Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22833 – 994
Here’s the haps:
I got this new journal from Amazon the other day because I really liked the cover. It was one of those things that just jumped right off the page and said, “BUY ME!”
I worked for a big-name insurance company in the late nineteen-nineties. One day, they began to issue us new “personal” computers in exchange for our mainframe terminals. Among many new and useful features they also had a mildly interesting research feature called Internet Explorer. A year or so later they wound up having to sell them off and get stronger ones that could use both the mainframe and the PC components so I got to buy one of the old ones. My son put up the two hundred dollars to buy the brand new operating system we needed to actually make it work, Windows 95. It came on fifteen or sixteen 3.5 floppy disks. After a lot of work and trial and error, we wound up with internet capability using a dial-up connection and Internet Explorer.
One of the issues I had with this new tool was that if you were looking something up but also wanted to look something else up you either had to bookmark where you were and then go back or open another instance of the browser program which really used your limited resources. As new browser companies came along like Netscape Navigator, AOL, Mozilla, and others it was still kind of the same story. You could open a different browser at the same time if you had the connection and RAM for it.
Then sometime in the late nineties or early oughts, someone finally invented “tabbed browsing.” This was the thing for me! I could save a bunch of sites that I wanted to read every day and right-click and open them all up. I open the news pages I want to read in this manner. I open a copious amount of blogs in this manner as well as comics websites. I try to visit people’s blogs “in person” rather than in the WordPress reader but the reader is useful as well. Anyway, I just right-click a folder, say, Blogs 01, and then select “open all (16).” Invariably over the last twenty years, I have gotten:
It’s a similar message on other browsers as well. For the last couple of years, I have been using Chrome, Firefox, and Edge for the largest part with a smattering of others occasionally. When I used to spend more time putzing with making websites I would use a couple others just to see how they looked. It seems to me that at some point over the years that one of them allowed you to change a setting to decide what this number should be but I can’t find it anymore. I’m sure there are a couple of Registry hacks you could do, too, if you’re up to it. And really, that’s not the point that I have in mind.
My point is, if computers are so smart, they ought to be able to learn this innate behavior of mine. After twenty years of doing the exact same thing, the computers ought to go, “Oh. It’s him again. Just open all the tabs.” “But if we give in to the demands of the multi-tabbists, the multi-tabbists win! I’ll ask nicely.” “He opened them all anyway, didn’t he?”
But they never figure me out. Not that it really matters. I just click the little button, although, if I’m getting my first cup of coffee, I right-click to open it but forget the message will pop up and when I come to sit back down the error message is still there, waiting for me to click it. Oh, well. You’d think after twenty years I would know better.
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