I got a new (refurbished, but close enough) laptop today. I had been ignoring the decline of my old one for months. Then one night last week I realized I was working, or trying to, on a machine with a dead battery, a power cord that only connected when it was draped just so over the left side of the screen, broken right shift, right arrow, and enter keys, a cursor that about once a week jumped randomly around the page, the inability to run iTunes, and a tendency to just hang there and think and think and think before it had an epiphany and did everything all at once so 20 windows opened, pop pop pop, and what the hell was I doing in the first place, and is there really a purpose to this life?
I spent most of tonight loading software, setting preferences, and playing around in Windows 7, which I'm happy to finally use. For one thing, I now have the ability to write in longhand with my penpad. I was even going to write a whole post that way, but while it read and predicted a lot of my scrawl admirably, it also kept barfing up words like "bed" for "yeah" and "sargasso" for I don't even know what.
Then, if you can believe it, it wouldn't let me write "fuck"; it was all "buck," "tuck," "luck," and I was all "NO I SAID FUCK!" and it was like "NOT SAD FORT;".
After about five minutes and lots of block printing, I finally got it to say "fuck." So it wasn't that the program refused to do it. It was as though it had wanted to think better of me.
I was going to post it because it was hilarious, but I unknowingly had the cursor in the URL field all that time, and that apparently is not an error you can recover from. All my laborious cussing disappeared forever. Luckily, I did grab a screenshot early in the process so you can see I am not making this up.
So Windows 7 is really nice! Although I was sad to see they made MS Paint fancier. Not fancy, but fancier.
Somehow that seems wrong to me, to have more brush choices in Paint, but what can you do in these modern times but hang on for the ride and try to keep up, right?