When I hold down the shift and press the eject key on my Macintosh keyboard I notice the DVD tray slides out at a tenth of the speed it usually does.

My first computer, the Color Computer, came with a variety of keyboard commonly called a chicklet keyboard. The name comes from the shape of the individual keys.

I always liked the keyboard. When I recived my CoCo 3 I shipped off my old CoCo to my uncle in Los Angeles. He used the computer for a few years finally upgrading to an Atari ST mega. When I got the computer back I found he had replaced the keyboard with an after market keyboard with more proper keys. This was a common thing to do, a lot of people didn’t like the keyboard.

Recently Apple released a new keyboard that is really nice. I asked my wife to get it for me for xmas. It uses flat, laptop style keys and is very low profile. It reminds me a lot about the original CoCo keyboard. I am really loving it. It’s was a really great present.

Sometimes people have a meta conversation about negotiating. Sometimes those same people talk about the carrot and stick method of negotiating. Those people really anger me.

Mostly because the “carrot and stick” term is a bastardization of the proper term “carrot on a stick”. Thankfully they mean completely different things.

Carrot and stick usually means you’re going to play nice until a certain point where things get nasty. This represents oppression to me.

Carrot on a stick usually means you offer niceness in front of the other party, and if they grab for it, you move a step away, hoping for the first party to make another grab. This represents cooperation to me.

I’ve noticed people using either term are not using it incorrectly. That makes me feel a little better. Nevertheless, I’ve got a lot of carrots here for the people who insist on using it.

Oh, Dan Trachtenberg (regarding Episode #37), why did you have to dislike my favorite game! TRON Deadly Disks for the Intellivision is super fun.

I really liked the arcade version of the game based off the TRON movie. The four mini games: Tank, Lightcycles, MCP cone and the spiders were all good. I was also dissapointed there was no disc game included. It would be many years before I saw Discs of TRON in an arcade.

But when TRON Deadly Disks was released for the Intellivision I was hooked. A really good single player game.

Dan did like Utopia, so at least we can agree on that.

My oldest daughter, Bethany, was very upset with us this Thanksgiving. She didn’t want to sit at the kids table. At Twelve she was the oldest child during the occasion.
As far as I know The Kids Table is an institution in this country just as large as Thanksgiving itself. Bethany had the audacity to ask me to switch places with her so she didn’t have to sit at that table. I think that really speaks towards to my lack of parenting skills for not instilling in her a proper respect for me. Only time will tell how that turns out.
On the drive home, my wife and I were talking about how mopey she was during dinner. Bethany promptly declared in her future household there will be no such thing as a kids table. The indignity of separating the children will not be tolerated.
Needless to say, my wife and I had not had a laugh that large in a long time. Jeanette, my wife, suggested I blog about this because something this good needs to be remembered for the future.