Journey to the Center of the Keyboard's Mind

 

 

In a recent session with my shrink (yes, genius does have its price), the talk came around, as usual, to my obsession with computers. And this time, my esteemed mental health care professional threw out a most interesting comment. 'Computers contain a great deal of symbiology,' he said.

 

Symbiology!? What the hay does that mean? Unfortunately for me, the good doctor got a phone call that very moment, informing him that he had won the SuperPowerBall $25 million lottery - after which he hightailed it out of the office, never to return! I'd sue him for malpractice, but my lawyer told me that the courts in Tahiti, where doc seems to have taken up permanent residence, are backed up with years' worth of lawsuits from clients who were abandoned after the professional they worked with for years skipped town for the fun and sun of the south seas.

 

So there I was, with not only my old mental concerns to keep me busy - I now had a new psychic dilemma, one very close to my heart. Symbiology? Does that mean the mouse and keyboard represent man's yearning desire to experience wrist pain? That the trend towards smaller computers represents a diminishing of human self-confidence? That computer networking is somehow an analogy for our fear of being left alone for even a moment, which really, as we all know, is about our fear of death?

 

 

For example, I've always wanted to end a sentence using one of those Spanish-style exclamation points - as in Hola¡ That's a pretty cool exclamation point to throw into a sentence, if you ask me. And then there's the funny looking B they use in some European countries, the ß. It's a lot better looking than the regular B, in my opinion. And what about ©, ®, æ, µ and even §? It would be nice to have access to those as well.

 

And keyboard symbols are more than just fun - they're an important part of business. While most Americans believe that the world of currency revolves around the old greenback dollar, there's a whole world of other money types out there, including pounds, euros, and yen - and even dollars have a little sister, in the form of cents. As it happens, all these symbols, and many more, are buried deep inside your computer. English language keyboard layouts include keys for grave, circumflex, acute, tilde, and my personal favorite, umlaut letters. How do you get at them?

 

 

There are other ways to gain easy access to PC symbols without having to take a course in memory enhancement. Microsoft offers a free tool called the Keyboard Layout Creator (free download from http://tinyurl.com/aek48), which lets you map symbols, as well as shortcuts or specialized symbols you find on the Internet. Using KLC, for example, you could technically create a keyboard layout using Hebrew characters that you would be able to access without having to switch language directions or use a Hebrew language font, which, as many of us who try to mix Hebrew and English knows, can mess up your text something awful, with the English letters appearing on the page out of order, or your text 'jumping' when you type in a quote mark or dash. With Keyboard Layout Creator, you could create a Hebrew alphabet using alt-control-shift key combinations, for example, that you would use when you wanted to insert a single Hebrew letter or word into English text, independent of Hebrew right to left requirements - as far as your text is concerned, you're using an English language keyboard character.

 

KLC is easy enough to use - it;s getting it that's a hassle. Nowadays, Microsoft makes you jump throught all sorts of hoops if you try to download any of their often useful software, with your computer having to prove that you have a 'real' serial number for Windows. It took me quite awhile to download KLC, and I only put up with the frustration of having to install plug-ins and verification tools and symbols in order to compare KLC to another utility I found that was a lot easier to download - and, as it turns out, a lot easier to use than Keyboard Layout Creator.