Miscellania

The purpose of a computer is to assist you in losing your mind.

This morning, I noticed that this laptop was starting to jump the cursor around for no apparent reason. Well, I thought, I know there is something to do with the touchpad setting that will affect that, let me go look. And though I in-and-outed several times, there was no touchpad setting to be found under Mouse. Five minutes ago, I mentioned to my wife how perplexed I was, and she said 'Well, on mine, its under Mouse', to which I replied 'No, see, I went right -- what the hell????' Because, you see, there it was, as it had been all along. Except when it hadn't.

After all of that, I still don't understand how 'gestures', 'pointer gestures', and 'edge motion' are supposed to work. I understand the concept, but not the execution. I'll give you a GESTURE !

Last night, I spent some time on finances. I wish that I had not done that. I learned two distressing things. One, that last month we spent about a third more than I thought - all defensible, but still - and two, that according to Excel's Goal Seek took, if I wanted to reach zero dollars as the very last entry for assets - our spreadsheet goes out to 2041, which is not as far out as it seemed when I first built the forecast spreadsheet, then we need to spend about a quarter less per month, forever, than I thought we normally did. Now, this can also be changed by making more than I show for income from interest and dividends (which is currently too high anyway; thank you, Ben Bernanke), but as thats not likely, we need to proceed on the assumption that we should spend less. This is not comforting to me. I know that I am not alone in this observation, but -- man!

This is when I start to think Gee, maybe I ought to go back to work. Um, yeah. That'll be simple to do.

(Things aren't desperate. I mean, we're talking ten, fifteen years out. I'm just really surprised.)