Listen to the keyboard. Please. Pretty please… Surface 2 Accessories?

View 801 Monday, December 02, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

 

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

It was a nice Thanksgiving Day at Chaos Manor. Two of the boys, Alex and Frank, were here and we were able with SKYPE to talk to Phillip and two of the grandchildren in Virginia. Friday Alex and I went down to LASCON, and I got to see a lot of old friends. Big panel in the afternoon with me, and Niven, and Greg Benford, and Harry Turtledove, and Betsey Mitchell and I can’t imagine how with that many people anyone had a chance to say much, but I had fun.

Of course I didn’t hear much of what was going on, and I ran into an xcorps rocket mechanic friend who showed me his COSTCO hearing aid. Two thousand dollars and about 17 frequency channels with notching and selective tuning. I am thinking of checking that out. I cannot use broad band hearing aids. It may be that Kaiser and Medicare Advantage have some kind of deal on something similar so I need to look into that, but I am weary of annoying people by making them repeat everything they say, and of not understand three consecutive words of most of what is said to me.

But I had a good time.

Then Saturday I managed the oddest computer glitch I have ever had. In essence my computer would start up, accept the password, and that password was the last information from the keyboard that the machine ever reacted to. Control-Alt-Delete did nothing. The Alt key did not bring up the Firefox tool bar. Windows 7 64 bit worked just fine so long as commands were given with the mouse, but nothing, nothing from the keyboard, except that it had reacted to the typed in password, so it was clearly a Windows setting, not hardware.

Now I had been trying to turn on the tone that sounds when you inevitably hit the Caps Lock key by accident – I’d as soon that key was on a foot pedal, or a key lock switch – and even finding that switch in the Windows 7 control panel requires dedication. It’s somewhere in the accessibility settings, and those aren’t as easy to find as they used to be. But I never got that features turned on. I had it turned on until recently when I did some kind of update possibly to Explorer, which seems to have reset it, and my attempts to reinstate it somehow resulted in the machine deciding not to listen to the keyboard again.

I spent Saturday trying to fix that. I then decided I had better back up my Outlook files while the system was still responding to the mouse. Then I kept fooling around with it all. And kept resetting. And trying again. I brought up Outlook on another machine so I could check my mail. Went back to this machine and – well, somewhere in there I managed to restore the defaults. I had brought up a keyboard that you can use with the mouse (there’s one in there) and that worked and with that on screen I tried other stuff and suddenly when I hit an actual key on the keyboard the on-screen mouse activated keyboard would show the key pressed, and I figured by golly it’s at least listening, so I reset the system and this time when it came up all the problems were solved. Better, I was able to go into the accessibility settings and set the tone for CAPS LOCK and this time that worked without any reset or anything.

Of course I then had Outlook in two places and found I had lost a month of mail and other information, but that was just a question of getting my head in order and finding a backup copy of OUTLOOK.PST, while saving all the mail that had come in on the other machine into a file I could export to, then moving everything back over here, bring up Outlook with an Outlook.pst good to Friday evening, bring in the stuff that had come in on the other machine and integrate all that, and when it was all over I had all my files back, all my records back except two sent messages that didn’t get into the exported files I saved and I won’t bother with them. But there was a bit of panic when I thought I had managed to mismanage my backups to the point of losing everything Outlook had done for a couple of weeks. Which has resulted in a flurry of backups yesterday and today, and not getting much done. So it goes.

And Roberta has banished me to the Monk’s Cell to work on Janissaries, which works because I have a couple of new books on medieval naval warfare that fit with the next scenes I have to write. After which I will try to catch up on MAIL – one of the things I thought I had managed to lose was my selected mail file with inputs on the “do we understand evolution very well” discussion. (That’s how I choose to see it. I have no investment in “believing in evolution” or not believing in it, and I have some faith in science as a means to discover the actual mechanisms of the world. Less faith in scientists in being scientists and not advocates for their theories and beliefs which seem as firm and unshakable as those of the Inquisition; but that’s another story.)

Anyway that’s where I have been for the past few days. A bit of computing at Chaos Manor. It was sort of fun, and we had the happy ending I always insisted on for my column. And now I will go off to work on Janissaries, and maybe I’ll get back on schedule…

And Kaiser tells me how to do the hearing aid deal. I pay 20% of cost, which seems reasonable.

My teen age granddaughter wants a Surface 2 with a pink keyboard. Shopping is crazy today but the most precious commodity here at Chaos Manor is time with some energy, so I am not worried about bargains. But I would appreciate suggestions about accessories that a teen age girl would think were cool. We raised four boys but no girls here so I am not much of an expert on what bright and sane teen age girls find cool. We’ll get the Surface 2 with pink keyboard. But what else is worth considering? I know Griffin makes some really cool stuff for Macs but she wants this since it has Office.

I’ll try to get to mail tonight. And some other stuff.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.