Please bear with me: I'm in the middle of acquainting myself with a new machine and a new operating system. The consequence of this will be to drag this scratch pad into a realm dangerously close to that of a real 'blog (as I may have said before, referring to Weblogs as 'blogs is about as archaic as referring to telephones as 'phones, especially if one talks about mobile 'phones. Hence I shall persist in apostrophising the word in order to irritate anyone that would find this habit irritating), with a discussion of the novelty of having a computer that actually does more or less what it is supposed to do without spending a week paging out to disk. At least this record has yet to degenerate into the mode of "today I got up and ate some toast" weblogs or worse yet, the weblogs which record every intimate detail of someone's dating and sex life, thus putting off any right thinking person from ever dating the blogger in question.

Anyway, mmm, computers. There should be a word to describe the process of hunting through menus in order to find the option that is causing the irritating behaviour that wasn't present in the previous version of the piece of software and turning it off. OK, that's a fairly complicated concept, but it's one I encounter every time I use a new machine. You know, the dull process of disabling those pain in the arse microsoft assistants that pop up in most office applications, switching off the feature that hides the menu options that you haven't used and so on. Can anyone see the flaw in the "thinking" behind that last example? I'm hunting around for some feature that I remember is somewhere in the program, but I can't find it because I haven't used it before? It's almost a catch-22 sitatuation. And am I the only person who finds that whole idea incredibly disorienting at the best of times? When I'm looking for an option and some of them are hidden, I can't begin to scan the menu until I've hovered long enough to see whether it's one of the hidden ones. It doesn't help that one never knows whether the option is classified under File, Edit, Options, Tool or Window.

I felt strangely empowered the other day when I managed to switch off that option that changes what it is you've highlighted. You know, you carefully click midway through a complex mathematical expression that you've typed into powerpoint for the presentation that you are preparing for a talk at the Institute for Damned Clever Stuff in Princeton, in order to make it sub-sup-super-sub-script, or something, and as you drag to the start of the section you want to change, suddenly the selection jumps over the whole thing. So you try again, in the vain hope that if you repeat it enough times then Windows will realise that you do know what you are doing, in the same way that if you type it enough times, the damn thing will realise that you do mean to write the word "teh" (which means, of course, the aspirant sound made by an exasperated computer user), but it's no use, and eventually you have to switch from mouse to keyboard in order to highlight the section using the undocumented keyboard shortcut (OK, it may actually be documented, but honestly, who reads Microsoft documentation anyway?), and eventually managed to get the right bit highlighted, and then switch back to mouse to carry on with the next bit. Anyway, I finally managed to find a check box somewhere deep within the powerpoint dialogues to switch this 'feature' off, and I then spent a pleasant half an hour or so delightedly sorting out my presentation the way I really wanted it to look and feeling like this was a real break through until I realised that this was the way the damn thing ought to work by default. Grrr. teh.