I’ve been using the Web since the early ’90s, but I am sometimes still amazed at what’s out there and how easy it can be to find.
Tonight, we were watching last night’s Enterprise and heard Captain Archer telling the Andorians that the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe had lost his nose in a duel about an equation. I’d never known that and wondered if the writers had just made that up (certainly I never read anything like that in any of Isaac Asimov’s books, which is probably where I learned how to spell Tycho’s last name). So after the show, I sat down at my trusty browser and typed three words into the Google search bar:
The first result from Google was one of Cecil Adams’s The Straight Dope columns, titled Did astronomer Tycho Brahe really have a silver nose?, which answered the question in the affirmative (though I don’t think Cecil got the equation quite right). Elapsed time from sitting down to having the answer: maybe 10 seconds.
What part of “Off” doesn’t Microsoft understand?
I’m still fairly happy with XP, but there are some truly weird things in the UI. I was ready to turn off my computer for the evening, so I clicked the “Start” bar, selected “Turn Off Computer”, waited for the popup asking me what I really wanted to do to appear, and hit Enter. The computer went into “Suspend” mode.
Silly me. I would have thought that the default action when you ask to “Turn Off Computer” would be to turn the computer off, but it isn’t.
At least Clippy doesn’t pop up to help.