stone tablets and a chisel?

Well, not quite to the level of stone tablet and chisel but:
2. (Soon) hand writing and paper

I copy that, Darwin. Hope this doesn't happen to you:

I was in Barnes & Noble not too long ago. For some odd reason, I didn't have a credit card on me - but I did have my checkbook in my jacket pocket. I wrote out a check in standard schoolboy cursive script and handed it to the young cashier who seemed almost shocked to see something that anachronistic being handed to her.

She looked at my check blankly for a minute and then asked, "Is this written in some sort of foreign language?"

I told her no, it was English. She looked over her shoulder at another equally young cashier who came up behind and proceeded to ask her if she had ever seen writing like mine. The other young lady exclaimed "Oh, yeah. Wow! My mother writes like that sometimes. She had a name for it, but I don't remember what it was"

I told her it was usually called longhand. "Yeah, that was it," she agreed.

The first cashier had by now gotten an approval from her cash register and bagged my three O'Reilly titles.

As she handed the bag to me, she smiled and said, "Longhand huh? Is that anything like shorthand?"

I nodded and said "a little bit," before I smiled back, thanked her, and walked away.

Back out  in the car I just sat there for a minute.

For the very first time in my life I really did feel OLD.

Ugh, I can't stand longhand writing style. Might be fast to write in, but it's darn hard to read sometimes... one would suppose I'm good at reading it since I work at post.dk, manually typing in the receiver for letters the OCR system can't handle. But it's more a matter of pattern recognition than actually reading the darn crud

Quote

manually typing in the receiver for letters the OCR system can't handle.

Hey, there's a solution for the CAPTCHA problem!

You'd probably have to outsource it to India or China, though - we're ~$26/hour, iirc.

Quote from: zridling on October 26, 2008, 09:54 PM

(And a more polite time, too. It's very weird to hear people talking on the phone in the public restroom while taking a dump.)

I hate working in phone support and hearing the customer use & flush the toilet while talking to me... 

Please tell me that this is not true 

Quote from: Deozaan on October 27, 2008, 07:45 PM

Quote from: zridling on October 26, 2008, 09:54 PM

(And a more polite time, too. It's very weird to hear people talking on the phone in the public restroom while taking a dump.)

I hate working in phone support and hearing the customer use & flush the toilet while talking to me... 

Please tell me that this is not true 

It doesn't happen that often, but it has happened to me personally multiple times.

I need to sit down (Darwin sits very still with his head in his hands).

Ummmm... what are you sitting on?

Ugh, I can't stand longhand writing style. Might be fast to write in, but it's darn hard to read sometimes... one would suppose I'm good at reading it since I work at post.dk, manually typing in the receiver for letters the OCR system can't handle. But it's more a matter of pattern recognition than actually reading the darn crud

I think one of the reasons you can call it "darn crud" is because people now write so seldomly that their penmanship suffers from the lack of practice. There was a time not so very long ago when being able to write "in a fair hand" was considered a necessary accomplishment for anyone who professed to have an education.

My grandparents had beautifully legible and gracious handwriting right up until the day they died - and both were well into their 70s when that happened. I myself used to have a good 'pen hand' that earned me a lot of compliments. But after the last 15 years of virtually nothing but keyboards, I now find I can sometimes barely read a note I wrote a week earlier. And that is especially true if it was written in a hurry.

Sad really, when you think about it.

Quote from: f0dder on October 26, 2008, 10:00 PM

Ugh, I can't stand longhand writing style. Might be fast to write in, but it's darn hard to read sometimes... one would suppose I'm good at reading it since I work at post.dk, manually typing in the receiver for letters the OCR system can't handle. But it's more a matter of pattern recognition than actually reading the darn crud

I think one of the reasons you can call it "darn crud" is because people now write so seldomly that their penmanship suffers from the lack of practice. There was a time not so very long ago when being able to write "in a fair hand" was considered a necessary accomplishment for anyone who professed to have an education.

Nah, it's longhand/cursive itself. Sure, some people write (a lot!) more incomprehensible than other, but in general I find it ugly and harder to read than normal writing.

must be an age thing, if it isn't normal writing, what is?? 

My grandmother is left-handed, and they tied her left hand behind her back so that she'd learn to write "properly" with her right.

Heh, heh, my dad is ambidextrous and got in trouble for submitting "someone else's work" when he switched hands to write. That happened a couple of times and he switched to the right only - got yelled at and disciplined for using his left.

As for hand-writing - I love it! My penmanship is crap, for reasons well articulated by others, particularly 40hz, but there is something rewarding about the tactile sensation of writing by hand. Even if I, too, can write far my more quickly (if not accurately  ) when I type. I also find handwriting to be less inhibiting - I can just write and edit later. When I type I am self-editing on the fly, which gets in the way of creativity at times.

So... wrt writing, I guess you could say that your goose is cooked?