sodiumjoe

This is the closest I've seen: https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=11734

leopold has other models including the f980c, which has a numpad, though non standard layout. If you want a traditional layout with topre switches, there's the Realforce line.

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

from http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141171

Portlander here, I used to work right by the food carts downtown on 10th and Alder. The hospital bracelet guy is one of regulars, he's been running that schtick for literally years. There's a cast off characters like him who are fixtures there. I'm not against compassion for the homeless, but after running into a few of these repeatedly, I tend to refrain from supporting them directly and give to local charities instead. I'm not even arguing that you made a bad decision, just sharing my own experience.

In certain ways, this "post-PC" era that Apple's brought us into with the iPad seems like a step backward. We're going back to something more like the broadcast television model, where a more or less centralized authority produces the content for passive users to consume. These tablets just keep getting more and more optimized for that.

I suppose it's somewhat natural, given the way the market works, but it seems our tools for consumption are advancing at a significantly greater rate than our tools for production.

I guess the opposing side is the Web. Amazon seems to be shaping up to be solidly on the side of the centralized authority-type cathedral builders, while the Web and Web technologies are more bazaar-like. It seems more and more like Google is the only powerful singular force whose incentives align with the Web instead of with more centralized production hubs.

My point is that the conversation still seems mostly to be about how to get the things we think we want. I want to talk about what we should want.

This passage in the article stood out to me:

Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated.? I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend’s parents’ house the past Christmas, where the family had "sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble." This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge--about social norms and propriety--had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.

What's beautiful about this "ordinary vision" is that it's a portrait of domestic tranquility and love, simple and unpretentious, not that it's some sort of cultural transmission conduit; and it's totallly perverse to even frame it that way.

Another:

One succinct evocation of the situation appeared in the comments section of a website called Yellowworld: "If you’re East Asian, you need to attend a top-tier university to land a good high-paying gig. Even if you land that good high-paying gig, the white guy with the pedigree from a mediocre state university will somehow move ahead of you in the ranks simply because he’s white."

The second, conditional sentence is the one that seems to get all the attention, but I've always felt that it's the first one, the premise, that deserves criticism. The article makes a head-fake toward it, but then lets it slide. This is the real problem with our culture: not that we aren't getting enough of the highest-paying or highest-status jobs, enough wealth, enough exposure, or enough recognition. The problem is that that's all we care about.

The tragic truth about putting everything into breaking through the "bamboo ceiling," I suspect, is that it doesn't actually look any different on the other side of it.

None of this is to say that wealth, exposure, or recognition are inherently bad or wrong. 1 Timothy 6:10 says "Love of money is the root of all evil." Not money; love of it. It's our preoccupation with wealth, exposure, and recognition, our search for these to the exclusion of all else that leaves us with nothing truly substantial inside.

Yes, the author briefly mentions artistic pursuits in passing, but it's still in the framework of external measures of success. What's the takeaway?

And though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.

"[Be] interesting," he says. Interesting to whom?

I have a different message: Be interested.

Yesterday's xkcd explicates it better than I can: http://xkcd.com/896/

Ugh. I know I'm probably in the minority, but, to me Avatar is a perfect counter-example. Because so much money was involved in its production, to make it a safe bet for a good return on investment, it had to necessarily appeal to the lowest common denominator. Hence the emphasis the flashy technology of production and presentation and basic complete neglect of everything that makes a film _art_.

If the movie industry went bankrupt, people would still create cultural artifacts, and (though I have no evidence for this) I would imagine they would create more meaningful ones. I don't think any of our neolithic ancestors made any money on the paintings at Lasceaux.