Being Blonde

Or #|, I should say. Sorry - it’s a geeky post, nowhere near as interesting as the title sounds…

Anyway, I’ve recently been blessed (cursed?) with switching to Mac - aside from the rather painful purchase price of the machine itself I’ve noticed two things:

1. Older mac users are jealous of 8 core machines.

(thbthbhththbh!)

2. Someone forgot to put the hash key on the keyboard.

I’ll say that again for emphasis: SOMEONE FORGOT TO PUT THE EFFING HASH KEY ON THE KEYBOARD.
(Disclaimer: UK keyboard, I’m fairly sure it’s there on the US one, and it’s probably got a cosy home of its own somewhere else on various other keyboards for various other nationalities but on the UK one it’s just not there)

Thankfully, older Mac users know where this completely indispensible (if you’re a web developer) key is hidden. If you’re nice and stop taunting them with screengrabs of your CPUs they’ll sometimes tell you too.

Failing that, as always, the intarweb doth provide.

Now I can see that the keyboard layout is a tricky thing to fit everything into - you only have so many symbols you can put on it and still have that “Designed by Apple in California” look…

But the UK keyboard layout has a handy little euro sign above the 2, next to the @key to say “look, I’m here, alt-2 is me! click me! please!”, just incase I’d ever actually use a euro sign (rather than €) - I’ve not yet… but you never know. It’s on the keyboard - it’s not the easiest key to hit by accident or anything, but it’s there….

For some reason though someone somewhere thought that finding the ubiquitous # symbol situated at alt-3 on the key right next to that euro sign would best be left as an exercise to the user…

Perhaps it’s meant as an intriguing alternate reality game experience taking the user onto a journey throughout the interweb. Or possibly it was intended to encourage socialising with fellow mac users, who would take a pitying (and slightly smug) look at you, bemoan your misspent PC upbringing and then enlighten you with their Macly wisdom.

That or someone just fucked up.

#####AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH#####

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Fun and games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.