Roads & hotkeys
There's a funny story that's floated around forever that talks about technology standards and how the size of the solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle is
dictated by the way Romans built their roads. The moral of the story? "Specifications and bureaucracies live forever."
Which I thought of as I composed an email in Outlook a few minutes ago... spell check in the Outlook main editor is assigned to F7. Using F-keys is generally not done in MS products, but this one is there and it's been used for a long time. And why? Well, because they had to copy what Word did and Word had spell check on F7. And why did Word have spell check on F7? Because WordPerfect did. It isn't as incongruous as space shuttles and horses perhaps but I find it amusing that Outlook 2003 has one of its many design decisions dictated by a piece of software that wasn't written by Microsoft, that was first written in the early 1980's and isn't even being used extensively any more. Word killed WordPerfect, but it couldn't kill F7 as spellcheck.
BBQ
Last night I wentto the "Ignition Week" BBQ at Howard's house and got to meet many of the new MBET students. They seemed like a good bunch, although they all left pretty early and didn't seem to eat or drink nearly enough... our class would never have left a full platter of desserts behind. Anyway, they had questionsabout what the year would be like and I got to learn about them as well. A good time was had by all.
