/home/todd

Somewhere along the line, I picked up the habit of mapping the otherwise utterly useless caps lock key to act as another control key.  If you’re an Emacs user, this is sort of critical to avoid the wrist strain of constant pinky-stretches to the lower-left corner of the keyboard.  Its become second nature now, so when I recently found myself working on a Windows-based lab computer where caps lock actually performed as-advertised, the result was a lot of code THAT lOOKED LIKE thIS.  Unpleasant, to be sure.

Linux and Mac OS X make remapping this key extremely easy.  System Preferences on the Mac and the GNOME keyboard control panel on Linux include a simple option to enable.  Tada!  No more wasted space west of ‘A’.  Windows, of course, is a different beast.

The good news: there’s a very simple registry hack to remap caps to control.  Seriously, it’s floating all over the internet.  Except, there’s a wrinkle–you need administrative access to edit the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry tree, which is what all of these hacks do.  For whatever reason, our school has decided computer science graduate students aren’t to be trusted with administrative access to their own computers [another rant for another time], so what’s a wrist-strained user to do?

Muck around in the Windows registry, of course!  It turned out to be pretty straight forward.  There’s a duplicate of the keyboard mapping registry key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, which non-administrators can modify, and it appears to behave exactly like the key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.  So, for anyone in a similar position, here’s the registry key to modify:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout\Scancode Map =
hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00

You can download a registry update file here.  Save it to your computer, double-click it to update your registry, then reboot and enjoy your vastly-improved keyboard.

Last week I did what you all suggested: I went to the local animal shelter and picked out an adorable kitty.  I didn’t head in looking for any particular characteristics (beyond wanting an animal past kitten-stage… everyone is willing to adopt kittens), I figured I’d play with a few and see if I got on well with any of them.  There was one particularly-needy-looking little domestic short hair, Elliot, on their website, but I didn’t really expect the site to be up-to-date.  Better to just go and look around.

A volunteer at the desk points me to a door and says, “Just go ahead.  Find one to fall in love with.”  As soon as I open the door, this raspy yowl is let loose from the cage on the lower-right.  I’ve lived with chatterbox cats before, and they’re cute, but this guy… this guy did not sound cute.  Picture what copious amount of whiskey and cigarettes could do to a cat’s voice, a feline variant of a smokey jazz pianist; that’s what this little fellow sounded like.

So I pass him by and check out the top row, where some truly beautiful kitties were lazily playing, batting at my arms or at each other.  I’m reading the names on each cage, wondering if Elliot is still there.  I’m a tad disappointed when this beautiful tuxedo-coated cat that’s been vying for my attention turns out to be not-him (a her, in fact, though I can’t recall the name now), but she’s cute and lively ,so I take her out of the cage and she doesn’t claw or bite, and I’m thinking, “Hrmm… this one could be perfect.”

Meanwhile the relentless pleas from whiskey-cat have taken on a hint of desperation: “You are not paying attention to me!” he cried.  “Not even a little bit!”  So I kneel down to take a closer look at him, and he immediately shuts up and starts nuzzling the cage door as hard as he could.  I put a hand through the bars to scratch his head, but can’t maintain for long because kitty starts rolling over himself in ecstasy (judging from the amount and quality of purring emanating from his tiny little self).  OK, so this guy seems to need a home desperately. I open his cage and he bolts straight into my lap, starts climbing over my shoulders, still purring like a V8, and I notice his name tag.  Elliot, domestic short hair, male, rescued Feb 2009, age approx 1 yr.  I gently put him back in his cage, where he once again let out that bizarre meow of his, and went to the desk to tell them I found one I want.

So!  That was just over a week ago.  Elliot’s adjusting to his new home pretty well.  He’s not nearly as vocal as when we first met, but when he does have something to say, I’ve started to find that raspy meow rather endearing.  He’s beginning to learn his boundaries (e.g., he can sit and walk on things that I also sit and walk on.  NOT COFFEE TABLES.  etc.), and he’s stunningly playful.  Seriously.  Everything is a game to him.  He even wowed the vet and her staff by showing no fear and insisting they play fetch with him.  And for all his energy, by the end of the day, he’s perfectly content to curl into a little ball beside me while I read.  Or hack.  Or play guitar.  Or sip martinis and watch old movies.  He doesn’t care.  He is perfect.