Thursday, November 02, 2006

Close that parenthesis!

Let me ask you, how powerful is a left parenthensis? You know what I mean, one of these: ( .

The reason I ask is that I never leave a left parenthesis lying around, nor a left bracket, a left widget or a left curly brace. I close them all, typing, sooner or later, the corresponding ) (ahhh, that's better). My compulsion might have to do with my many years of computer programming, in which unbalanced parentheses often reflect the presence of a nasty problem.

The reason I bring this up is that I have a keyboardless PDA, one of those devices that proposes to recognize my handwriting when I write notes. Now I do not rely on handwriting recognizion, using instead a lovely open source onscreen keyboard called MessageEase. But still, it's a lot more effort to do punctuation, and I'd like to type notes that are as short as possible, like this appointment:
11:00 Hairct @ mystiq (Jamie again

The parenthetical part of that note reminds me who's scheduled to cut my hair. There's no need to close that parenthesis, is there? So why do I always add a right paren at the end?
) ahhhhhhh.

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