Yesterday, the evil computer gremlin struck again. I was happily plinking away writing immortal prose and sorting photos when this insidiously wicked monster struck. My screen suddenly enlarged and began floating all over the place. The entire desktop screen was unstable. Just moving a thumb across the thumbpad caused the screen to dance vigorously in all directions. So I began searching. I clicked on everything I could find to click and found nothing. I appealed for help on my blog. I learned before that asking the Mac store got me nothing but rebuffed so I wasn't about to go there. Then on page 347 of David Pogue's massive manual Mac OSX Leopard: The Missing Manual I found a likely culprit--the vision impaired options dialogue box. That's got to be it, thought I. I turned off the Zoom option on the option list for this evil site, turned on my computer again, and behold! The screen remained normal size, locked into place, and behaved itself nicely.
Since I am a computer idiot, finding this cure was no less than spectacular. Pogue's crystal-clear computer manuals are a godsend. They are all titled "The Missing Manual" because Mac, for all of its engineering prowess and brilliance, writes skimpy manuals at the grade school level. All it took was about seven hours of hit-and-miss diagnostics to solve this dilemma. And how, may I ask, did the Zoom on the hearing impaired dialogue box get turned on? I've never looked at this site in my life. What evil was lurking in my computer's innards that signaled to this box "Turn on the zoom. That'll fix this computer idiot for a few hours."
Of course, every time I have a crisis like this, I swear I'll never turn the blasted thing on again. I'll never make another blog entry again. I'll never raise my blood pressure again from trying 10,000 options before stumbling on the cure. Instead, I'll go clean out the garage. I'll assemble another book shelf to accommodate my year's surplus books stacked in piles all over the house. I'll sort out my closet and donate some of my 10 dozen polo shirts to charity, a task my wife has been bugging me about for approximately 20 years. At least once a week. I'll clean up the week's newspapers strewn about in various stages of completed reading that remain in creatively and strategically located areas around the living room and kitchen. I like that word: "strategic." Politicians use it a lot. They think they always need to have a "strategy", which is shorthand for saying they can't see their nose in front of their face. I'll sort out my den. I'll see what's in the box I hauled up to SLC six months ago from St. George that I have not needed to examine during this intervening time. I'll repent of any possibility of improper language and rude behavior.
On the other hand, I think I'll stay glued to the computer for just a little while longer and see what happens. Maybe the computer gods will be kind to me for a while longer. I hope. Anything looks better than cleaning out the garage. Believe me. But my intentions were briefly good ones.
