First, I'll continue this exchange by saying that the W3c has not done anywhere near what it should have done for people with disabilities. Years ago there should have something simple like a tag (with perhaps a few hierarchical and navigation abilities) added to HTML and the w3c should have promoted the living hell out of it. Such a tag would make life far easier for web designers too, as they wouldn't have to engage in css layout shennanigans just to be able to have the content come first for a screen reader. The screen reader could strip out all the tags except the tags and everything in between them, and that would be that.
Of course, those idiots are too busy engaging in endless semantic web rdf masturbation to be preoccupied with something so simple that would make the user experience better for so many people. They'd rather argue over the finer points of using xml to describe camel droppings on a hillside in Tibet.
Where as you, being the Typical Unix Geek, might fault the evils of graphically representing anything at all for these problems blind users face, I would fault the programmer/techie-centric bent of the w3c that forces the process of designing technical stuff first, considering user interface only after the technical stuff has been designed, and then trying to shore up these difficult issues (like accessibility) after too much code has been written and too many designs in the original inadequate system have been taken as canon.
Second, on the issue of graphics and usability, graphics really do equal usability--if done right (i.e. if you don't let unix programmers design it). You can have affordances with graphics, whereas you can't really have them (or at least have very good ones) with something character based. And typically with most text-based systems, you have characters or groups of characters ending up behaving in the exact same way as graphic widgets (i.e. trees of plus and minuses) but doing so in a far clunkier way and being less able to betray their purpose.
Third, I experienced your brand of tyranny first hand when I first tried Debian back in 1998 (my first linux). The text based installer was confusing and ambiguous. I had to spend hours reading your stupid manual just to get linux on my damned computer. And most likely through an ambiguity of how the installer presenting something, when I finally managed after several days to get Debian installed on my computer, a pager wasn't installed. So here I was, this person new to linux, willing to put up with far more than I should have to by having to read man pages, and here were the man pages shooting down my screen at eight freaking million miles an hour. It wasn't an installer fine for 1996; my 1996 macintosh had a far better installer than that. Hell, a 1984 mac had a better installer than that. If there isn't a more compelling argument for Debian not being used on the desktop than all the years they've refused to have a graphical installer, then I don't know what is.
Finally, going back to the first point I brought up about programmers running everything, after our last discussion on Slashdot, I really can put very little stock in anything at all that you say about usability. Most usability experts will tell you that in order to design a truly usable UI you have to design the user interaction early on in the technical development of the system, not merely add a GUI on as another layer after all the technical everything has been completed. In disagreeing with this, because it disagrees with your precious Unix Philosophy, you are disagreeing with some of the most fundamental steps to making computers usable.
As more and more efforts are made by traditionalist unix folks to target desktop end-users, they will increasingly run into greater and greater conflict with folks who believe in an alternative desktop based on open source that sheds the industry's 20 years of mediocrity and neglect, and who recognize the traditional unix folks promote that which is just as mediocre and just and neglectful. I predict this conflict which both your side and my side will obviously have to fight will be far worse than that little SCO scuffle everyones ranting about.
While not having much to do with red-green color blindness, it would be a correct assumption that the varying shades of gray is awful for visually impaired people. For older folks whose eyesight is going and for visually impaired people who struggle with trying to make out the most basic details on the screen, the lousy contrast ratio of multiple grays is really going to suck.
The Smurfs got so popular because they stuck the word "smurf" in their vocabulary as much as possible. As a result they made a smurferrific amount of money smurfing every kind of merchandise smurfable.
Sun has obviously Javaed the smurfs, and wants to make a Javalicious Javatop that will make them Javatastic sums of money.
1. Design cars to have better visibility. There shouldn't be giant 'pillars' blocking the driver's view of other cars on the road. A driver should also always have an excellent, unobstructed view out the back.
2. Day-time running lights, so the car is more visible by other drivers and pededstrians.
3. Airbags for every possible passenger in the car.
4. Lots of compartments in the car to store things. I should have more places to store my 3 foot long 20 pound Mag-Lite of death than just the trunk. Of all the cars I've been in, only Suburu is really good about providing lots of places to put stuff.
5. Well-placed controls that allow a driver to operate them without taking their eyes off the road. The general placement of these controls should be standardized across all car brands and price-ranges.
6. Radios that lets the driver do the same as #5.
7. Make it impossible for someone to get locked out of their car. For example, my honda will only let me lock the driver's side door from the outside (using the key).
8. Cup-holders that do very well in accommodating a large variety of different sized-shaped beverage containers.
These are eight simple, easy, lo-tech things that we really should have done years ago that would make cars safer and more pleasant to be in. It is my opinion that until these basic things are added to every model of car produced in every price-range, we shouldn't even begin to think about adding something as complex and expensive as a computer.
Well, there was a usability study done by Sun. If I recall correctly, through much user testing, they discovered that the subjects (all sun employees) having to choose between 20 different clocks and having to navigate through really cluttered menu's (some of which had duplicate items) presented usability problems.
Supposedly Sun had folks trained in HCI doing this study. But I'm a little skeptical, as many of the worst designs a good HCI person would be able to spot without doing any user testing (they should still do user testing, of course, but they should have been able to catch the obvious ones without it).
If Captain Picard diverted 90% of his warp power to running a simulation in the holodeck where he rides horses in the Kentucky Derby, he better damn well admit that the Enterprise is in no shape at all to fight Klingons.
What I'm really unhappy about is that Red Hat has in the past spent $700,000,000 dollars buying out some dicey dot-coms and a compilter company when they should have used a small portion of this to make their distribution more desktop-ready. When I've mentioned usability problems to Red Hat's programmers, they tell me that they are having these usability problems because they don't have the money to hire HCI folks who know what they're doing and would help solve (and in many cases, help to avoid the creation) of things that make the user experience suck for non-technical users.
Given that Red Hat didn't spend the resources they needed to to make their product acceptable for end-users, I respect Matt Szulik for acknowledging that his product still has quite a ways to go.
(BTW, you didn't deserve a troll rating in my opinion. You also should have gotten more of a role in Nemesis. The movie would have sucked a lot less).
I think that if you would like to solve the problems you're complaining about, the best path is for you to code.
UI folks shouldn't have to become programmers to get UI problems solved. I would much rather continue my HCI education and put all my energy in studying newer and better ways for people to get their work done with computers than learn a bunch of crud about AutoConf and Makefiles. There are people far more experienced than me who have decades of experience at making computers less confusing for end users, who spend 40-60 hours a week intensively studying things like cognitive psychology and HCI. Why the hell should those people have to spend the next ten years of their life learning how to program to change a confusing button or ameliorate a cluttered screen?
That's just silly. If you don't like their work, you have the right to not use it. Find or create an alternative that is more to your liking. The thought of punishing a free software developer because they don't meet your personal standards is simply offensive.
A secretary does not have any right not to choose Debian. A schoolchild does not have any right not to choose Debian.
There are certain settings where people are naturally forced to use a platform and don't have any say in the choice about whether to use the system. This is not about me. This is about them. If no one else will fight on their behalf, then I will.
You Debian people also keep using the word "your personal this" or "your personal that". I'm not talking about my personal standards. I'm talking about basic standards that have been laid down by the Human Computer Interaction community for the last 20 damn years.
If a free software developer only writes stuff for himself, everyone else be damned, great. I have no problem with that. But when a free software developer does not meet these basic standards set down by the discipline that makes computers easier to use, and when he targets grandma anyways and lobbies for his unusable crap to be installed on government computers, then such a person must be appropriately dealt with. I consider such a person to be as harmful to the end user as Microsoft.
It's not that I don't believe in Freedom; it's that I believe a user's greatest Freedom is The Freedom To Get Stuff Done With A Minimum Of Fuss.
Dramtic Post? I'm writing a public license that enforces usability. Me posting a rant on Slashdot is merely a bit of cute banter.
My point in general is that given Debian's history of avoiding a graphical installer and given your substantial role in Debian history as it's leader, I very much question your opinion of linux being "ready for the desktop", as I question why you should be put in any kind of leadership role of a process that targets non-technical users.
As for the points in general about linux and UI:
If you don't take the UI/user interaction issues when the plans for the technical stuff is being laid out, you will always end up with an extremely non-integrated, inconsistant, and confusing UI. We usability folks have been screaming at programmers for the last 20 years to bring in UI people in the early stages of designing the technical stuff, but they (esp. the linux people) have in no way listened.
As the linux folks have continually perpetuated the unix myth that user interaction can be slapped on modularly at the last second, the user experience of linux has continued to suck. And this has been going on for well over 10 years. As long as the unix geeks who dominate desktop linux development try to layer away user interaction problems and think of GUI's as nothing more than "Eye Candy" and in no way function, I guarentee the user experience of linux will suck for another 10.
If Linus Torvalds had wanted linux to be on the desktop, in 1993 he would have got his Finnish butt to the nearest school in Scandinavia with a HCI department and would have allowed usability folks substantial input on the design of the first kernel.
As for the subject of developer attitude, ultimately, developers who have contempt for newbies will bring that contempt in one way or another into their work, and in one way or another it will affect the user experience. Therefore, on technical grounds any developer who has contempt for newbies should be locked out of the desktop to protect end-users. The proper way to handle such folks is to handle them back to the server closet where they belong.
One could also make the moral argument that developers who have contempt for newbies have entirely no right to the desktop. You could even take this one step further and say that any action taken against such developers (e.g. licenses, patents on innovative UI stuff, project wars, etc) is morally justified.
If you have a menu with a number of options, the more options that are in the menu, the longer on average it will take for the user to make a selection.
Your typical unix person would think that fewer options in the menu is less powerful. But if every time a user goes to a menu with far more options and it takes them 3 seconds longer to make a selection, that too is a sacrifice of power.
I have always found it odd that geeks claim to be power users, yet they tend often to be the most inefficient users of the system and take the longest to do things.
The phrase "computer literate user" really means the person has been hurt so many times that the scar tissue is thick enough so he no longer feels the pain.--Alan Cooper
Mac OS X has proven that a unix desktop isn't really so hard to use if its built by a developer community that has had a very strong history, culture, and tradition of valuing the user experience, valuing easy of use, and is quite at home with GUI's.
Linux has a developer culture with a rich tradition and history of devaluing the user experience, demonizing the end user, glorifying that which is esoteric and confusing, and is more at home with a text-based UI. This is why after 10 years today's linux desktop is still less usable than a 1984 macintosh with a thousand times less ram and CPU cycles. Linux's problems are largely cultural, not technical.
Apple didn't prove that unix on the desktop can be viable, rather they proved the unviability of the traditional unix developer at making something your grandmother could use. Those that point and click are bound to rule the desktop; those who sed and grep and awk are only suited to rule the server closet.
Why hasn't someone invented a GUI yet that is designed by people with some ergonomic sence?
Because the people who have the ergonomic sense are not generally people who know how to code, and the people who know how to code in no way want to listen to the people who have ergonomic sense. Ergonomists are derided, coders are lauded. Such is the way of Free Software.
If Bruce Perens really cared about the end-user experience of linux, why the hell didn't he make a serious push for Debian to have a graphical installer when he headed the project?
Where was Bruce? Oh where was Bruce?
If he so cared about so much about Debian not having desktop marketshare, why didn't he use his position as Debian project leader to speak out against the elitist, anti-end user attitudes that have come to define Debian as a community and a distribution?
As the owner of a Zaurus, I've paid an enormous tax through hardware that is seriously lacking in ergonomics (putting the power button on the outside of the machine. Damn thing turns on in my pocket) and with software that has bad interface design (the datebook requires twice as many taps as the Palm's to put in a date).
Moral of the story: any technology can have a tax. In Zaurus vs. Palm, the question is whether you pay the tax in money (PalmOS) or in Time/Aggrivation/Lost data (Zaurus). For mobile computing, the latter tax is usually several orders of magnitude more expensive.
Now this only further lends credence to my fear that one day my PDA will lose wi-fi connectivity followed by my friend telling me my fancy pez dispenser has the worst gum he's ever tasted.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I'll continue this exchange by saying that the W3c has not done anywhere near what it should have done for people with disabilities. Years ago there should have something simple like a tag (with perhaps a few hierarchical and navigation abilities) added to HTML and the w3c should have promoted the living hell out of it. Such a tag would make life far easier for web designers too, as they wouldn't have to engage in css layout shennanigans just to be able to have the content come first for a screen reader. The screen reader could strip out all the tags except the tags and everything in between them, and that would be that.
Of course, those idiots are too busy engaging in endless semantic web rdf masturbation to be preoccupied with something so simple that would make the user experience better for so many people. They'd rather argue over the finer points of using xml to describe camel droppings on a hillside in Tibet.
Where as you, being the Typical Unix Geek, might fault the evils of graphically representing anything at all for these problems blind users face, I would fault the programmer/techie-centric bent of the w3c that forces the process of designing technical stuff first, considering user interface only after the technical stuff has been designed, and then trying to shore up these difficult issues (like accessibility) after too much code has been written and too many designs in the original inadequate system have been taken as canon.
Second, on the issue of graphics and usability, graphics really do equal usability--if done right (i.e. if you don't let unix programmers design it). You can have affordances with graphics, whereas you can't really have them (or at least have very good ones) with something character based. And typically with most text-based systems, you have characters or groups of characters ending up behaving in the exact same way as graphic widgets (i.e. trees of plus and minuses) but doing so in a far clunkier way and being less able to betray their purpose.
Third, I experienced your brand of tyranny first hand when I first tried Debian back in 1998 (my first linux). The text based installer was confusing and ambiguous. I had to spend hours reading your stupid manual just to get linux on my damned computer. And most likely through an ambiguity of how the installer presenting something, when I finally managed after several days to get Debian installed on my computer, a pager wasn't installed. So here I was, this person new to linux, willing to put up with far more than I should have to by having to read man pages, and here were the man pages shooting down my screen at eight freaking million miles an hour. It wasn't an installer fine for 1996; my 1996 macintosh had a far better installer than that. Hell, a 1984 mac had a better installer than that. If there isn't a more compelling argument for Debian not being used on the desktop than all the years they've refused to have a graphical installer, then I don't know what is.
Finally, going back to the first point I brought up about programmers running everything, after our last discussion on Slashdot, I really can put very little stock in anything at all that you say about usability. Most usability experts will tell you that in order to design a truly usable UI you have to design the user interaction early on in the technical development of the system, not merely add a GUI on as another layer after all the technical everything has been completed. In disagreeing with this, because it disagrees with your precious Unix Philosophy, you are disagreeing with some of the most fundamental steps to making computers usable.
As more and more efforts are made by traditionalist unix folks to target desktop end-users, they will increasingly run into greater and greater conflict with folks who believe in an alternative desktop based on open source that sheds the industry's 20 years of mediocrity and neglect, and who recognize the traditional unix folks promote that which is just as mediocre and just and neglectful. I predict this conflict which both your side and my side will obviously have to fight will be far worse than that little SCO scuffle everyones ranting about.
[The Debian Installer] was great for 1996
Yet Apple had a graphical installer in 1984.
I consider Usability to be a freedom; therefore I consider Debian to be a distribution of tyrants. And thus to tyrants.
While not having much to do with red-green color blindness, it would be a correct assumption that the varying shades of gray is awful for visually impaired people. For older folks whose eyesight is going and for visually impaired people who struggle with trying to make out the most basic details on the screen, the lousy contrast ratio of multiple grays is really going to suck.
The Smurfs got so popular because they stuck the word "smurf" in their vocabulary as much as possible. As a result they made a smurferrific amount of money smurfing every kind of merchandise smurfable.
Sun has obviously Javaed the smurfs, and wants to make a Javalicious Javatop that will make them Javatastic sums of money.
Then obviously you should try Cocoa on your desktop. Won't keep you up as late working stuff, either.
1. Design cars to have better visibility. There shouldn't be giant 'pillars' blocking the driver's view of other cars on the road. A driver should also always have an excellent, unobstructed view out the back.
2. Day-time running lights, so the car is more visible by other drivers and pededstrians.
3. Airbags for every possible passenger in the car.
4. Lots of compartments in the car to store things. I should have more places to store my 3 foot long 20 pound Mag-Lite of death than just the trunk. Of all the cars I've been in, only Suburu is really good about providing lots of places to put stuff.
5. Well-placed controls that allow a driver to operate them without taking their eyes off the road. The general placement of these controls should be standardized across all car brands and price-ranges.
6. Radios that lets the driver do the same as #5.
7. Make it impossible for someone to get locked out of their car. For example, my honda will only let me lock the driver's side door from the outside (using the key).
8. Cup-holders that do very well in accommodating a large variety of different sized-shaped beverage containers.
These are eight simple, easy, lo-tech things that we really should have done years ago that would make cars safer and more pleasant to be in. It is my opinion that until these basic things are added to every model of car produced in every price-range, we shouldn't even begin to think about adding something as complex and expensive as a computer.
But the Debian boxes were rooted in a freer, and more community-oriented manner than their Microsoft counterparts.
if( artistMakesMoney == true)
goto oppsIDidItAgain;
Depends on whether you consider mimicking object-oriented design in C a quick and dirty hack.
Federico is a programmer. Programmers tend to screw up UI's further, not improve them.
I have few hopes for the 2.6 file selector.
Well, there was a usability study done by Sun. If I recall correctly, through much user testing, they discovered that the subjects (all sun employees) having to choose between 20 different clocks and having to navigate through really cluttered menu's (some of which had duplicate items) presented usability problems.
Supposedly Sun had folks trained in HCI doing this study. But I'm a little skeptical, as many of the worst designs a good HCI person would be able to spot without doing any user testing (they should still do user testing, of course, but they should have been able to catch the obvious ones without it).
If Captain Picard diverted 90% of his warp power to running a simulation in the holodeck where he rides horses in the Kentucky Derby, he better damn well admit that the Enterprise is in no shape at all to fight Klingons.
What I'm really unhappy about is that Red Hat has in the past spent $700,000,000 dollars buying out some dicey dot-coms and a compilter company when they should have used a small portion of this to make their distribution more desktop-ready. When I've mentioned usability problems to Red Hat's programmers, they tell me that they are having these usability problems because they don't have the money to hire HCI folks who know what they're doing and would help solve (and in many cases, help to avoid the creation) of things that make the user experience suck for non-technical users.
Given that Red Hat didn't spend the resources they needed to to make their product acceptable for end-users, I respect Matt Szulik for acknowledging that his product still has quite a ways to go.
(BTW, you didn't deserve a troll rating in my opinion. You also should have gotten more of a role in Nemesis. The movie would have sucked a lot less).
Green Destiny sounds like a new strain of high-powered, genetically engineered weed.
I could just see the DEA raiding Los Alamos after getting reports of computer scientists blowing entire afternoons on "their smoking Green Destiny"
who *exactly* should 'dominate' (desktop) linux development then, if not unix geeks?
HCI people
Don't see why not.
wait a minute...I'm seeing a vision....Jakob Nielsen and Linus's desktop linux show
Excellent idea. Jakob's contributions are as important as Linus'.
If you keep 'screaming at programmers' I guarantee you'll continue to be ignored.
We'd get ignored no matter how we put it. Your point is?
I think that if you would like to solve the problems you're complaining about, the best path is for you to code.
UI folks shouldn't have to become programmers to get UI problems solved. I would much rather continue my HCI education and put all my energy in studying newer and better ways for people to get their work done with computers than learn a bunch of crud about AutoConf and Makefiles. There are people far more experienced than me who have decades of experience at making computers less confusing for end users, who spend 40-60 hours a week intensively studying things like cognitive psychology and HCI. Why the hell should those people have to spend the next ten years of their life learning how to program to change a confusing button or ameliorate a cluttered screen?
That's just silly. If you don't like their work, you have the right to not use it. Find or create an alternative that is more to your liking. The thought of punishing a free software developer because they don't meet your personal standards is simply offensive.
A secretary does not have any right not to choose Debian.
A schoolchild does not have any right not to choose Debian.
There are certain settings where people are naturally forced to use a platform and don't have any say in the choice about whether to use the system. This is not about me. This is about them. If no one else will fight on their behalf, then I will.
You Debian people also keep using the word "your personal this" or "your personal that". I'm not talking about my personal standards. I'm talking about basic standards that have been laid down by the Human Computer Interaction community for the last 20 damn years.
If a free software developer only writes stuff for himself, everyone else be damned, great. I have no problem with that. But when a free software developer does not meet these basic standards set down by the discipline that makes computers easier to use, and when he targets grandma anyways and lobbies for his unusable crap to be installed on government computers, then such a person must be appropriately dealt with. I consider such a person to be as harmful to the end user as Microsoft.
It's not that I don't believe in Freedom; it's that I believe a user's greatest Freedom is The Freedom To Get Stuff Done With A Minimum Of Fuss.
Well, this needs to stop.
It will. One way....or the other.
Dramtic Post? I'm writing a public license that enforces usability. Me posting a rant on Slashdot is merely a bit of cute banter.
My point in general is that given Debian's history of avoiding a graphical installer and given your substantial role in Debian history as it's leader, I very much question your opinion of linux being "ready for the desktop", as I question why you should be put in any kind of leadership role of a process that targets non-technical users.
As for the points in general about linux and UI:
If you don't take the UI/user interaction issues when the plans for the technical stuff is being laid out, you will always end up with an extremely non-integrated, inconsistant, and confusing UI. We usability folks have been screaming at programmers for the last 20 years to bring in UI people in the early stages of designing the technical stuff, but they (esp. the linux people) have in no way listened.
As the linux folks have continually perpetuated the unix myth that user interaction can be slapped on modularly at the last second, the user experience of linux has continued to suck. And this has been going on for well over 10 years. As long as the unix geeks who dominate desktop linux development try to layer away user interaction problems and think of GUI's as nothing more than "Eye Candy" and in no way function, I guarentee the user experience of linux will suck for another 10.
If Linus Torvalds had wanted linux to be on the desktop, in 1993 he would have got his Finnish butt to the nearest school in Scandinavia with a HCI department and would have allowed usability folks substantial input on the design of the first kernel.
As for the subject of developer attitude, ultimately, developers who have contempt for newbies will bring that contempt in one way or another into their work, and in one way or another it will affect the user experience. Therefore, on technical grounds any developer who has contempt for newbies should be locked out of the desktop to protect end-users. The proper way to handle such folks is to handle them back to the server closet where they belong.
One could also make the moral argument that developers who have contempt for newbies have entirely no right to the desktop. You could even take this one step further and say that any action taken against such developers (e.g. licenses, patents on innovative UI stuff, project wars, etc) is morally justified.
Enough. I've got a paper to write.
--
Ergonomica Auctoria Illico!
Your typical unix person would think that fewer options in the menu is less powerful. But if every time a user goes to a menu with far more options and it takes them 3 seconds longer to make a selection, that too is a sacrifice of power.
I have always found it odd that geeks claim to be power users, yet they tend often to be the most inefficient users of the system and take the longest to do things.
--
Ergonomica Auctoria Illico!
Mac OS X has proven that a unix desktop isn't really so hard to use if its built by a developer community that has had a very strong history, culture, and tradition of valuing the user experience, valuing easy of use, and is quite at home with GUI's.
Linux has a developer culture with a rich tradition and history of devaluing the user experience, demonizing the end user, glorifying that which is esoteric and confusing, and is more at home with a text-based UI. This is why after 10 years today's linux desktop is still less usable than a 1984 macintosh with a thousand times less ram and CPU cycles. Linux's problems are largely cultural, not technical.
Apple didn't prove that unix on the desktop can be viable, rather they proved the unviability of the traditional unix developer at making something your grandmother could use. Those that point and click are bound to rule the desktop; those who sed and grep and awk are only suited to rule the server closet.
Why hasn't someone invented a GUI yet that is designed by people with some ergonomic sence?
Because the people who have the ergonomic sense are not generally people who know how to code, and the people who know how to code in no way want to listen to the people who have ergonomic sense. Ergonomists are derided, coders are lauded. Such is the way of Free Software.
If Bruce Perens really cared about the end-user experience of linux, why the hell didn't he make a serious push for Debian to have a graphical installer when he headed the project?
Where was Bruce? Oh where was Bruce?
If he so cared about so much about Debian not having desktop marketshare, why didn't he use his position as Debian project leader to speak out against the elitist, anti-end user attitudes that have come to define Debian as a community and a distribution?
Where was Bruce? Oh where was Bruce?
If you cross a chameleon with a cow, do you get cow that changes it spots when it senses danger?
As the owner of a Zaurus, I've paid an enormous tax through hardware that is seriously lacking in ergonomics (putting the power button on the outside of the machine. Damn thing turns on in my pocket) and with software that has bad interface design (the datebook requires twice as many taps as the Palm's to put in a date).
Moral of the story: any technology can have a tax. In Zaurus vs. Palm, the question is whether you pay the tax in money (PalmOS) or in Time/Aggrivation/Lost data (Zaurus). For mobile computing, the latter tax is usually several orders of magnitude more expensive.
-- insert joke about badges being smarter than people attending meeting here --
Now this only further lends credence to my fear that one day my PDA will lose wi-fi connectivity followed by my friend telling me my fancy pez dispenser has the worst gum he's ever tasted.