preposition

about/up: Lots of Irritating, Silly Parentheses

I have a history of interface problems:

"                                              2-21-92

" Well, I'm almost at the end of a page, which is clearly shown by the yellow line coming closer and closer as I write this text...  So, for everyone's convenience, I'll finish thist writing on Page Two...  [21 spaces](cont)

" Gee, wasn't that cool!?!

" Anyway, today was another slight improvement on Wednesday, bringing the "how-was-your-day-o-meter" up to at least a +1.  T.G.I.F. helps a little (the phrase, not the ABC evening line-up)  So today I finally felt inspired enough to write a book, using AD&D (of course) as a baseline."[1]

Interface problems:

• the yellow line was the Textcraft Plus page break marker coming up. This was the word processor i was using on my Amiga 500. You had to set its settings just so to get it to print on a page(1), but it was significant effort (if for no other reason than loading a template(2) off a floppy disk(3) was slow and cumbersome), so i only did it for stuff i knew i was going to print.[2]
• That date is supposed to be centered (via TC+'s closed-amiga-c(4) "Center" command) but is instead about 4/6th of the way across the page)(5).
• I'm writing this in vi(-1), for which i have no useful plugins to make html(6) easy, especially the escaping in the bibliography(7).
• I'm writing this while listening to music via xmms(8), whose ui interface issues are myriad and frustrating compared to all my iTunes using friends, i must admit. Party Shuffle is fucking brilliant.
• But a lot of why xmms sucks is because of GTK(9), whose file browser stuff (and/or xmms's implementation thereof, though i strongly suspect that these are more limitations of gtk) doesn't include some pretty basic and necessary things, like "back" instead of "..", non-broken symlink-following behavior, and some form of find-as-you-type[4].