Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Aaahhh! New Keyboard!

I haven't been posting lately mostly because of my keyboard. I know, it sounds like a lame excuse, but really, my keyboard was driving me nuts. I can't say too much, of course, because my dear husband is the IT specialist around here and he really was doing his best.

Joe is the pastor of four churches and during Lent things get kind of wild for him. My keyboard suddenly stopped working about the the same time as Ash Wednesday rolled around. He picked up what they had a Wal-mart. This particular computer that we currently have only uses some sort of special attachment for the keyboard. Now this shows how much I don't know. I think he called it a universal connection.

But anyway, we probably have 10 keyboards in our basement on the storage shelves. But, alas, none of them work with this computer. So he want into Wal-mart and found this funky new-fangled thing that doesn't use cords to hook up to the computer. It has a receiver type thing that hooks up, but then the mouse and the keyboard are cordless and transmit signals to the little doohickey that is attached to the computer. I guess the idea is to eliminate one of the cords.

But what a worthless piece of technology. At first we just assumed that it was having some sort of trouble working with our computer since, of course, we use linux. Another geek thing. Basically means that in order to use anything that comes ready to use, Joe, in fact, needs to have time to do all kinds of research to get the linux tweeks to make it work. In defense of linux, it is a much more secure OS and compared to our one Window machine, our multiple linux machines hardly ever crash. I guess that means something, too.

Monday Joe got sick of the keyboard, too. Really, I think he had been sick of it, just had no time to figure it out. But for whatever reason, he finally had the time to get the linux "cheats" for this particular keyboard/ mouse/ receiver combo. Even so, the thing still didn't work. It's like the keys only sporadically connect with what they are supposed to connect with.

But, to make a long story short (oops, too late) we got a new keyboard in town yesterday. Yeah! Now I can type without correcting every other word for spelling errors when it really was just the dumb keyboard. It either skipped letters all together or periodically would spontaneously add six of a given letter. Then add to that the shift key that only worked occasionally. "Caps locked" worked, so at least at the beginning of a sentence I could get caps if I remembered to use "caps lock" instead of shift. aND THEN i HAD TO REMEMBER TO TURN IT OFF AGAIN. But the things like parenteses and the @ symbol in e-mail addresses were totally inaccessible.

Oh, I guess it's a long story again. Sorry. But hopefully I will have time to sit down and write all the wonderful, spell-binding things I've been thinking about. I know you can't wait.

Right?

Anyone there?

Hello? hello?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm here and appreciating your blog. Corella