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Hello, Greg Holden –

I believe you. You wanted to avoid computerese in Front Page Plain and Simple. You tried. I haven’t seen “the user” or “end user.” So I won’t call you a computer nerd. I know: they call themselves “geeks.” They are not. A geek is a performer in a carnival who bites heads off chickens. Look it up in a dictionary. If they’re going to call themselves geeks, they should demonstrate it, bite heads off chickens, and get PETA after them.

But it’s difficult to overcome old habits, and there are so many nurdwurdz. Default is still there. That was the first nurdwurd to confuse me many years ago. How many years ago?  I was attempting to use PC Write, which I decided was PC Wrong, on an 8088. I kept seeing the word default in what nurdz call documentation and what normal people call poorly written instructions. I have rarely seen well-written computer instructions.

So I looked up default in an ancient Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.  How ancient? All the words for sexual activities were Puritanical, before the sexual revolution. Every definition of default included the word failure. Huh? What an attitude! Eventually a nerd, cleverly disguised as a high school English teacher, explained it: if you fail to do anything, it does [whatever.]  You mean its standard response. Its normal response. Its usual response. It’s regular response. What convoluted nonsense! I realized nurdz don’t like to think of themselves as normal and don’t like to see the word.

So I created acronyms. I need to define acronym because most nurdz regard any collection of capital letters to be an acronym. Wrong! An acronym is a word formed from the initial letter or letters of a series of words. To be a word it must be pronounceable. Understand? The acronym is SNUR.Standard Normal Usual Regular. Let’s replace default with SNUR. We really don’t need SNUR. Just assume the system will do what it normally does.

Technology moves on. No more DOS. Many of us are convinced that stood for Dumb Operating System or Damned Operating System. No more prompts. A prompter at a theatrical performance reminds a performer if they forget their lines. DOS promps just sit there, and maybe flash. Imagine a live prompter who says “Say something” or “Sing something.”

Many Americans have a problem with food - too much or too little. It must have been an adiposally disadvantaged (fat) nerd who replaced list with menu. It is sadistic and unhealthy to remind people about a problem they suffer from.

In my favorite children’s video The Phantom Tollbooth characters argue whether words or numbers are more important. They are equally important and should be used appropriately but nurdz often use numbers when the should use words and vise versa. How small is small? How small is very small? Is tiny smaller than very small? Why not use numbers, and in metric units?

Ergonomics means designing machinery to fit humans. Computerese includes non-ergonomic obstacles. We read from left to right and from the top down, but programmers rarely consider that. The first sequences we learned were numbers and our alphabet. Why aren’t lists in numeric or alphabetic order? Word-Will-Never-Be-Perfect’s Help is in alphabetic order and it is helpful, unlike WordSuck’s Help which rarely is. IT DOESN’T TELL US HOW TO FORMAT A DISK!!! Are they that stupid or do they do it deliberately?  Nurdz can’t understand why we have problems negotiating their mazes. Anyone who creates a maze can usually negotiate it. Not always. Remember those multiple digital numbers such as   1.1.2. They were so confusing even the nurdz stopped using them.

“user friendly”?  Very few products have been user-friendly.  You mean victim-friendly.
Nurdz talk of learning curves. What kind of curve? Constant radius? Increasing radius? Decreasing radius? Logarithmic curve? Parabolic curve? Why do we have learning curves? Why isn’t everything obvious, on the screen, or readily accessible on the screen. Why is there so much MSYHTR? That’s pronounced mis-yuh-hitter: more stuff [or shit] you have to remember. We are victims of sine wave learning and forgetting curves. If we spend time away from these obstacle courses, our knowledge goes back down.
Why give names to “bars?” It’s in quotes because that’s a stupid term for it. It’s a horizontal list. A row. Why give names like Menu bar, Standard toolbar, and Formatting toolbar?  They’re the top or #1 row, the second row, and the third row.  That’s too obvious, isn’t it?  It’s more shit we have to remember or look up.

Shorter is better, usually, in words.  “current page”  Is it electrified?  It’s this page.  A graphic representation is a PICTURE. Yes, I’m shouting. Maybe it will sink in.
Targets are usually circular with concentric rings and large enough so they can be quickly hit. So why do we get tiny rectangular boxes? Because they hate us, that’s why! They can’t be that stupid.
I could go on but I try to limit myself to one page.

Yeah, I know. I should tell Bill Gates. You are closer to him than I am. You tell him. I complained to Macmillan about how Peter Norton sold out – had a team write Peter  Norton’s  Complete Guide to MicroShaft Windows 2000 or something like that. They claimed the want feedback. BS! They want asskissers. I showed them how much I could improve their infuriatingly verbose Chapter 8. They ignored me, of course. . 
   
Why does this damned thing insist on indenting?  Where in the index does it tell me how to eliminate that?

Ed Hughes
POBox 1152
Fort Lee NJ 07024
TheFriendlyStranger.com                   verypissedoff@hotmail.com
Nov 14, 2005

Know any magazine that would buy this?  Fat chance, huh?