Sunday, January 11, 2009

Not Qwerty

The hair salon I go to here is quite up to date -- in addition to magazines, they offer Internet terminals to use while you wait.

I hadn't used one until this weekend, and was surprised to discover that it comes with a French keyboard, which is quite different than the American one:


Perhaps the weirdest and most annoying thing about this keyboard is visible at the lower right: the period is only available with a shift key.

That's probably because Europeans interchange periods and commas in much of daily life -- for example, fractions are indicated with commas, so three and a half euros would be written "3,50".

Unfortunately for the French, the period cannot be interchanged with a comma in World Wide Web addresses ...

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