>>Over the years I continued trying to encourage her to learn 10 -finger typing, and later to start using computers, but she just wouldn't/could'nt do it. "Interferes with my creative process", she said (my typing for her didn't seem to do that, for some odd reason)
>
>I can understand that. While I was trying to write stories (some still are on my website), I discovered that the advice to write them on paper first, then retype, was nonsense. Doesn't work for me. Maybe good for those who never had computers, but... I write prose text the way I write code - cut, paste, move around, insert a remark here and there with the idea to expand later, call the pieces in different order... which would be nearly impossible on paper. That's the way I think. Once (after a hurricane) I did write a few chapters, but guess what, they were in a continuous line. I also wrote a bunch of edits to be inserted into the pieces I printed beforehand (knew what was coming, so I prepared - didn't expect 11 days without power, though), but had to go over all of it again later (at the keyboard) to see whether some other movement of text was needed. Because the paper is so effing sequential.

I used to work at a newspaper before computers, and we used to literally cut and paste our stories together. We cut out typewritten paragraphs with scissors and glued them back onto another piece of paper in order to move paragraphs around in our articles. It was crude, but hey, it worked!

>>...and by the time an "old" user learns a new technique he may have lost more time learning the new way than he will gain using it between the time he learns it and the time a brave new UI paradigm comes around. That's a zero-sum game right there.
>
>In the sense that every day has only 24 hours and the night, and every week has seven days and the weekend, yes.
>
>For a couple of years the inside doorhandles on my car were broken. Physically. They would still work, though, you only had to hold them a certain way, or to press the broken frame near the break so the wire would get pulled and open the door. I finally got new ones couple of weeks ago, and my wife is still using both hands to open her door. She managed to get back to normal two-finger operation once or twice, when she was specially thinking of it; rest of the time, the habit takes over.

lol. Must've been a Yugo <g>

Reminds me of yet another story, this one by the famous animal behavior scientist Konrad Lorenz. He was studying some ducks that made a very long and winding path from their nests to the water for some reason. Mr. Lorenz put a rock in the middle of one of these paths and observed how the ducks learned to jump over the rock after stumbling over it a few times. After a few weeks he took the rock out. And guess what: happened when the ducks came to the place where the rock used to be, they jumped! That's also an accurate representation of most of the people that use my software.