped
in front of a speeding bus, so I must be doing something right...

-Kurt