astradele

After an evening of an entertaining board game (“Dune”, as in Frank Herbert), I decided to skate home. I love skating at night on the empty residential roads. It’s cool, quiet, and smooth.

I’d never taken this route home before, but roads tend to be pretty parallel, so it wasn’t hard to figure out. Near the end, however, I encountered a dead end. A grassy knoll lay between me and a parking lot that connected to the last road home.

I’ve had my inline skates for six years or so, although using them only intermittently since university. I’ve never fallen, though I’ve come close. I’m not particularly good, I just never seem to have quite taken a spill.

I’m sure you see where this is going. In a moment of impulsive recklessness, I take to the poorly illuminated grassy knoll, shoes in hand, at about midnight. I fared reasonably while limiting myself to a crab-walk. Once I decided to actually roll, however, it was much more precarious. In the end, despite making it past miscellaneous grass patches and pine needles, my fortunes ran dry and I wiped out.

It reminded me of snowboarding, actually – felt the same on a wipe out. I got off with a superifical scrape near my elbow, a long but thin cut on my shin, and a wrenched muscle by my ribs. I’m glad I did it.

Why am I glad over personal injury from recklessness? Ironically, the injurious experience made me feel younger and wiser. Younger, for daring to do something that was probably going to be deleterious to me. Wiser, because the shock of injury spurred me to reflect on myself and what I was doing, why I did it. Sounds odd, eh? I haven’t taken an injury of any sort (aside from snowboarding) in a very long time. It’s like I’d forgotten what it was like. I guess it’s invigorating, mentally and physically, to do something that has signficant risk, even if the visible outcome is negative. I had a good laugh while regaining my breath.

Before you think I went totally crazy, I would never condone completely reckless behaviour. I did consider probabilities of long term harmful effects for this “obstacle course” before letting the whimsical side take over.

It turns out that someone implemented a Mouse Gestures for Internet Explorer plugin. It seems to work really well!

If you’re wondering what Mouse Gesturea are, the short answer is that it’s a fast way to instruct a program to do certain things, like shortcut keys on the keyboard. They’re great for programs that require your hand to be on the mouse anyway, like web browsers. The user holds down a mouse button, and draw a simple shape on the screen really fast with your mouse. The application interprets it and translates it into a command, which it then performs.

For instance, by holding down a button and making an L-shape, the browser window closes. An up-down motion asks for a page refresh. Those are the simple gestures; they let you skip the button search effort. I guess it’s like learning a sign language to instruct the computer on what to do.

You can have more complex operations. Some that I’ve found useful are: clone the current page, open up a new (blank) window, show me the web page source, blank out this image. Once you consider a large number of operations, it’s easier to remember the pictographic gesture than which of the many buttons or menu options does what you want.

I highly recommend trying it out. It may sound hokey, but it grows you on you really fast.