In the category "Think! It's not illegal yet", I offer this gem. I'm early for my haircut appointment and the waiting area is part of the main traffic area between two areas in the shop. A young man (late teens) is there with his mom, and is purchasing a coffee and donut for her, at her request. This necessitates the young fellow to traipse through the waiting area on his way to the coffee shop, stepping over my feet on his way. Seconds later, he's back to inform his mother what types of donuts are available. She makes a suggestion. He makes a third trek through the waiting area and navigates around where I'm sitting, in a quest to purchase the required donut. Apparently the preferred flavour was not one of the available options, and this necessitates another trip back to mom to inform her. On his fifth trip through the waiting area, I'm seriously wondering what independent decision-making skills this person will have when he branches out on his own at post-secondary or the workplace?
In the category of "open-minded creativity", I present this nominee. At a screenwriting session, a group of a dozen people are participating in an instructor-led session on idea generation. Responses to the question "Where do ideas come from?" generated a number of expected responses -- history, travel, life experiences -- the usual tangible regurgetation of plotlines. Recognizing my brain may not necessarily operate in a similar fastion to others, I offer "imagination" as a source -- recognizing the creative newness of ideas that may pop into one's mind at random intervals. Nope. Apparently not. According to this group, and supported by a smaller sub-group of 20-somethings who think a 4-year-old's story about Barbie using lipstick is creative genius, there is only a role for imagination when used as a tool to recreate a tangible storyline generated from external stimuli. Wow. I wonder what external stimuli created that blue dude in Avatar.
And finally, this has the potential to be a winner in multiple categories including "Technology Sucks", or "Crap that You'd Expect to be Reliable", or "How Many Laptops can I Crash". After years of a mututally beneficial relationship with my HP laptop, it finally surrendered to age and flashed the blue screen of death before gasping its last breath. The series of subsequent technological failures in recent months have made me mourn the loss of that workhorse. The succession workplan had a Lenovo ThinkPad step up to take over. That lasted six months before it became incapable of switching between applications and opted to freeze as a way of dealing with its overload issues. After our IT staff provide CPR, and promise a less stressful environment, it becomes a backup laptop with a guaranteed schedule of morning sleep-ins and afternoon naps.
Taking its place on the main stage is Lenovo ThinkPad the Sequel. Six weeks later, it decides it can't handle the pace, and mounts a slower reaction time to every user request in hopes of being assigned the same fate as its predecessor. After frustration with regular eight-minute start-ups, and consistent "not responding"' messages, The Sequel is relegated to a corner of my desk where it awaits an understudy role if required.
Enter Dell, the new upstart that promises to outshine all others before it. It's not without its quirks -- an offset keyboard with about 20% of wasted real estate that generates a sentence of gobbledygook every time you line up your hands directly in front of the monitor, and skewed key placement that results in launching the calculator on the excessively large number pad vs. hitting the delete key. But once we'd come to an understanding, most things seemed to be going well.... that is, until it started randomly moving the cursor to different locations in the application I was running. Before you suggest it might have been an unwanted grazing of the trackpad, let me assure you it wasn't. Not only have I been successfully using a trackpad for more than 15 years, after my first experience with this Dell, I set the sensitivity of the trackpad to "pound for action" mode. Besides, even grazing the trackpad in error could not result in Dell randomly choosing entire paragraphs to delete, or launching other applications when fingers were no where near the keyboard!
So, after Dell's possessed actions this morning, I rebooted it (does anyone else really think there should be a different definition for reBOOT?!), only to end up with a computer with skewed icons (some I have no idea where they've come from), and no mouse function. Back to the Lenovo understudy.
Things were going well with Lenovo -- I figuure the holiday had left it well-rested. That was until 20 minutes later when the blue screen of death appeared -- and with its gasping breath, was heard to exclaim something about a crash dump.
I'm reluctant to grab the back-up to the back-up in case things happen in threes! Of course, I was very reticent to use my iPad too, for those very reasons. I'm going to save this now and post.... I hope!
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