Chapter 25 - The Microsoft Whammy - How Bill Dust-in-the-Sky Gates messed up editing for humanity.

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete

"Hi Del, are you ready for more exciting adventures in text editing?"

"You are the sunshine of my life!"

"I'll take that to mean yes. Yesterday you said something spot on!"

"I did?"

"Yes sir... You said:

"We humans end the selection where we do to CONNECT to the sense of what is being written."

Absolutely true! Sometimes the words even seem to call each other:

Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox Christmas

"Thinking things through last night I discovered how Bill Dust-in-the-Sky Gates put a whammy on text editing.

To be polite I called it the 'Microsoft Anomaly'. Are you ready for it?"

"Fire away!"

The Microsoft Anomaly

God is in the details

(And so is Bill Gates)

Why does one go through the trouble of highlighting text? Principally for 4 reasons (of course I'm generalizing).

1. To format - that is, to prettify deserving text that will live on in the final document.

2. To copy and paste - that is, to repeat deserving text that will live on in the final document.

3. To cut and paste - that is, to better position deserving text that will live on in the final document.

and then

4. To destroy undeserving text that obviously will NOT live on in the final document. Notice the anomaly? We are forced to lavish the same attention on the garbage as the deserving words - the gems

Let's polish these, or copy them or maybe move them

Let keen eye maneuver pudgy finger to drag small handle over tiny text until the selection glow is just right and then... destroy!!! (kinda like polishing a vase before smashing it with a sledgehammer)

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Chapter 15 - It gets real. Juula, an Estonian girl visits Del at the ICU - Text Editing will soon take a quantum leap forward

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Del came back to his senses chastising himself. Lucidity, lucidity at all costs! Machines don't beg doctors to kill patients! Lucidity, damn it!!! How is lucidity obtained when in a coma? he wondered. And as always, because of his experience, the answer came instantaneously: prayer. He mumbled a Rosary. And in the middle of a Glory Be, out of the blue but with poignant clarity, he remembered a moment well after he had been banished from the keyboards, but shortly before the 'additives' - the damned drugs - had lost their magic. He had met a marvelous Estonian girl, marvelous because she was so pure and clean and straight and unsullied by drugs or cynicism or attitudes. Juula was fresh and had honest twinkles in her eyes. Del had been entranced. But after all the bad living he'd been through (with the worst yet to come) for all he was bedazzled, he had refrained from courting her because for the first time in his l...

Chapter 18 - Juula promises to get a "new and improved" DEL back on phones and tablets

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Good morning, Del! Ready for the big day?" "Sure, what do you have in mind?" "A tour... to a place you've often seen but never noticed." "I like it already. Where?" "A page in MS Word." "Eh? Microsoft Word? I must've done two-thirds of all my work there - even starting before Windows. If there's one place that holds no mysteries for me!" "So you might think, my sweet bundle of mashed-up bones, so you might think!" "Okay, I believe you, number one because I have to and number two because I want to. But may I ask why?" "Yes, of course. You feel that you were unjustly removed from the telephones and tablets of the world, correct?" "Well, I can't say 'unjustly' - there wasn't any room for two deletion buttons, so they left the big guy - they left Backspace... but all right, yes, it hurts." "What if I told you I could...

Chapter 1 - From Keyboard Reject to Action Hero

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Once upon a half-life ago, there was a guy called Del. That was his nickname, short for Delete. And he was a reliable, hard-working key on most of the world's computers. A straight-forward and regular sort of guy, he was never more prominent than any of the letters he had been charged to kill, no fatter than an 'i', no skinnier than a capital 'W' - unlike Backspace who was super-sized and flaunted a Nike-style arrow pointing hard-left ←. Some hardware companies, like Lord Macintosh, had refused Del right from the get-go, preferring to farm out his tasks to a combination of other workers like 'Function-Delete,' with 'Delete' on Sir Mac actually being Backspace ←. But then one day, for Del - the original Del - things took a bad turn, real bad! And it happened at the speed of a toilet flush vortex! Millions upon BILLIONS of small handheld flatscreen devices suddenly began to spill from the heavens - the 'STPs' - smartph...

AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

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