Ghost in the machine

Hope y'all had a fine summer solstice, and now the days will be getting shorter again.  Tempus fugit, eh?

Even though I've been avoiding the news I must admit that the hearings that are going on are quite entertaining.  Tomorrow should be a doozy; I read that the British guy who was filming the transition period is going to testify.  Should be fun.

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So, instead of watching the news I've been going back through the Institute archives and reading about the hot topics of days gone by.  I've got most of the stuff in a huge text file so I can easily find stuff; just do a keyword search and see what comes up.

There is a lot of stuff to peruse and the quality of writing is such that I'm jumping in and out of rabbit holes.  A lot of food for thought and I'm in no hurry to draw any conclusions, I'm enjoying the process too much.

I will say this, though: after the last five years I can safely conclude that the two party system doesn't work anymore.

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There have been some strange computer problems on my end, probably hardware related but I can't track it down.  There is a ghost in my machine that has taken over the keyboard but it comes and goes.  It's like a demon is pressing keys without my input; I'll watch an open Notepad window fill up with thousands of characters, like a period, tilde, bracket, or a letter.  Hundreds of them, and then a pause, and then hundreds more.  Sometimes the characters change, sometimes they don't.  It comes and goes and is not predictable and would be entertaining if it wasn't so frustrating.  I'll be entering some text and then the field fills up with equal signs and keeps going.  The only way out of it is to smack the keys in the lower left of the keyboard, like the control, alt, function, shift, and maybe the spacebar.  That usually gets it to stop.  I suspect that it's simply a keyboard issue, maybe some gunk in there somewhere.

I've run a bunch of programs that check for viruses, spyware, and malware and I think I'm fine on that front.  The most puzzling thing is that it doesn't happen on a regular basis.  The machine can go for days with no problems and then it's hours of headaches, like today.  I was doing a text search and then dozens of new Notepad windows started opening up.  WTF?, I ask myself.  And just now the cursor started going down the page, as if someone kept hitting the return key.  A few judicious smacks and I'm back in business.

The computer is a laptop, and that's the keyboard that is giving me the flux and requires the occasional attitude adjustment.  I'm typing on a nice, big Microsoft keyboard that's plugged into a USB port, real keys with plenty of travel and a dream to type on.  Not as good as some of the old IBM keyboards but whole lots better than the crappy keyboards you see today.  Okay, I'm done venting.

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It's nearly time for Uncle Ken's sojourn downstate for Fourth of July festivities, isn't it?  I know he keeps in contact with his old (and getting older, ha, ha) chums from his University days and Covid has screwed things up lately.  Maybe this year things will be back on track.