the beauty of a good user interface

After suffering through research for LWR, I am ever so appreciative of those programmers and designers who provide seamless navigation tools to the rest of us. As you may recall, that class requires me to pretend that perfectly adequate indexing technology does not exist. We must do the work manually.

This presents me with a problem because I, unlike those well-established technologies, am not a perfectly adequate indexing technology. By indexing standards, I'm an awfully retarded and deficient computer. The Apple IIe that I played my first computer game on would laugh its scrawny little guts out at me.

Given my deficiency in indexing cases manually, I have resorted to ranking the law books by their user interfaces. This makes me feel like I have a modicum of control, though I swear that the computers in the library are giggling at me.

Statute book #1, your font is 10 point, not 12 point? Back of the line for you! I'll use your competitor, Statute book #2, even though #2 is so dusty that I sneeze. Appellate review book #294, you're too heavy. I pick the slimmer competitor's edition!

It's really pathetic what forced separation from technology has done to me.

And, because we're talking about LWR and user interfaces, I present to you a story of user interface design that seems remarkably topical to me. At least somebody can enjoy good technology.