[Previous entry: "Jambo, Jumbo!"] [Cliffs - Home] [Next entry: "English Bob"]

08/29/2003: "Heal Thyself"

Doctor Big, heroine of "Doctor Big vs The Mathematicians" (click to view), just bought a new Toshiba Pentium 4 laptop, and it bit her on the thumb. What? Yes, on the thumb. I'll tell you what I mean. If, in her professional capacity, she were removing a fat, green, freshly shelled pea from the nostril of a distraught child - stranger things have happened - and she allowed a temporarily unused and forgotten thumb to wander, unnoticed, into that child's mouth, what would happen? Click more.. to find out.

Best case scenario, she would gag the child, much to the chagrin of the bystanding and handwringing parents; worst-case, the little bastard would bite her, much the same as her laptop has. You mean she stuffed a pea up her laptop's...? No, her thumb makes her send animated e-mails, like POP3 stuttering. Each e-mail (frame?) contains part of the text, and you have to fan through them to get the drift of what she's saying.

You see, Doctor Big doesn't do anything by halves, so I wasn't particularly surprised when I received four e-mails from her, each expressing part of the same continuing thought. I do, however, remember thinking that she might consider cutting back on the caffeine.

The next time it happened there were only three e-mails, but in one of them she alluded to having difficulties with her e-mail client. I offered to help, if I could, with configuration issues, but the stuttering, quite frankly, had me baffled, though I tried to sound confident. Then, while I breaking ice out of the ice cube trays, it hit me.

She is typing away and allows a temporarily unused and forgotten thumb to drag, unnoticed, over the touch pad and wham, that screaming Pentium 4 processor executes gobs of code, finally gives up trying to figure out what she wants to do, and falls through into a kind of heads-up mode, tucking her e-mail away in the to-be-sent file, leaving Doctor Big none the wiser about what just happened. She tries again and again and again, but with seemingly random timing, her e-mails disappear. Baffled, she tries to start over each time, but in her frustration - this box cost her a lot of dough - and not knowing whether the preceding e-mail has been sent, will ever be sent, or even what happened to it, much less what she typed last before the mysterious poof, she begins to babble/type, in a stream of consciousness, which, if you fan through the resulting text quickly enough, turns out to be surprisingly coherent. Poor little thing.

Long story short, it ain't the Japanese, or Bill gates, or even that fat pea, it's just a temporarily unused and forgotten thumb allowed to wander, unnoticed...

Note to readers:
Readers with Internet Explorer can use these links to "Add to Favorites." The rest of you are on your own. Remember, Cliffs Notes dot Info.
Click here to add this page to your favorites!
Click here to add this site to your favorites!

If you've enjoyed Cliff's Notes, click here to find lots more blogs. This link opens in a new window in case you realize you were better off here.
Last but not least, if anything interesting comes to mind about the above post that you would like to share, blurt it out in the form below. If you enter a "homepage," your "name," as you entered it, will become a link to your site. E-mail addresses, if entered, may be harvested by spammers.

Replies: 1 Comment

The thumb is mighter than the CPU.

little ginny said @ 09/11/2003 08:20 PM CST