Friday 8 April 2016

Minor frustrations.

 Computers do strange things sometimes. Now I am not a complete novice as regards computers. It was almost an integral part of my job and I must say I was quite adept at producing tables and columns and various layouts and so on. However, from time to time technology leaves me somewhat flabbergasted. 

For various reasons our home computer thinks it only belongs to Phil: someone has to be named and have passwords and the like and he is more willing than I am to do all the messing around involved. And all the electronic bits of gadgetry are linked together without this causing a problem as a rule. And then odd things happen such as some programme demanding a specific password, which Phil remembers easily because he works on a kind of code that he understands completely (because he invented it) but which I have to work to remember. 

The other day he set up some kind of extra security thing - computer obsessives always do stuff like that - and, as a result, when I went to post my blog, blogger popped up with a version compatible with the Arab Emirates. Really! Lots of very confusing Arabic script looked very weird alongside my blog. So we had to back track so that I got the UK compatible version instead. But why Arabic? For a brief moment I wondered if I had been hacked in some odd way. 

And then there's the inconsistency of social media like Facebook. Out and about I often snap a possibly interesting or amusing photo on my phone and post it off to Facebook. Up pops a little message: "Your photo will be posted". And then, hours later, I find that the one I posted hours ago in the morning has not appeared - some never do - while the one I posted half an hour ago or even five minutes ago has already appeared. Facebook clearly lies! Of course, if I repost then the photo appears twice over! How frustrating! 

Here's another little computer thing that annoys me: if I want to make a comment on my friend Colin's blog, the system asks me to prove I am not a robot. So I tick the little box and up pops a series of photos. I am then asked to select all the pictures of mountains, for example. Quite what this proves, I am not sure. Could I not be a very clever robot? 

No doubt computer geeks will tell me that all of this is perfectly normal!

1 comment:

  1. If you click on the wrong pictures for the robot check it gets upset and you have to keep repeating everything. So instead of cutting you off it keeps asking you to try again because it knows you are not a robot and craves your human attention.

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