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Recently, I’ve had a certain amount of frustration in my digital life in that interfacing with Jaws, the screen reading software which allows me to write novels, email, this blog and surf the Webhas been difficult to manage. Ever since I loaded Office 2007 onto my XP system, Word 2003 has disappeared, forcing me to deal with the new ribbon interface which is decidedly blind-hostile. It was clearly designed by some arrogant prick at Microsoft who doesn’t care that millions of people were working comfortably with the classic menues interface and don’t want to migrate to some other wild goose scheme. Happily, someone has written an add on which enables you to use the classic menues with Office 2007. This will provide an acceptable stopgap measure until my new Dell comes in the post sometime this week.
Besides the problem with menues, I was finding that Jaws would simply refuse to echo menues properly. I’ve bitched about this for about three weeks when it suddenly occurred to me today that I have both JFW 5.1 and JFW 9 on my system. When I bailed out of the earlier version and lit up Jaws 9, I had no more problems –at least, no more of THAT problem.
Finally, I applied for a loan from the Washington Assistive Technology Fundso that I could secure the Dell without paying outrageous interest after nine months have elapsed. The very kind and gracious Andrea there helped me with the application process and gave me some hope that the loan might well go through, even though my credit history is, to put it nicely, a little bit on the wobbly side. This morning, she called with the delightful news that I had been approved for the loan and that we just have to complete some paperwork to make it final.
This is crazy wonderful news for my productivity. My Dell, which is about four or five years old, is acting more like it’s nine or ten years old. It’s kludgy and slow and I think the file system is zonked. It’ll be nice to keep around as a spare, and it’s served me well in my writing life. But it’ll be nice to break in a new computer that doesn’t act like it has to CONTEMPLATE every command before executing it. A computer should do what you tell it to do as soon as you tell it to do it. If I wanted a Zen master, I’d learn Japanese.
Oh yeah, and feral cats are in the title because my reality was starting to seem like rounding up a herd of feral cats. But today, it’s seeming more like marshalling a little squad of handsome German shepards.
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