I had to white-knuckle it to school, it is just appalling what the police let people get away with in this town. A county that enforced the dangerous driving laws against tailgating would make a fortune, but nobody will do it because that driving practice (by and large) has a distinct ethnicity in Florida. If there were two Cubans on the road, one would be tailgating. And a Florida cop would sit there and watch it happening.
We are covering, at lightning speed, the various built-in features of Windows that diagnose the computer and peripherals. I now know that all kinds of software exists to fix broken computers, but I do not have a clue how to use them. Only that they can be used, or so I am told. So far we have only gone through most of the drop down lists one by one, and looked at the options and settings. I still have no idea whether any of the information that these programs display is good or bad. There were some interesting parts once we got on the Internet because several people in the room know where all the good free sites are.
[Author’s note: during this period I had no Internet access at home. There were good reasons for this. I had also had only WebTV for the previous few years, which served all my purposes. The Internet has become totally commercialized and I am not certain what kind of businesses will be the winners.]
I see there is e-mail from Julie, Marion and Wallace but no way to print it at class. Also, the instructor is looking for volunteers to direct parking at a concert in a couple of weeks, in return for two tickets. It is the vocalist from Bad Company so the Space Hippie leaped at the opportunity. Make that double leap, because I am the one that will be directing the traffic on April 16, 2005.
A good point was tossed around during this class. Nobody says it is a bad idea that computer manuals now come on CD-ROMs. The downside is when the manufacturers stop printing manuals altogether. That would force people who never needed or never wanted a computer to have to get one, a bad thing indeed. To save the $5 or whatever the wholesale cost of an instruction sheet is these days, the factory will make somebody spend thousands of dollars to get a computer and learn to use it on the internet to get something that should be free. Then along come the bloodsuckers who start a Manuals ‘R’ Us and gouge you even more. (Does anyone recall my $40 Sony manual? The one where they charged me $1 per photocopied page and when I got home, 26 of the pages were in French.)
