Touchpad Travails [13 Jan 2005|12:28am] [ mood | blah ] [ music | Marc Cohn - Walking in Memphis ] The dawn of artificial intelligence beating the shit out of humans is not far off. Computers will take over the world, I can vouch for that, I can even bet my laptop – not that it’ll be of much use then. First it was the computer viruses which spread by simulating their attack the same way diseases spread in organisms. Even then the one thing you were sure of was computers never went 'mental'. Nut jobs were a uniquely human phenomenon. Not any more. Lately an incident has made me realize that these artificial intelligent beings can be extremely touchy. The touchpad of my Dell laptop has developed a split personality disorder, which, if you ask me, is a uniquely human mess-up. I’d not have thought that a computer would be able to duplicate that, not in a thousand years. But the truth is, it didn’t take my laptop even a day, such are the hidden powers of artificial intelligence. The touchpad splits it's time between two personalities – it has a sense of fairness(expected), so both personalities last about equal time each whenever I use the it. It starts off the day by behaving like a reincarnated ouija board. When I drag the cursor to go to a link on the website that I am particularly interested in (these days it is Brad and Jen, what else), it automatically goes to all the other links which it thinks I should have gone to instead of the one I wanted to go in the first place. I strongly suspect it is an adolescent spirit with a poltergeist streak because, the otherwise benign touchpad has suddenly become extremely mischievous. It closes browser tabs before I am about to hit the submit button in some form after painstakingly filling out all the required fields. It erases whole paragraphs with a cursor nowhere to be seen, in short, I am going bald. Once it had its fill of Personality No.1, the touchpad takes on Personality No.2, which is that of a trade unionist. Seems like too much touching and caressing by a socialist as me has 'rubbed off' on the touchpad. After an hour of intense touching, dragging and cajoling the touchpad decides it has enough, it puts on the attire of an Union worker. It becomes sluggish, it’ll move an inch in the wrong direction after five minutes of frantic fingering (by me on the touchpad). Full fledged non-cooperation movement (or non-movement as is the case) will start about an hour after the sluggishness appears and this means that my trade unionist touchpad has decided a break time is of order and within minutes it will shut itself off (freeze) to go and take a rest or a nap or coffee or whatever it is the touchpads do when they take a break. The moral of the story: All touchpads are not created equal. If you haven’t encountered the above problem, thank your God for not making your touch pad as intelligent as mine or better still for keeping you a cave man who still use a mouse(they say some people use keyboards, are they not extinct yet?). Keep your computer happy by feeding it the right amount of crumbs and coffee whenever you two share a meal at your desk and keep things smiley. 24 comments|post comment

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