Category Archives: Cyberspace & Technology

On The Fickleness Of Technology

You know, yesterday started off as such a fantastic day, and in the last couple of hours it went spiralling down in flames. This was made even more irritating by the fact that we were supposed to be celebrating Tal’s birthday, and I so desperately wanted to enjoy myself, but events conspired against me. I should have just stayed home.

A lot of the Bad Day-ness revolves around my wretched little smear of a printer and its thirty-dollar ink cartridges which require replacement much, much too often for the amount of printing that I do. It wouldn’t be so bad if the printer didn’t consume vast quantities of ink for no reason, particularly coloured ink, which I don’t use often at all. The printer requires both a functional black and colour cartridge in order to print in black only, for some lame reason, and yesterday not only did my colour cartridge run out, the printer decided to not recognise the new cartridges I put into it.

I will own a new printer by the weekend. The nice man in the independent print shop around the corner told me that many people had problems with this particular model and showed me a Canon printer priced at just under a hundred dollars, which prints faster than the one I’ve currently got and whose cartridges cost only six dollars. Since I have paid the original price of this printer several times over in ink cartridges alone over the past year I’ve owned it, I have no problem buying the new printer. One hundred dollars is equal to buying three cartridges for my current printer, after all..

So, please consider this a public apology to everyone whom I didn’t speak with last night at the pub. The demise of my printer fouled up three seperate projects all scheduled to be completed just before I left last night. That, plus half an hour looking for a parking space (which always puts me in a foul mood) made me Hel to be with. After such a terrific day, it was a real disappointment.

The good news, though, is that I won ten dollars on a lottery ticket. I feel smug, somehow.

Wiktory!

We have cable! Woo!

At 9.30 AM Saturday morning, the contractor showed up to flick the switch and give us wiring. I got to see a whole three minutes of ReBoot before I had to leave for an interview and class.

And, after all that angst, the universe had a grand old snicker at our expense by not showing Buffy on YTV Saturday night. The Powers That Be giveth, and The Powers That Be taketh away… (I hear last week’s Angel was pre-empted by the war, though, so that’s one less new episode I’ve missed.)

Spam!

Well! Useful spam at last:

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Yes! This is much more useful than more university degrees, webcam porn and enlarging sexual organs that I don’t personally possess!

Another moving update: as of this afternoon, kitchen mostly packed, books mostly packed. Thanks, guys. Fun and productive.

I missed orchestra tonight by a simple miscalculation: my husband had scheduled a box run over to the new apartment with Skippy. As the car cannot be in two places at once, and since we only realised this at 6.30 PM, there wasn’t time to try to find another lift out to the West Island. He loaded up the car and left while I began to pack the bedroom closet. He was back half an hour later. “Done already?” I said. “No,” he replied, “they turned the power off so the electricians could finish rewiring the building, and it hasn’t been turned back on yet so it’s pitch-black and we can’t see to carry boxes up the stairs. They’re still in the car.”

Drat. This means I missed the orchestra ensemble photo for nothing.

On Cats and Computers

Calloo, callay! I have a new monitor! Yes, hard on the heels of discussing the eventuality of my father purchasing a new computer, I visited a friend last night, mentioned the need to have a new eye exam and how monitors were bothering my vision, and walked away with a new monitor. (He had two. And he says he was planning to buy another one this week anyway.)

Ceri thinks that I’ve drafted my cats to write my novel while I sleep (little does she know that sleep is a rare luxury in my life these days). MLG posted this URL in a comment, and I just had to share it with you:

PawSense, the software utility that catproofs your computer.

From the web page:

When cats walk or climb on your keyboard, they can enter random commands and data, damage your files, and even crash your computer. This can happen whether you are near the computer or have suddenly been called away from it.

PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard.

Every time your computer boots up, PawSense will automatically start up in the background to watch over your computer system. Even while you use your other software, PawSense constantly monitors keyboard activity. PawSense analyzes keypress timings and combinations to distinguish cat typing from human typing. PawSense normally recognizes a cat on the keyboard within one or two pawsteps.

In my experience, one or two pawsteps have already done damage that will take at least one to three minutes to undo.

The most priceless bit was the warning screen they’ve developed, which announces CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED, locks down the system, and requires authorization to un-lock it so you can keep typing.

Yep. Good thing these people developed this software instead of, oh, I don’t know, using a keyboard shelf under their desk or something. Yes, indeedy. Where would we be without them? Overrun by illegible cat novels, that’s where.