OK. That looks as if I’m fuming politely or have flipped but it’s the working characters I have on my laptop at the moment. No, the carriage return, a.k.a. “enter”, key doesn’t work, neither does the tab key. You can’t do much with that, the majority of my passwords can’t even be typed with that.
“So how are you typing this?” any kindly readers persisting with this blog will be asking. Courtesy of a ten Euro USB keyboard bought in Auchan (one of the hypermarket chains in France) yesterday a.m. But it’s a French layout keyboard so I have to avoid looking at the keys and it too has some nasty habits so I’m not sure if the problems with the laptop are just with the keys or with the keyboard controller.
How did it happen: completely my own fault. I was exhausted and not very happy with the campsite a couple of days back and finally settled down with a large glass of water and a coffee to catch up on Emails and the blog. In my tiredness I managed to knock 90% of the water over the laptop. I tried to dry it off quickly but should, I know, have switched it off immediately and dried it much more throughly. However, it seemed fine, I chose it partly as it was supposed to be near military in its robustness (an utterly implausible bit of advertising “puff” of course) and was also supposed to be student proof. Later it started misfiring as a typed and I realised I had a problem on my hands whihc I hoped would improve if I left it off and encouraged it to dry out. As it’s roasting heere I thought that would be easy but it travels pretty well wrapped up in waterproof panniers and it got worse over the first 24 hours and has only regained two keys in the last 48 hours.
OK. I’m admitting defeat on trying to keep up with work (I had only managed to answer key Emails) and I think most of the site, e.g. maps, days, advice, will have to stay as a project for my return but I’ll see if I can bodge things here.
I’m sure this is partly divine judgement on my rather defiant reply to Haroula’s recommendation of a smartphone. Oh, and that packed up completely for mobile data yesterday, not helping things as Iwas cycling pretty blind as as result. To be fair, when J and I had sorted out the fact that it’s registered in her name and got me in direct contact with Tesco, they fixed it in about five minutes. It still seems to be very capricious about uploading ‘photos by Dropbox, but that’s a different issue!
OK. None of this is about life or death and I cycle on getting older, wiser (perhaps) and probably fitter, by the day!
I really struggled with French keyboards when I visited France. Humbling experience.
Oh that had me barking out loud tonight. Thanks. Yes indeed. I’m also amused to cross the border and discover that the Spanish keyboard layout is actually much more similar to the UK English than is the French “AZERTY” one. (And the Spanish is presumably very similar to the US English one too, as I remember that one, most of the differences are in the position of things like the “@” sign). How do you type Japanese into a computer Gregory? I recently had a very brief work trip to Shanghai and was fascinated to watch the use of what seemed like an “English” keybooard was used to type one of the transliteration systems and characters flash up from which typist selected, at some speed. I’m guessing that there’s a similar system for the pictogram laden Japanese script, what about the other two. (I’m being too lazy even to cheat and use Wikipedia remind myself of the correct names.)