Rick's b.log - entry 2008/06/29

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FYI! Last read at 05:21 on 2024/11/24.

My Geek Score

On Wednesday I am having an assessment to see how my computer skills measure up. The problem is I'm a self-taught geek and my little RSA IBT2 certificate doesn't seem to correspond to anything French. I think my various GCSEs are the same level as a Brévet (BEP), but who knows?

I was last tested back around 1997ish (by a girl called Emily Jane Ewens - what a nice name) and I ran into the problem that her test software was a clone of Word, but an incomplete clone. So to write:
   This is a word in italics and this is a word in bold.
I was expected to:
   This is a word in [grab mouse, click I button]italics[click I button again]   and this is a word in[grab mouse, click B button]bold[click B button].
How ass-backwards! So much better to do:
   This is a word in [^I]italics[^I] and this is a word in [^B]bold[^B].
Only the test software didn't do keyboard shortcuts. Duh!

I also used a program (Mavis Beacon?) to measure my typing. I can type at about 40wpm which isn't bad for a mostly-two-fingered typist.
Now couple this with the slight hiccup that it is all going to be in French plus the fact that I'll be using the horrid horrid AZERTY keyboard which I just find to be so counterintuitive...

And in a little more detail:

It just seems so anti-Internet generation. There's even a key on the upper far left (the ` key on a British keyboard) whose function appears to be only to output a '²' - like how often is that ever needed?!?
I'm writing this with an AZERTY keyboard to get myself more familiar with it for my test, but as soon as I've taken the test, a British keyboard is going back onto this machine. I mean, I could cope if it was simply rearranging the letters, I have a Spanish keyboard somewhere... but to bury some commonly-used geeky characters in Alt combinations, and to require you to Shift for numbers (or use the numeric keypad, something I rarely do as I remember the days before PCs had such luxuries!), it's all a great big headache!

Anyway - I am guessing my score will be lower than it ought to be, but hopefully not too bad. The test is apparently going to last for around three hours (!), so it ought to be pretty thorough! I'd better take my dictionary. ☺

As you can imagine, I have a number of soucis (soo-see-z) or worries. I'll let you know how it goes.

Hey-hey-for the Pond Chicken!

We had a moorhen (tranlates to be a "pond chicken" in French, how cute is that?) sitting on her nest in our pond. A bad storm came and the pond level rose, what with the field drains and such. As the level settled down, there was no sign of pond chicken nor the nest.
About a month later (yesterday evening) we saw the bird walking along the edge of the pond, beak held up high, with four fuzzy little chicks hopping around behind her.
I don't know how she managed it, but "yay!".

Mo' maïze

Walked over to the old meadow earlier. The wheat field is quite badly polluted by bindweed, whoops! There was a soggy old meadow area that has never been farmed as long as we've been here. Surrounded on three sides by proper old hedgerows, it is an area about the size of an old-style field (i.e. what was reasonable to work in a day before mass mechanisation).
Now? Turned, flattened, stripped of all life and sown to corn.

Maïze, by the way, is not said as mayz in French, the accent over the 'i' splits the sounds so it is ma-ee-ss (ending with an 'ss' sound, not a 'z'). It is the same thing with the perfum, and "trendy" Brits that call their daughter "Anaïs" and say anayz. Uh-uh, it's a-na-ee-ss!

No daily B.LOG?

I know some people write a running account of their lives in their blogs. Sorry. I'm not that interesting. Last night I read through RadioTimes (that we bought earlier in town) and made up a chart for the week using my TeleGuide software. I missed Dr. Who (will catch it today maybe?) and instead watched some stuff that I don't really remember, then "Pteradactyl" on Zone Horror, a daft film 'cos they were running from killer dino birds and they kept running out into open spaces and wondering why they got eaten, well duh!!!
I had pasta for dinner (again!).
Do you really want to know all that crap?!? ☺

Today's word...

Today's word is consternation (con-stir-nay-shun); which means alarm (as in the emotion), anxiety, confusion, dread, fright, shock. It isn't just 'confused', it is scary-confused, like if you came home to find your front door broken and the lights on, you'd be in something of a state of consternation. You may even be discombobulated!

Your comments:

jgh, 7th August 2016, 20:04

Yes, I was stuck in front of a piece of computer literacy test software back in about 1999, and everything that was natural to do, Ctrl-Save, Ctrl-Bold, Ctrl-Copy, Ctrl-Paste, Shift-Cursor-select, it refused to acknowledge.

See the rest of HeyRick :-)