January 8, 2013
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Hidden Key Codes
Okay.
That was weird.
I was writing a blog, happily into it, writing away, and then the whole blog just vanished. I had left the following legend: r y.
I’m going to assume I hit one of those magic keystrokes. So somewhere in some basement is lurking the nerd who created a keystroke which erases everything you’ve written.
Did I ask for that?
I did not.
I mean, what’s wrong with the ‘delete’ key? It’s always worked for me.
I do remember back in the day, in the long ago, hoary time when buying a computer meant typing pages and pages of nonsense e-x-a-c-t-l-y right, not a bit of nonsense misplaced or you start all over again, to create what was mysteriously called a ‘program’. I remember it well because none of my programs ever ran. Well. Once I made an address list that worked. Couldn’t do it again if my life depended on it.
Years passed. Machines became bigger, faster, and more programs, pre-written, came with them. Now the new computer owner needs to know almost nothing about programming to make his computer do what he wants it to do.
But those secret keystrokes still lie buried in the keyboard.
The only one I EVER knew was ctrl-alt-delete.
When I had XP, it never made any difference.
It wasn’t until we sped into the future with VISTA that these odd key combinations began working their ancient magic on new, virgin machines, and now I have Windows 7 which is just on fire with the damned things. They work in the text with Xanga. They work in the text with Word, which I swear to God never happened before. You can delete your entire unsaved text by hitting one key, or a combination of keys which are really not all that hard to hit by accident. You can change the format of your page. You can move margins, erase spacing settings…and you have no idea how you did that.
Which makes it nearly impossible to undo.
Anyway. You’ll never get to read the blog I almost wrote because it’s floating somewhere out in cyberheaven.
The contractors are almost finished with the neighbor’s roof, which can’t happen soon enough because I am so tired of dogs bursting through the dog door in high alarm I’m ready to throttle them both.
THEY ARE THE SAME TWO ROOFERS ON THE SAME DAMNED ROOF DOING EXACTLY THE SAME THING THEY’VE BEEN DOING SINCE NEW YEAR’S DAY. How many times can we suddenly realize there are ROOFERS ON THE ROOF!! ROOFERS ON THE ROOF!!
I closed the door.
Riley is napping.
Annie is lying on the floor burping woofs.
There are roofers on the roof.
We can never let down our guard.
Comments (3)
It has been my observation that the control key was diobolically placed next to the shift key making it incredibly easy to hit it and who knows what other key and do damage to your project.
A week ago I spent the better part of the day working on
a report that was due the next. Hit the “save”…. killed it
completely. Nothing left of it. I could hear laughter some where I’m sure
of it. Damn little excel-hating demons. Ugh…
*~matthew~*
@bleuzeus - Joni, my computer loving friend in Boston, says you should hit ctrl+Z–which is ‘undo’ in keyboard stroking. I know you’ll remember that for all of eternity now, as I will, as we mourning the loss of all we’ve done and accidentally erased in the past.