One of those "fast" days...

[alexpgp]

Usually, items of The Routine Stuff™ that arrive on Friday morning aren't very urgent, as the end client tends to take long weekends. Today, however, one item turned out to be quite urgent, but I learned this only after having arrived at the fitness center for another kilometer of walking in their pool.

Fortunately, I happened to have a tablet with me, so I sat down and—using my telephone to display the source text of the letter that had been deemed urgent—I tapped out a translation on the tablet.

As it turned out, my efforts were repeatedly undone by whatever correction/selection/prediction algorithm it was that was running the tablet's keyboard. Some of the simplest text (like "G." as a person's initials) simply refused to stay simple (the machine kept changing "G." to "Google."). I finally got wise to what was going on, but only after sending off a version of the letter that was filled with the kind of crap that you'd expect to see in a hastily composed text message.

I finally got things straight, and sent off a good translation (albeit sans footer, though that is not a show-stopper).

My subsequent walk went swimmingly, so to speak.

Cheers...

Comments

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

Autocorrect is evil.

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

I regularly curse (figuratively speaking) my iPad for its set of idiosyncracies of behavior. For the longest time I attributed all the double Rs to my presumably shaky hands. But recently it has been laying down fifteen or more Es. I knew there wa no way I was THAT shaky. I guess the iPad has some kind of palsy--not me.

As far as predictive text, I finally turned it off on my phone. I decided it took less time to correct whatever small mistakes in spelling I personally made than to take the time required to go back and rewrite all its "suggestions" for words it thought I meant. No regrets. However, sometimes the suggestions do provide a small source of entertainment. For example, it regularly wanted to correct my son Tobin's name to "Toxin."