jeepliberty's Journal: Coping without an 8 Key

8-ball, 8 men out, crazy 8s, 8 is enough: What would you do without an 8 key?

While normal keyboards have numeric keypads, typical laptops do not. I found myself on the road at Panera's Bread in Pompano Beach attempting to update my ezine with photos via WiFi of the Florida State High School Swim/Dive Championship in Fort Lauderdale Friday night and my 8 key spazzed.

My Laptop is a LinuxCertified LC2100 with dual boot Fedora Core 4/Window XP.

Note that the 8 has a shift value of *. I was trying to merge 72 event file into a single files to post to my ezine webpage. To add to the angst, Friday was the 18th.

I succeeded with variations of [7-9], 05111?, and using a GUI file upload that let me upload files to a directory swim051118 which luckily I had created earlier. It was brutal. As I was pissing and moaning in my hotel room Saturday morning the 8 key suddenly became unstuck (after I had already burned CDROMs of Friday's events using a base directory of swim051117).

Anyway, the local high school diver, Andrew Scully, (Satellite High) won state 2A diving championship Friday, and Satellite High Boys and Girls won 2A overall championship on Saturday.

Swimming and diving are not money sports and do not get a lot of print coverage. My hope is that one of these athletes makes it to the olympics and I'll have "Before they were stars" photos to provide for a coffee table book. Friday's photos are here and Saturdays are here .

do you mean 10 key?

[subgeek]

8 key would only let you enter octal numbers.

or is it something else that i'm just too stupid to know about?

Re:do you mean 10 key?

[jeepliberty]

Now you have me confused. So let me explain like I would to a tech at a telephone service center offshore:

The key between 7 and 9 on my laptop keypad did not respond to finger pressure. So I couldn't "scp photos.tgz username@website:pics/swim051118 ". Luckily there is a web based GUI to handle uploads.

I also wanted to tarball 72 event files that had a pattern 051118F001.htm - 051118F072.htm. The normal way would be to "cat 05111* >all.htm". But the * is a shifted 8. So the command became "cat 05111[7-9

Re:do you mean 10 key?

[subgeek]

nevermind. i was being stupid. i've heard some people refer to the number pad on the right of the keyboard as a 10 key because it resembles the calculator like device of the same name. it has 10 number keys. see? i'm dumb.