She has given up, for the time being, on contacting her South Australian friend. Instead she wanted to send an e-mail to our mutual friends up here on the Sunshine Coast who have just moved into a retirement village due to physical infirmities. First she wanted their e-mail address. I explaiend that it was in her address book in Microsoft Mail. Next, "How do I find the address book?" I opened Mail for her, selected Compose a New Message, clicked on the 'To' icon and showed her the Address Book. "I didn't know you could do that." she said. Note I had shown her this just the day before and it was new then! I selected our friends' e-mail address and asked Margaret to enter a subject and then left her in the text area to write her message. I then went back to snoozing.
Twenty minutes later Margaret wheeled in and said "The computer's broke and I have lost everything." I went back to the study to find that the bloody Sims were back. Margaret told me that they had just appeared from nowhere and had wiped out the mail. I am beginning to think that she believes the game has some real physical presence. I killed, sorry wishful thinking, closed down the Sims and found a multitude of other windows open. I closed each in turn until we had a nice clear desk top. I restarted mail and luckily it had auto-saved a draft of Margaret's e-mail. I corrected s couple of typing errors and left Margaret to finish.
Twenty minutes or so later she had lost the mail again and was in Gimp looking at some photos. Again she hadn't selected it and it had just appeared. I think that what happens is that she accidentally closes mail and just clicks on any icon to try and start it again. If it doesn't appear she doesn't close the new window but just selects another and so on. She had four different Firefox (web browser) windows open, Gimp and Open Office Writer open. I closed them all down and got her back to her e-mail which was now three paragraphs long and actually quite chatty and sensible. I advised her to just type in a closing statement and would make sure that it got sent.
She was still at her computer an hour later when I took Louis for his afternoon walk. When I got back Margaret was lying down and told me her computer had gone wrong again. Note that this is now over three hours after she began to write the e-mail. I sorted out the mess, the Sims were back and there were a few other windows to close before I could give her a clear go at finishing the e-mail. Now she had done something quite clever. What ever you typed after the last word started on a new line then jumped back to it's correct place on entering a space. She had inserted a long string of invisible characters which meant the any new character in front of it would see that it was longer that the line length and wrap it the start of a new line. After the next space it would realize that the new, short word would fit on the old line and un-wrap it. I have no idea what the invisible character is, I suppose it could just be a space. I will investigate further.
While this is all quite amusing it has a worrying side. Margaret stopped reading books several weeks ago. She use to read a couple of books a week. As her cataracts made reading more difficult she graduated to large print books but still understood and enjoyed what she read. Last month her ophthalmologist thought that her reading difficulties were due to lack of cognition and poor attention span, not the cataract in her right eye. He advised special reading glasses instead of the graduated focus lenses she uses now as they have a really tiny reading zone which means that Margaret can't concentrate on large ares of text. We have an appointment with her optometrist in a couple of weeks to get reading glasses. I hope they work as these computer problems appear to stem from poor concentration followed by arbitary actions has she really has no idea how her computer works these days. While never a computer expert, she actually did all her course work on my old CPM based computer twenty four years ago when she went back to the University of South Australia to get her Arts Diploma in Drama. She was the only student using a computer for assignments etc in 1986. This shows the level of ability she had as Windows was just being released at the time and she was just using a command line based word processor and a stand-alone spell checker.
I am hoping for another quite day.
Margaret Graduating in 1988 with out daughter. Helen
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