Computer Abuse

One new feature of Vista I’ve discovered is that it apparently responds to threats.
Even when I was still using XP I’d made the upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. Overall, it worked fine, addressing most of the issues that plagued IE 6, such as some Web pages not rendering correctly.
However, the combination of IE 7 and Vista seemed to introduce new problems with many of the sites I visit regularly. Some of them wouldn’t render correctly, while others would take a very long time to load, while still others wouldn’t load at all.
Those same sites loaded effortlessly on Munin, which is running IE 7 on XP, so clearly it was a Vista-specific issue.
Hoping that enough people would complain about such problems to inspire MS to release a patch, I resolved in the meantime to download Firefox to see if that would do a better job of it.
Everything worked fine in Firefox, so I contemplated making the switch.
Vista must have realized what was going on, though, and decided that it had better straighten up and fly right if it was going to keep me from making the permanent switch, so IE 7 just spontaneously started working properly.
I’ve long been a proponent of operating systems that respond to threats and to physical violence. I call it the domestic abuse approach to interface design.
Error message pops up? Simply smack the computer upside the monitor, and the message goes away and the computer does what it was supposed to be doing in the first place…if it knows what’s good for it.
So this development in Vista is clearly a step in the right direction. I like the idea of my browser doing anything it can to woo me back once I begin to stray. I want my browser to behave like some aging, overweight housefrau who drops the pounds and takes up pole-dancing and starts offering threesomes to keep her husband home in the evenings because she just can’t face life on her own. That’s how I want my computer OS and applications to be: desperate to please me because they don’t want me to abandon them or hit them again.
I’m kidding, of course, though I do often wish that my computer could feel pain, but the coincidental timing of IE working out whatever bug it needed to was pretty entertaining. At a guess, if it isn’t just a coincidence, I’d say that maybe the system switched over to a different rendering engine once I installed Firefox. Does that happen?
Whatever, I still find it kind of funny.
And for those of you wondering why I haven’t just switched over to Firefox anyway, the answer is that I don’t care.
What I mean is, what you might see as compelling reasons to make the switch from the “evil” browser over to the “good” browser, I see as a bunch of ideological nonsense.
IE is already on the computer. IE works. Therefore, I have no reason to switch.
That being said, when IE stopped working, I was willing to make the switch because then I actually had a compelling reason.
Now that IE is working properly, though, I’ll switch back, as I do have some complaints about Firefox that become compelling reasons not to use it when IE is working.
If you use Firefox, good for you; just don’t bother telling me why I should.
Same goes for your favorite OS (though if you do have one that responds to getting physically and emotionally abused, let me know).
It’s rather wintry out there today. Not sure if I’m going to head all the way down to Reston for that training. It’s not especially vital training, and it’s not a whole lot of OT.
Still, it is some OT, so I guess I’ll have to think about it.