I’m on a plane to San Jose, sitting next to a rather geeky young lady and she’s typing in a foreign word processing application.  I squint and squint and finally figure out it’s Notepad, or Wordpad.  Bare bones typing.  Then I show up at Dave Berlind’s Mashup Camp the next day and happen to sit next to another nerd — a consultant of some sort — and he, too, is typing in Notepad. Weird.

I’m in the heart of the tech country (Stanford, Google, etc.) and people are typing in a foreign, retro and presumably hard-to-use word processing app.  I gotta know why.  A few days later I mention it around the office, and the geeks think I’ve been smoking something, so I remain quiet.  I know what I saw.

Today, many weeks later, I decide to go to Wikipedia and look up Notepad.  You know what it said?  Notepad is a non-formatted text application that removes all tags and format from copy cut and pasted from a website. And vice versa.

Clearly, the people I espied were heavy web users/publishers and found it to be a much more facile approach.

Ergo, I am writing this document in Notepad and will paste it right into LiveJournal.  I’m betting that instead of my normal formatting problems — cutting and pasting and taking extra steps — copy will slide right in.

Of course, as the world’s worst typist, speller and editor, this excercise might be a major mistake.  Let’s see.