Computers Just Know When to Break

I'm just trying to get the last part of "the other book" finished at the moment. So of course this would be a good time for my word processor to break. Suddenly Word 2007 wouldn't start. When it did run, after a wait for ages, it just sat there grinning at me. If I tried to do anything it froze up again.

Of course the first question I could ask is "How does it know I'm under pressure here?", but I long ago stopped worrying about this. Computer systems just know. Many years ago, when I was writing lots of presentations, my copy of Powerpoint developed the ability to crash whenever I thought "I really need to save now". It did this three times in a row.

I've had so much experience of things failing just when it would be most inconvenient that I'm now convinced that computers just know when to put the boot in.

After some serious digging around, and a near re-install, I found out the cause of my Word problem. I use a network printer at work which I have set as the default printer (which is kind of sensible, since it is where I do most of my printing). This means that Word looks for it when it starts up. Of course the printer can't be found on my network at home, so Word just sulks for ten minutes and then gives up the ghost.

At tip. If you have the same problem, just change the default printer on your PC to one that is always there (for example the document writer) and the problem goes away.

I was feeling very smug this morning when I figured that out and fixed it, and reckoned that I'd got one up on the universe.

Then my monitor abruptly stopped working....

Time machine

For ages the clock in my car has been eight minutes fast. I quite liked this as it seemed to me that I always arrived earlier than I thought. However, this week I decided this was silly and so I set it to the exact time. Snag is that I still seem to arrive at the same time that the clock says, making me late.. Most confusing.

It is as if the car clock is some kind of absolute time which can't be changed. I'm going to set it to an hour fast and see if I arrive at work before I left home.

Microsoft Feels Your Pain

I first saw this some time ago. I'm very pleased to find that it has made it onto YouTube:

Live Writer Goes Live

It looks like Live Writer (the thing that I'm using to write this blog) has finally gone, er, live. It was in beta for ages, and the "Help About" screen in my version still says Beta, but now it looks much more like a finished product. All the nice features are still there, along with the plugin structure (which seems to have sprouted a bunch of extra plugins - but nothing as nice as my Flickr Inkifier of course).

If you write blogs and want a lovely place to work, you should take a look here:

http://get.live.com/writer/overview

Easy Money

I won 10p yesterday. I had a bet in a lecture that:

i=0;

j = ++i;

- would set j to 1. (it does, because the increment is done before the assignment). Someone didn't agree, a bet was made. Sample code was written and executed. And I won. I didn't keep the money. I handed it back with a magnanimous "Get yourself a drink on me" which shows how out of touch I am...

I went into today's C# lecture with hopes for similar financial gain, but it was not to be. I think the word may be out that I am some kind of hustler. I really like teaching the first year course. Every year we seem to get a great batch of students who ask sensible questions and enjoy learning how to program. It is rather nice at the moment because we are looking at things where there are no "right" answers, just ones which fit the context better than others. So we can debate these issues. Great fun.