Saturday, January 31, 2009

IM - Instant Messaging

My friend is Mexican with a Spanish keyboard. I only have English. Yeah, you can configure Windows for both, but what about the keytops or memorizing the new layout. Hell, I never learned to touch-type.

We IM almost constantly. We wander back and forth between English and Spanish. That’s no problem with a Spanish keyboard, all the letters, numbers. accents, punctuations, and special characters except @ = ALT+064 for both languages are on it. Anyone who has been to an Internet café in Hispano America learns that right off.

What to do? What to do?

The only real sticky one is ñ. Without it, year (año) becomes anus (ano). You can get around it by typing anio which would be pronounced almost like año. So, I hunted through MS Word’s symbol table and found that ALT-0241 makes ñ.

Leaving all the other accents off may look uneducated but nowhere near as silly as Have a Happy New Anus.

One clumsy character per language is a fair trade, I guess.

There’s a more pernicious side effect. The more I IM, the more cigarettes I light, sometimes having two going at once. The doc gave me some new pills to help quit. After two weeks, not a dent! I guess that shows that the Smoking Nazis and their pet shrinks don’t know what they’re talking about. The addiction is more habit than chemical dependence.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, smokes are less than twenty bucks a carton for Marlboros, less than ten for a couple of similar Mexican brands.

Where’s the will power?

1 comment:

  1. Dear Senior Barry
    If you are running Windows XP , it is very easy to alternate between Keyboards.

    Go to Control panel , Regional and language option , advanced and choose the language you want for your keyboard.

    Once done apply save and exit.

    To toggle between the two setups( English and Spanish) just press the LEFT ALT and SHIFT keys on your keyboard.

    Hope it will work for the Spanish as it works for me for the Arabic Keyboard.

    Let ne know your findings, best regards

    ReplyDelete