Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 15 March 2002

# 5:20 PM

I managed to spill enough tea on my keyboard this afternoon that it got into the contacts and made the shift key be permanently stuck on. Have you ever tried to do anything on a Unix machine, with its case-sensitive everything, with shift stuck on? You can't even type "shutdown", because it comes out "SHUTDOWN", which is Not The Same Thing as far as the shell is concerned.

When I took the keyboard apart to dry it out I discovered two years' worth of crumbs, hair, and other gunk, so it became a huge project where I dismantled it down as far as it would go and cleaned all the pieces thoroughly. Putting it back together was a bit of an adventure... I got the top row of the number pad in the wrong order, and the interface board upside down, the first time.

It all works now, except that for some reason the right-hand shift key has turned into a control key. As I don't ever use the right-hand shift key, I don't particularly care.

I've got nine messages in my inbox which are all replies to something I wrote this morning. They are, collectively, informing me that three months ago when certain people said some things that I took for agreement that things would be done properly in the future, those people thought they were just making casual statements that things had been done properly to date, implying no agreement to keep doing them properly.

I want to flame the crap out of these people, but that will only make the thread drag on and reduce the chance of beating a real agreement out of them. So I'm not going to respond until there's a chance I can come across as not being righteously pissed off, despite in fact being righteously pissed off.