Feeling Better

OK. Now I can tell the tale of my computer frustrations over the last week.

B&N Nook
My WiFi Nook stopped being able to connect with the B&N home computer. Lots of investigation in FAQ files and forum boards finally gave me the answer. (An e-mail to the tech services people didn't.) The problem, they said, was with my credit card. I needed to unregister my Nook and reregister it. Strangely, I did nothing to the credit card information, and now it works fine.

Akron Learning Management
My Akron students use a software program that puts my whole course in one place. Setting it up is a pain, but there's a convenient utility that moves one section's materials to another section. Problem? Only most of the material moved. And I didn't find out until students began having trouble. Of course, the IT guys did warn me last October in a one-line comment buried deeply within an FAQ file: it only looks like it worked, but if you don't do these eleven extra steps, it won't.

Ashland Anti-Virus
I've got material on an Akron server, so when I wanted my Ashland students to see it, I simply posted a link. It's a University server, and neither Norton nor McAfee anti-virus finds any problem. Trend Antivirus does though, and the only way I learned it was when my students couldn't read the files. And Trend only causes trouble when I (or my students) try those sites—never when IT people do.

MS Word
This one is probably my fault. A student wanted to copy and paste an Internet citation into a paper, so I told him that the best way was to find "Paste Special" and choose "Unformatted Text." It works that way in PowerPoint. It works that way in Word for Mac. It works that way in previous versions of Word for Windows. It even works that way in NeoOffice and Open Office. I hadn't counted on Microsoft Word's new, thrilling experience that takes your documents from good to great in less than five minutes. One thing they did to make it thrilling was to eliminate the "Paste Special" menu in favor of a fade-away menu that appears very briefly when you do an ordinary paste. "Good to great" only took thirty minutes of Internet searching and experimenting. I should have known that Microsoft never actually makes anything easier. My bad.

I'm better now. I have made a couple of vows:

• I'll totally avoid the new Word for Mac, and won't even use Word much any more. My nerves can't stand it.
• I'll actually drive to the Ashland campus and find a Windows machine to test out any links I post for their students. (My time isn't that valuable, anyhow.)
• And I wrote a very slick, sexy hack to avoid using that part of Akron's site altogether.
• The Nook? Still a weird piece of software, but I can work around that one too.