Flashes of Panic

Somewhere I picked up a habit, in IM conversations, of correcting myself using Perl syntax. (I think perl swiped this from awk or sed but I’m not that old; I learned it from Perl.) To clarify for less geeky people, that means that I would type something like

s/Oriten/Orient/

and expect it to be read as, “Oops, I fat-fingered the spelling of that word, here’s the correct version so you know what I meant.” The more literal interpretation of that syntax is “replace the first string with the second one.”

Imagine my surprise earlier this week when I did exactly this in a Skype IM conversation, and rather than having my little substitution shorthand turn up in the chat window, it actually edited my preceding message and added a little flag saying the message had been edited.

I’ve found myself wishing more than once that I could have shell access to life, instead of being completely limited to this visually-stimulating-but-inefficient audio/visual interface, and for one brief second Skype brought that dream a baby-step closer to reality.

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