Right now I’m in the very damp city of Chicago, for the annual IMLS-sponsored Web Wise conference. IMLS (or more correctly the Institute for Museum and Library Services) is a U.S. government funding agency that makes grants to museums and libraries, and Web Wise is the annual get-together for several hundred grant awardees to share their experiences. Fortunately it’s not limited to recipients of IMLS funding, though, or else I wouldn’t be here!

The theme of this year’s conference is Sharing Resources, and so far it’s been a very good event. Tomorrow morning at some ungodly hour I am speaking as part of a panel entitled Museum & Library Partnerships for Power: New Developments in the Museum Field and Implications for Libraries. The title of my talk is “The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model: Building Semantic Bridges Between Museums, Libraries & Archives.”

I use computers extensively pretty much every day, but I’m not a touch-typist, so I generally look at the keyboard while I’m typing rather than the screen.

At least once each day, I accidentally hit the “Insert/Overwrite” toggle key on my keyboard and start inadvertently overwriting text instead of inserting.

Really, what’s the point of this ridiculous anachronism, “overwrite” mode? Has anyone actually used it intentionally since Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS went out of common usage? I wish there was a way to disable it at least, so I wouldn’t keep erasing stuff accidentally.