The Little Engine That Might Be Able To Later
Posted: Fri, 24 March 2006 | permalink | No comments
By now, you would think that I would have learned that Breakfast + Freshmeat = mess.
Today, we have an unimaginatively named program called "font manager". Some day, in the future, we may have a font manager -- but we don't yet. Here's the description, direct from the horse's mouth:
font manager is a font manager for GNOME. It cannot do any font management tasks yet, but is already useful for picking fonts.
It's quite adamant that font manager is a font manager. Yet it can't manage fonts. Interesting. I suppose this is an example of the curious issue of true identity -- are you who you are because of what you are called, or because of what you are? The author(s) of "font manager" obviously believe that your true identity stems from your name, regardless of what you may actually do. I disagree somewhat -- in a lot of ways, I identify more closely with the term "computer geek" than with my name -- I think it's essentially social conditioning and a need to be uniquely identified from all the other computer geeks out there that makes me remember to respond to a call of "oi, Matt!". An interesting book on this subject is Jennifer Government, by Max Barry (ISBN 0349117624), in which people's surnames are determined by who they work for (so take a guess as to who Jennifer works for).
There's something very wrong with me when a quick scoff at a freshmeat article turns into pseudophilosophy and a book review...
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