ack!
May 27, 2008
computer troubles abounded today, especially concerning email and image upload. In the first place, the wireless internet was entirely switched off this morning and then, when it was turned on, was so swamped as to be utterly unusuable. That was okay, though, as there are several computer work stations scattered about the conference. However, at these workstations the keyboard looks like this:
It's almost the same, but not quite. Evidently, I rarely look at the keyboard when I type because I ended up attempting to go to "zzz;,qil;u,ich;edu" instead of "www.mail.umich.edu" several times. By the time I figured out what was going on I had to go to the first session of the day.
Also, i think the connection was swamped most of the day as I had a very hard time uploading anything. It's now about 5:30 here and the connection is finally usable for uploading things, such as the photo of the screwy keyboard that was essential for this post.
Foreign keyboards can be a real headache. Mexican keyboards completely baffled my attempts at email access in that country because, if I remember correctly, they don't have the caret symbol anywhere, and I was thus unable to even enter my password.
I had a quick look at the wikipedia entry on the AZERTY keyboard used by French speaking countries. It strikes me as funny that certain high-frequency letters have been switched to more convenient locations for French speakers, while the QWERTY layout was carefully designed for inefficiency in the first place! Seems they'd be better off throwing out QWERTY, that old fashioned throw back to jamming typewriters, and start from the DVORAK layout or something uniquely French.
Posted by: Alison Hatt | May 27, 2008 at 05:17 PM