Computing

That’s a fascinating trick in Word Perfect, Tamar, undiscovered by us in all these years – but I’m pretty sure Jenny has answered the question of what my husband did to make his text disappear – if you hit Ctrl A (or a) in Word, you Select All. If you next hit an alphanumeric key, it all goes.

With all my grumbling about the Good Old Days, it’s nice to have a solid, specific example of how they were better. Word Perfect would have said “Delete block? Y/N” before proceeding.

I’ve set Auto Save on my husband’s computer to five minutes – but I think I’ll change it back to ten, because I don’t know where the saved file is to be found and I am still having a lot of trouble with the file structure in Windows 8. If there’s a crash or a power failure, Auto Save should produce its latest effort in a dialogue box when you start again, as Word does. But what about an inadvertent deletion? In that case, you need to move fast, before the blank document is itself Auto Saved.

Knitlass, I was glad to hear of your computer sufferings – and deeply sympathetic, as well. My husband believes that he is uniquely afflicted by my ignorance and stupidity, and that if we had a Man In to teach us what to do, all would go swimmingly. We did in fact have a useful session with James and Alistair over the summer – Tools > Zoom is a particularly good one, to increase the on-screen visibility without altering the font size. But I don't think there's an all-purpose easy answer.

Life

Archie seemed in somewhat low spirits. Our niece (his first cousin once removed) and I got him successfully installed in his new room yesterday afternoon. His new house master is what we used to call in the 1950’s, dishy.

I am keen to get Archie on the electoral register so that he can cast my vote (in effect) in the referendum next year. The housemaster didn’t know about such things and I’m not even sure he knew what I meant by, The Referendum (he has just arrived from a school in middle England). But I spent some time on the Scottish Electoral Register website just now, and it doesn’t say anything about schoolboys being disqualified because they really live in Athens. I will press ahead with this.

Knitting

My sister’s husband – they’re now safely back in CT, alas – sent me this link to an article by Alison Lurie on the New Yorker blog, called “The Sweater Curse”. It is extracted from a forthcoming book called “Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting”. We’ll have to look out for that one.

Not much got done on the knitting front here yesterday, but that skein has been successfully wound, despite the temptation to cut the yarn and throw away the remainder, once I had wound enough to finish Relax2.

I found this on Zite this morning and am totally in love. There’s a kit.