Sartre said “Hell is other people”, and as usually he got it wrong. Hell is a foreign keyboard.
– Perry de Havilland
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Samizdata quote of the dayAugust 19th, 2006 |
 24 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Hell is listening to National Socialists speak as if they were Liberals.
Oh yeah! I was in Mexico in a cyber cafe and I nearly went crazy. It’s agony using a FRIGGING Spanish keyboard! ARrrrggggggg.
The Bosnian keyboard is the worst of all time. Sometimes they even had an American keyboard, but when you typed on it Bosnian letters showed up on the screen…ARG!
Being a travelling touch typer is a bitch, as a discovered in Prague a few days ago. Czech keyboards do my head in. Hell indeed!
Emma, that is exactly what happened to me! It LOOKED like a English keyboard, but…. ARG!!!
Korean keyboards are a lot of fun, too. Especially when they’re stuck in Chinese mode…
When I first tried to install a Russian keyboard driver to enable my QWERTY keyboard to have the phonetic equivalents of the Cyrillic letters, I got stuck with the Soviet keyboard layout instead. What a pain in the ass….
Although the minor differences are the ones that bite you the most… the ones between a UK and US keyboard and the keymappings for US and UK applied to them make 4 lovely combinations. Since I have a random mix here of the two hardware types, it keeps things interesting.
I was visiting England and I just assumed US & UK keyboards were the same… nope, not quite. But nothing prepared me for the horror of finding myself in France. Jesus, it is sooooooooooooooo frustrating trying to type when wh@t you get is not what ¥ou tp¥ed! Grrrrrrrrrr.
When all the layouts were invented, nobody had any idea that one of the most obscure keys on the keyboard (“@”) would become one of the most widely used. So it is in a different place in every keyboard layout, and it quite often requires bizarre multiple shift combinations which are hard to impossible to figure out. I have been in places where I was literally unable to send e-mail because I couldn’t figure out how to get an “@” symbol, or where I couldn’t log in to websites because my e-mail address was being used as my login.
Actually you can virtually change the keyboard configuration in windows, no matter what the physical keyboard. It happens in the control panel. So if you type looking at your screen you should be fine.
As for Sartre, I think someone else completed his quote like this: “Hell is other people at breakfast” which makes much more sense.
One way of doing this, not the easiest, but helps in situations when you absolutely can’t work out where a frigging @ symbol or something else is on a foreign keyboard, is to create a webpage with all the obscure symbols, load it when in need and simply cut and paste.
I think the “hell is other people” line is from Dante’s Inferno not Sartre.
Actually you can virtually change the keyboard configuration in windows, no matter what the physical keyboard. It happens in the control panel.
Depends what keyboard layouts were installed on the machine when the OS was installed. I have encountered plenty of situations where there was no US or UK keyboard layout installed. And don’t even let me start on internet cafes with all sorts of things disabled that make it impossible to use the control panel or to cut and paste and stuff like that. (Corporate installations can be nearly as bad at times).
Michael Jennings, I believe you should be able to obtain an @ symbol pretty reliably by holding down the ALT key and typing 064. Likewise, for an expat like me, I occasionally find ALT-156 useful when writing home (though it is sometimes ALT-163 for some reason to do with codepages)
Rich
It’s true that it is a pain when it happens in an internet café or in a corporate network. However, to the languages toolbar (right-click on windows toolbar>toolbars>language panel) you can add any language with any keyboard configuration.
Satre said Hell is other people. To which the punchline is traditionally “But then again, he was French”. Given the above comments, it would appear to apply to Perry’s paraphrasing too.
Rich
Not so Thaddeus. It is from Sartre’s ‘Huis clos’ (“L’enfer, c’est les autres”).
Somebody once summed Sartre’s overall philosophy thus: “I think, therfore I am not.” Don’t know how accurate that is, but it is amusing.
Ironically, Sartre was one person who never had a problem with foreign keyboards. He was famous for always carrying a Blackberet.
Well, I learned something today. I thought it was Nietzsche (sp?) that said hell was other people.
(A Christian’s answer: so is Heaven.)
LOL…sort of like the old saying that prostitutes aren’t paid for sex, they’re paid to go away.
That one had me coughing up my early morning Islay Malt!
And that is certainly not a joke!
My girlfriend is a translator. She works from home. One day her computer was up on blocks. I said until I got it fixed she could use mine for the day. She’s quite computer-savvy but you know what they say about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. The languages she works in are Russian, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian…
You can imagine the fucking mess my beloved machine was in when I next booted-up…
And this wasn’t a foreign keyboard, this was mine, at home!
Er, No.
Hell used to be trying to configure Linux via the command line on a GB keyboard when the system has loaded the default US (or worse, a German) keyboard map and I didn’t know enough about Linux to load the correct keymap. That was really hell.
But I digress, as Tom Lehrer once said.