Man, don’t you just love computers. When they work. Perhaps you have noticed a slight change in format of the blog. And perhaps you have had trouble writing comments, because I have had trouble responding to comments for about the last week or so. My tech support person, former student Brant, and I just spent a very long, frustrating afternoon trying to rectify whatever devious glitch was causing me grief when trying to add a comment. I feel like I am single-handedly financing his next new car purchase or trip to the Caribbean with all my distress calls when the computer misbehaves or I just have a computer question in general. And I have no problem with that; I’ll pay him whatever it takes rather than be faced with fixing it myself, which of course means it would never get fixed. All I contribute is much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, all to no avail, while he patiently tries to explain the problem to me as he moves the cursor and types with nanosecond speed, and talks even faster. About all I really do is keep Peaches out of his way as she paces back and forth between him and the monitor as he works to sort out the problem.
I couldn’t begin to explain what’s going on, but it has something to do with the Blogger site making an update which creates havoc with my blog as we used to know it. Google is on my bad list right now since it is their glorious idea to change things that were fine just the way they were. We tried and were finally successful at sending them one of those error messages about the problem and discovered that others were in fact having some of the same trouble. But does Google care? I think not. Google is supposed to be the best place to work right now, according to an article I saw in the Sunday paper (“Google named best place to work in America.” Mike Swift, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, January 22, 2012; E4), so maybe they are so caught up in having fun with their perks on the job that they can’t be bothered with minor complaints from someone from an obscure little town in Texas with an equally unimportant little blog, and may get around to correcting the problem one of these days.
So, here’s the deal. The new format may stay or go back to the original look in the future; either way it is still The Bright Lights of Muleshoe. You will now have to click on the word comments if you want to say something. And I should be able to add my own comments about your comments. Assuming of course, the computer gods agree to let it happen.
And let me call to your attention something I just discovered that might be helpful when searching for particular blog posts. Look in the first line right above the blog and at the top left of the line you will see a white search box that has a little magnifying glass in the right hand corner. Type in a topic or key word, hit enter, and stories will appear that match the key words. You may have to scroll down through the stories shown to find the one you might want to read, but I thought it might narrow your search a little.
If I could find it, I would risk copyright laws to share with you an old Non Sequitur by Wiley comic strip that pretty much sums up my feelings about the Internet and modern technology. The cartoon went something like this: the setting is Hell; the main character, looking suspiciously like the Devil, is sitting in front of what looks like a giant computer terminal with wires running everywhere and screens lined up across the board; a new occupant is watching from a short distance, and the caption reads, “That explains a lot,” or something to that effect.
As I have lamented before, the Devil is in the details.
