GreggW's comments

I just told my wife, "The next time I want to be an early adopter, just hit me until I fall to the ground and stay there."

I have a bilateral hand disability, and the program I DEPEND on, MacSpeech Dictate, doesn't work under Snow Leopard. I had refused to pay an extra $55 for features that should have been there in the first place, but now I have to. Furthermore, the UPDATE ISN'T DOWNLOADABLE (they mail it to you, for $10 to $90 extra, based on how fast you want it). And the final insult is that it's not clear the new version will even work until they (not an especially responsive company, of course) release a Snow Leopard update that may be delayed by "several minor functional and cosmetic issues" they want to add!

I'm hosed for at least a week, maybe longer. I'm 55 years old, the very definition of a gentle, responsible person, and this is the first time I've flamed IN MY LIFE. But I've got to say this:

I HATE MACSPEECH, THEIR BUSINESS PRACTICES, THEIR INSANELY BRAIN-DEAD DESIGN AND USABILITY DECISIONS, AND THEIR TOTAL DISREGARD OF INFORMED (former 10-year technical Apple employee) FEEDBACK BY SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY USES AND DEPENDS ON THEIR PRODUCT EVERY DAY.

Even though it hurts my hands to type this, it was WORTH IT.

I could go on...but that's it, basically. And not a single exclamation mark or #$@%&* expletive, either.

Okay, here's my $.02. I'm 55 and re-teaching myself Scheme (25 years ago, I edited the BYTE Magazine special issue on Lisp, and I just discovered that an excerpt from my review of The Little Schemer is now quoted on its back cover). I'm in the late stages of my training to be a marriage and family therapist (second MA at age 53), and I have an open-source project that I fiddle with (infoml.org). So what's my take on things?

Consciousnesses is far from binary; sometimes I think it's the most finely nuanced thing in the universe (read The Head Trip, by Jeff Warren). Speed of thought decreases--you got that right--but I've now got decades of experiences behind me, and these lead to thoughts I never could have imagined when I was 25. Unfortunately, it's not true that "quality of thought won't diminish"--my father died with dementia at 85, and it certainly changed the last 20 years of his life. Change is the only constant in life, by the way, and flexibility and openness are your greatest assets in dealing with it.

As you grow older, meaningful connections to others, humble achievements (helping others at a personal level), and balance in all things become more important than power, money, and sexual conquest. I feel I'm far more creative than I was 20 years ago, but my desire to sacrifice balance for achievement has diminished; at this stage of my life, different things (as described above) are more important to me.

Some parts of getting older truly suck, but I am a lot happier and calmer that I used to be. I really know who I am now, and I can no longer be jerked around by what other people think. It's a great ride, and if you take care of yourself along the way (mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually), it can be quite worthwhile. Good luck to you all doing whatever you're passionate about!

My project is InfoML (http://infoml.org/), a proposed standard for storing "chunks" of (human-readable) text and annotating it with various useful metadata, including tags and bibliographic information. I hope there will eventually be a community of developers who will find InfoML useful and will build a variety of software tools for manipulating data stored in this format.

A warning: I switched immediately to a Kinesis keyboard after first getting wrist pains. But Kinesis keyboard uses the thumbs (much stronger digit, right?) to press the modifier keys usually pressed by the little fingers.

Not a good move for me: despite eventually going off all keyboards and using voice dictation software, I have permanent damage in both hands and my thumbs are the first to start hurting.

What I've been told by experts is that the best thing to do is to switch among different layout keyboards every couple of days. Each uses slightly different muscles, and if you switch often enough, you may not fatigue any of them--but there are no guarantees on anything!