Here is a screenshot from my Lenovo ThinkPad computer. The computer was running a self-test using the incorporated Lenovo utility, and I tried to abort this test by exiting that utility. And then I got this dialog box: Read it carefully: If you continue, all the tasks … will be canceled. Are you sure? And … Read more
Had to take a flight out of Newark airport on the morning after the move from daylight saving to winter time. The preceding evening I took good care to set my alarm clock and wristwatch back the required hour, and took off to the airport in the morning. And when I got there, I was … Read more
One gripe I have with the help systems in many consumer software applications: they’re written with the assumption that we users are all clueless newbies. Take the Microsoft Office tools: they have many advanced and powerful capabilities; it is both interesting and useful to know what exactly they do. But the Help system only gives … Read more
I sent a friend an email with an attached Zip file. It bounced, with a message from “System Administrator” that read Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients. Subject: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The following recipient(s) could not be reached: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx … 552 5.7.0 review our attachment guidelines. u14sm9443132gvf.20 I figured maybe the … Read more
I needed hard copy of a paragraph from a long text document, so I opened it in my trusty old editor (Programmer’s File Editor by Alan Phillips, a powerful freeware editor I use in lieu of the pitifully rudimentary Windows Notepad). I selected the paragraph and opened the Print dialog, recalling that there was an … Read more
Working in Adobe Photoshop CS4, and I just bumped into a menu item I needed that is grayed out. This does happen: Photoshop has a huge wealth of commands and capabilities, and many depend on the context – for example there are things you can only do in RGB color mode and not in Indexed … Read more
My account on a social networking group froze me out, so I wrote their support an email explaining that I can’t log in, with details of how this came about. I got a wonderful reply indeed: Please follow the following steps: 1. Log in to your account … Wonderful! I replied “You’re joking, right?” and … Read more
Used to be, at the beginning of every (face to face) meeting ten minutes would be wasted on getting the slide projector going. Today many meetings are virtual, but the same time is still wasted while people try to log into the shared meeting workspace… A case in point: I’ve just participated in a meeting … Read more
I was checking some French using Google translator, and discovered that – contrary to my French teacher’s insistence back in high school – “La langue Francaise” means “English language”! Of course one doesn’t expect perfection from machine translation, but this was different than the usual silly mistakes: a translation program ought to know the meaning … Read more
Here then is my sleek Nokia E71, and I really like it overall. But nobody’s perfect, right?… Take the calendar application that came on this handheld. It has a number of shortcomings (more on these later) and one amusing quirk: most of the time when you click the calendar button it displays an empty screen … Read more
