Retro Geek
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.
