Maybe I ought to feel melancholy in some way. I deleted a Yahoo discussion group I've owned for around fifteen years. The people who were subscribed to it were a loyal group, but there were only occasional posts in the end. I started getting spam that indicated the security of Yahoo Groups has been breeched, and so I put it to bed. Vayo con dios, Coin of the Realm.
I deleted the discussion list, but kept the name by creating a new blog by the same name here on blogger.com before it got taken by somebody else. How selfish of me. This title seems indicative of my wishy-washy attitude toward specificity. I intended for it to indicate that group members could write about anything that crossed their mind. I made everybody a moderator. There was nothing to rail about. It was too fair. Too liberal. Too irresponsible, I suppose.
I'm still subscribed to the Thomas group. I went on a No Mail status, so I don't receive any posts from the group. I can go to the group's home site and read the correspondence if I so choose, but it's the sa-me people saying the sa-me thing they've always said. It's all they know, and for the most part what they write about is what other people have written. They have opinions about other people's opinions. Who needs that?
The e-mail posts I get from the AppleScript group are specific to that programming language and while the members seem polite, it's not a place where I'd go for entertainment. I just had my first real conversation there about how I've not been able to turn off the automatic correcting feature of the spell-checker.
This is a new feature in the spell-checker of the upgrade to the operating system called Snow Leopard. It works across all or most of the Apple programs including the browser including FireFox. That's why I looked in System Preferences to turn it off, and I did, but the auto correcting feature didn't stop "correcting". It turns out that I had to turn it off in each application locally.
I like this feature when it corrects the typos I make. Sometime I misspell words, but mostly the "correcting" the spell-checker fixes most of the time is when my fingers hit the adjacent key rather than my not spelling a word right. When that happens, what the auto corrector replaces my intended term or expression with can be totally wrong, even though it also has a feature that allows me to go back to my original intent, but if I don't catch that it's the wrong word, the results can be weird.
The remaining problem I'm having can probably be fixed too, but currently I don't know the source of the problem. I don't know what Apple calls the feature in order to find it and turn it off.
The problem for me is when I highlight some sentence or paragraph I wanna completely remove and start all over. This editing practice is one of the basic reasons that moved me to switch from using typewriters to write, and using a computer.
With this new system, if I don't like something I've written and move to highlight and delete it, even before I finish highlighting the accursed section a popup dialog shows up with a menu as if I had right-clicked. I have to deal with that dialog box before I can move on. The menu doesn't offer the Delete option. I can only choose to Cut, which puts what's highlighted into the clipboard, and I might already have something in the clipboard I intend to use. What a drag.
Upgrading to Snow Leopard was the stupidest thing I've done since I switched back to Macs. It's very irritating, but I'm not the only one. The Apple Support pages are full of people who also regret doing it. I was too impulsive and eager for my own good. Maybe Apple will straighten it out with 6.2.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
