Voice recognition – the end
| Voice recognition – the end | |
25 March 2004
To cut a long story slightly shorter, the author managed to convince himself a chink in the anti-virus/security regime had allowed a virus on board. As unlikely as it appeared, given the daily av updates and the religiously-observed patching of Windows whenever Seattle dictated, three troubling tell-tale symptoms developed last Friday afternoon. First, the anti-virus software, despite numerous updates and restarts, persistently claimed it was out of date. Another worrying development after the first restart was when the voice recognition software alleged that the trial period was suddenly over. Earlier that day there had been 17 days still to go. The clincher for the author was when he couldn’t connect to the Windows Update site. Something was definitely amiss, so it was off then to the vendor’s site to download a couple of removal tools for the latest worms doing the rounds. Two hours later having run both tools the diagnosis was that neither the Polybot nor Beagle worms were present. This was a toughie. There were some virus-like symptoms, yet the ability to do a live update and download removal tools from the anti-virus vendor’s site indicated otherwise. It must therefore be the voice recognition software causing havoc, the author decided. The only answer was to uninstall it, even though this would instantly wipe out all the dedicated voice training put in over the last couple of weeks. You know what’s coming next…The vr software was scrubbed and the date problem was still there. Date problem?? Calendar? No, please, not that… It was. The author had, prior to lunch time, double clicked the time in the task bar and advanced the month to April to check the date of a meeting. Now, normally when you change a setting, or do anything remotely daring, Windows, like your mother, asks, “Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really, really sure?” Evidently, though, when you want to lose a whole month of your life and screw up your computer’s clock, that’s okay, no questions asked. It is, after all, only one of the lynchpins of the operating system by which our computers makes sense of the world. Remember all the hoo-ha about the Millennium bug? The upshot was the better part of four hours chasing my tail because my computer thought it was April 19 instead of March 19. I feel a stiff email to Mr Gates is in order. Bet it wouldn’t have happened with my Mac! * Monday’s visit to the fracture clinic confirmed the cast will come off in four weeks’ time. Yippee! | |