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)