Alright! Now Blogger has a new automatic (read: whether you like it or not!) spell check function that decides for you when it thinks you’re spelling things wrong, and it “corrects” them for you! Unfortunately for people like me, who type very rapidly, but with only two fingers looking at the keyboard, these changes occur without our knowledge, so when we proofread our piece, it can look nothing like we expected. All kinds of words are magically changed into new, different words than we intended due to typos or simple limitations in the spell-check dictionary, or even because of gremlins, I suppose.
This is why I always liked to use MS Word to write in (The new version of MS Word also seems to do this now), and then to cut and paste the piece into the blog. Oh, but when you upgrade to Mac OS “Lion”, you’ll roar with disapproval that it no longer will recognize your old MS Word files, and that until you get a new MS Office, you can’t open your old files! (Awesome!) This is why the typewriter was so great! Sure, you had to do it right the first time, and you couldn’t edit it later, but at least you could always use the same device later, and it always would work the same way, and you only had to get a ribbon once in a while. And fifty years later, it would still work the same way!
Such is not the case with computer stuff. I can’t even open a Photoshop file I made 8 years ago in Photoshop anymore! And I upgraded all along! That’s a gyp! What if a priceless work of art was created by a dead artist in 2000, and we didn’t recognize until today that it was there? Too bad: you should have resurrected them to redo it every few years, because computers are just a scam to bilk you out of thousands of more dollars every year for nothing! Keep up, or forever lose your work! It’s extortion, I tells ya’: extortion! (But Blogger isn’t extorting anyone: I want to make this very clear. Blogger is giving us for free an annoying feature I hate without charging us for it: and that’s just polite. But how about letting us turn it off if we don’t want it? Or do we have to pay for a plug-in to let us do that? Actually, that’s a great business model: provide free software that self-updates automatically, and then, once everyone has used it and has tons of crucial files created with it {and that only open in it!}, then start adding annoying features that make it miserable to use, and then charge for plug-ins to opt out of these automatic features! It’s a can’t-miss business plan to chisel us out of millions!)
The least they could do is let any file created in whatever program be open-able in that program forever, no matter what version they’re on by then! It’s only fair! What about Tom Hanks in Castaway? And what about Buck Rogers? Can’t they edit their old manuscripts? I mean, really! It’s like software engineers hate fictional characters or something!
BTW: This is an old post I decided not to post awhile ago because I thought maybe I was the only one who had an issue with this. But here’s a slideshow article about some awkward texts altered in this way:
