RTFM

When I got my first computer some 30 years ago (a NewBrain with a whopping 32k of memory) one of the things people used to say when one got stuck was RTFM -- Read The F*** Manual (where "f" was a variable to which you could assign a word of your choosing).

In other words, when all else fails, read the instructions.

Now, however, there are no instructions to read.

We recently installed Microsoft Office 2010.

It is useful for reading those .docx files people keep sending me.

But Microsoft office has no manual. There are no instuctions to read.

Recently a document opened with a fat blue stripe down the right-hand side. I wanted to get rid of it. When I hovered my cursor over it, it said "markup area". So I typed "markup area" into the help file to find out what it is, and how to get rid of it. Nothing, zero, zilch.

My daughter has been raving about Microsoft OneNote, that comes with MS Office. It sounded interesting, so I had a look at it. It has a blurb that tells you how easy it is to use. You just dump all your information into it. That's a bit like telling you to toss all your stuff into an abandoned well and cover it up. It's easy to put it in, but not to get it out again.

I browsed through the computer books in a bookshop the other day.

There was not one on how to use Microsoft OneNote. There were books on MS Office on offer, ranging in price from expensive to exorbitant. Only the exorbitant ones mentioned OneNote on the cover, and I couldn't look inside to see how many pages they devoted to it because the whole thing was wrapped in plastic.

But there were whole books on how to use Facebook and Twitter.

Back in the 80s we bought computer books to learn how to use computers and programs. But now you can only get manuals for web sites.

I wondered why anyone would need a manual for a web site, when you can't get a manual for a program. Then I saw this:

This applicaticon will be able to:

• Read Tweets from your timeline.
• See who you follow, and follow new people.
• Update your profile.
• Post Tweets for you.

That was from Mashable. All I wanted to do was vote for something, once, yet in order to do that I had to let them do all that. I had to allow them to update my profile -- so hey, if someone at Mashable wants to update my profile to say that I'm an international money launderer, wanted in sixteen principalities and native states, I must let them do it? Not a chance.

There are two buttons - Save and Cancel. I click Cancel -- but no, they won't let me do that before I've filled in my e-mail and password. Eventually I entered a bogus username and eight asterisks for my password (Ha! Those password crackers will never guess that!). Then I could click cancel and depart.

So perhaps one does need a manual to understand web sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Only problem is they keep changing them, so the book is probably out of date before you've bought it.

For weeks Facebook has been telling me that I can no longer notify people about my blog posts in my "Notes", but I will still be able to do it on my "Wall" but when I want to share something that someone else has written by putting it on my "Wall" it tells me it has been posted to my "Profile". So are Walls, Profiles and Notes all the same thing?

Perhaps I really do need to RTFM.

Meanwhile, instead of OneNote, I'll continue to use askSam, which I've been using for the last 20 years, and I still haven't managed to exhaust its capabilities.

Parents keep child’s gender under wraps - Yahoo! News

If gender is the social construction of sex, isn't this child too young to have a gender yet?

Parents keep child’s gender under wraps - Yahoo! News:

When many couples have a baby, they send out an email to family and friends that fills them in on the key details: name, gender, birth weight, that sort of thing. (You know the drill: 'Both Mom and little Ethan are doing great!')

But the email sent recently by Kathy Witterick and David Stocker of Toronto, Canada to announce the birth of their baby, Storm, was missing one important piece of information. 'We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now--a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...),' it said.

That's right. They're not saying whether Storm is a boy or a girl.

Is the use of "sex" and "gender" in this article an instance of what Fowler calls "elegant variation"? Or have the words become completely interchangeable? Or is it just that journalists nowadays don't know what the words mean.

I get mildly annoyed when forms ask for my gender, and offer the alternatives of "Male" and "Female".

"Male" is not a gender; male is a SEX.

Male and female are sexes.
The genders are masculine, feminine and neuter.

Too many toolbars

I wish software marketers would learn that if there is one thing that most computer users don't need, it is yet another tool bar.

Yet today I got yet another semi-spam message advising me of a new "must have" toolbar. Do they really think I am desperate to look at a screen full of tool bars, most of them with links to the same search engines, and the same other useless stuff?

Worst of all are the ones that install their toolbars along with their programs, without asking if you want it. And then they don't go away. Firefox asks me if I want to uninstall add-ons that I want and use, but on the junk ones that I'd love to get rid of the "uninstall" option is usually greyed out, and one can just disable it or enable it. And I keep getting notes advising me of updates to the toolbars that I don't want and can't uninstall.

One of the problems with too many toolbars is that some web sites (often those of the people who automatically install unwanted tookbars) have pop-up windows that demand a response, but you can't see what response is needed because the buttons for responding are hidden below the bottom of the screen, and you can't scroll down the window to see them, and you can't move the window up above the numerous toolbars.

Some virus writer is going to make a killing one day by writing a program that claims to be able to remove unwanted toolbars, just like a lot of the anti-spam programs that actually transmit viruses.

That's my pet peeve of the day. I feel better now.