Library Notes
April 17, 2003
By Pansy Hundley, Librarian.
A lady who shall remain nameless, but she knows who she is, came in the library yesterday, and was telling us something so funny, I must tell you. She’s like me, she has a nodding acquaintance with computers.
The other day she could not get a little icon to stay where she wanted it to be and where she kept putting it. When she tried it would disappear the first time she clicked a button.
She finally called her daughter and asked her how to do it. Daughter explained that you do this and push this and put it on the Desktop.
So, the wanna-be-computer operator tried everything, pushed this and that, tried to follow instructions and said little icon was still being elusive.
In disgust and desperation she finally called her daughter again, telling her she was still having the same problem. Daughter said "Do you see the desktop?" To which the disgusted computer-operator answered, "The only desktop I see is the one I’m leaning on!"
I could identify so closely with what she was saying and how she felt, I laughed and laughed with her, not at her, because I’ve almost been there.
Computer technology has some of the dumbest names and terms attached to it. When I first started hearing some of the terms, I was dumbfounded at some of it.
Now I ask you, what makes sense about floppy disks, fuzzy logic, surfing the net, mouse, desktop, nanny software, motherboard and on and on. And that doesn’t even cover half of it. We need to add another entirely different language, in addition to Spanish, French and such, and call it Computer Language. You already know a lot of it, if you’ve been on one of these lil’ darlins’ much at all.
One of those smart aleck operators can instruct you to do something like "Put it on the desktop" and you answer "Huh?" You are as likely to set a pan on top of a desk as punch some button to put it on the computer "desktop" that you can call up, with the right command and click on something more conveniently.
When the Martians land and hear two computer people talking, they’re going to turn and say to each other "These earth people talk worse gibberish than we do!"
But Thomas Perry does not talk gibberish, let me tell you, but talks good books. This is his latest one "Dead Aim." It does not have the Jane Whitefield character, but he is letting her rest from her labors for a little while.
"An unsuspecting man tries to help a young woman on the edge, and finds himself drawn into a lethal struggle with a deadly adversary – and then another, and another, and another.
Robert Mallon has lived for ten quiet years in affluent Santa Barbara, California, when an encounter on a beach with a mysterious young woman shatters his peaceful, carefully constructed life. Despite Mallon’s desperate attempts, he loses her, and the becomes obsessed with discovering why. He hires detective Lydia Marks to uncover the secrets of this stranger’s life, and what they learn propels them into a terrifying underworld of sinister secrets and deadly hatreds. Set against Mallon is the master hunter Parish, a man with an expert understanding of evil, who preys on rich people’s desire for dominance and revenge."