User-seductive Computing
User-seductive Computing In my continuing saga of trying to get the office Mac to write cheques for me, I have been getting a crash course (as it were) it in basic Mac usage. One of yesterday's discoveries is that floppies can only be ejected from a drive under software control (normally by dragging the floppy's icon into the trash can icon; talk about yer intuitive graphical user interfaces), so if MacOS is distracted when you put the floppy in the drive in the first place, and doesn't know it's there, you can't easily get it back out. The fix (as I'm told is often true for Macs) involves rebooting the machine: depressing the mouse button while the Mac reboots causes it to spit out any floppies that may be lodged in its drives. This little-known but indispensible fact is apparently buried deep in the Mac manuals. (There is a trick involving inserting a paper clip that's supposed to work, but it didn't for us.) Anyway, I'm beginning to see what some people like about Macs: if you have a big colour display and a sound chip, it's like having a video game with the coin box hot-wired to let you play for free (we have one of those in the office too; I still prefer it to the Mac in general, but Gyruss is quite single-minded and just will *not* write cheques for me). So I was whaling away, exploring the Mac and racking up points, and found myself deep in a maze of twisty little menus (well, panels is probably more accurate) and landed in one called "Preferences", since I wanted to customise something. The panel was fairly typical: boxes to check off, buttons to click on, and it seemed to be the sort of stuff I was interested in; then I noticed that in the middle of the panel was the caption "Orientation" and a set of three boxes marked "Straight", "Bi" and "Lesbian/Gay". Well, I knew the Mac's reputation for being virus-prone and user-friendly, so I quickly backed out of that panel; I do not want to explore the Mac's full multi-media capabilities, thanks.