I was noticing the other day that my daughter writes almost all her letters from the bottom up. This mystifies me. I write all my letters from the top down. Not that I've ever given it a ton of thought. I have extremely legible handwriting; if you look at the subtitle of my website--"In the Words of Kenneth R. Pike"--that is in my handwriting. I always print and I write all of my letters in as few strokes and direction-reversals as possible. No fuss, no muss. I'm a complete efficiency freak.

Except with my lower-case "g."

I used to always start my "g" at the lower intersection of the tail and the top. Thus, a single clockwise stroke formed the entire letter.

But Microsoft OneNote did not recognize this as a "g."

I have a "tablet" laptop. This means I can swivel the screen and turn the laptop into a writing tablet. I used to take notes this way in class, by writing on my computer screen. I was extremely impressed with the software; the handwriting recognition worked great for me (but as I said, I have very legible, indeed almost blocky, writing).

But as impressive as it was, it never got my "g" right. One day I discovered that, if I started at the top of the stem, drew a counter-clockwise circle, and then reversed direction to draw downward on the tail, my computer recognized the letter.

I no longer have classes and so no longer take notes. But when I hand-write things, my "g" is inefficiently written. About a quarter of the circle gets redrawn, wasting time and ink. But I developed the habit of writing my "g" so computers could more easily recognize it. It doesn't look too different from my old "g," but if you look closely the difference is there. I "debugged" myself instead of the computer.

Ostensibly, technology exists to facilitate our tasks. But a lot of people lose sight of this and decide that technology is an unqualified good. And who could blame them? I love technology! Sometimes, even technology that makes my life more, rather than less, complicated. I adjust my habits to accommodate the limitations or quirks of the tech, instead of demanding things work the other way around.

(And I wonder how technology will change us in the future. You all know how I'm an armchair transhumanist-slash-futurist, so I won't bore you with further expansion on that.)

How often do you do this--accommodate technology? How often do we, as a society, do this? How often do manufacturers more or less insist that this be done? In other words, have you ever been told, "Yes, I know that it is silly and inconvenient, but you need to just learn to use the software?" I know Linux programmers are sometimes accused of this mentality, but I also know that Microsoft practically invented it.

I wonder if, deep in the offices of Apple Computers, there is someone who realized this, and that's why Apple products are so dead simple, using them is practically instinctive. I don't like their locked-down stuff, but I do like to use the right tool for the job, which is why my less-than-tech-savvy wife has a MacBook and an iPhone. Frankly, it's less headache for me, and a much more pleasant experience for her. The technology doesn't push her around, or force her to change her handwriting, or whatever.

Me, I'm just a masochist like that I guess. Sometimes I even break my computer just so I'll have something to fix. d^_~b