Notepad's refresh rate lag has gotten truly abominable since I switched over to Windows 2000 Pro, so I think I'm finally gone over to the dark side of content editors. There's an awesome program I've been using at work called BBEdit BB stands for bare bones, and it's exactly what I'm looking for. It's much, much less clunky than Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or any other website-building program, mostly because it doesn't build your site for you. (In fact, Macromedia admits this, and so has synched it with Macromedia Dreamweaver's many flavors.) It just has lots of things that make coding in HTML easier, like great find-and-replace functions, automatically color-coding your tags in the display, and tools for picking hex code colors and stuff. Unfortunately, it only comes in a Mac version. The closest Windows equivalent is a freeware program called NoteTab, which I've just started using. One distinguishing plus is built-in FTP capability, so uploading is three mouse clicks (plus the typing of the filename, i.e. slice.html) away. I'm still figuring out the rest, though.

The more I think about it, the gladder I am that I caught the Internet train in middle school, when it was still possible, practical, and even ideal to learn HTML by simply right-clicking on any cool site you found, and then reading through its code, since every single bit of code necessary to make this web page look like that Nowadays, dynamic pages send different things to you every time using ASP and JSP and other random server-side includes, complicating the whole learning process... That's all, in a nutshell; the whole progression of HTML is far too long and complicated for someone of almost no knowledge regarding the subject to even try to detail.

I really wish Apple would get off its aesthetic high horse and just make a multiple-button mouse already: left, right, and scrolling wheel. Granted, its übersimple, one-piece lucite design IS really striking, but it's annoying as well. I'm a device monogamist: I like to use either my keyboard or my mouse, but not both at the same time, and the only equivalent of right-clicking on that darn lucite mouse is pressing "command" button while clicking. I have a trackball at work in addition to the mouse, which I use in apps such as Photoshop that require lots of right-clicking, but the motion necessary to move the ball is really heralding of carpal tunnel syndrome, so I still use the mouse most of the time. Except when I want to right click. Argh.

I'll stop picking on Apple now, though, and move on to computers in general. I think keyboards should be backlit, in a way akin to telephone buttons. I mean, your screen is glowing. If only the keyboard were self-lit as well, I wouldn't need to have a light on right now.

One last gripe: work is getting to me. Specifically, the neural paths in my brain are being slowly dragged over to the Mac side not only in keystrokes and shortcuts, but also in my touch-typing. There are two wholly different sets of ideal pressures, distances, and key placement on the boards between which I need to switch almost instantaneously. My keyboard at work has keys that are much more raised from the base, but has a lot more "give" before a key hits the resistance that translates to a full-on keystroke. I blame my recent flood of typos on this. Yeah scapegoat.