pumpkinstrokemarrow

The user interface continues to appeal and it is fast. However, that is not the end of the story.

Have yet to get the hang of the address box. Not quite sure how clever it is at interpreting or resolving what you type in the address box on the second line of the screen. While quite often it has a good stab at finding what it is you are after, quite often it comes up with a screen saying 'oops' (they do seem to love this sort of computer chattiness in the US) and you have to do a bit more work to get what you want.

Print and save options do not offer quite all or work in quite the same way that IE did. In particular, not as clever at guessing what folder you want to save something in as IE, although that might get better as it gets to know me better. Plus there are some odd interactions with same, which fires up when you are not expecting it. Maybe this is a consequence of leaving MS to manage the printers.

The back button seems to be less helpful than that of IE. OK, so it is difficult for a dumb computer to work out exactly what you mean by give me the last screen, but Chrome seems to be quite good at getting stuck on blogs (run by Google). But maybe the bloggers can tweak their pages so that back does not work. Doesn't do anything for me though. Blogs which do not support back in a sensible way do not get bookmarked. Although, to be fair, I have not worked out how to do that yet. Easy enough in IE after 10 years of the thing.

On sign in, if, you have in some past life inadvertantly clicked the 'remember me' box, Chrome is even more helpful that IE. It puts username and password straight up, without bothering for you to click or suggest the first letter of the user name from a drop down list. A bit of an irritation for me, having chickened out of the registry edit which it seems is needed to turn remembering off. So some burglar would not have too much difficulty getting into my email. Not sure how much damage could be done, but I do worry about such things.

But there is some good news. If you should have occasion to ring the helpful people at Syon Park, their telephone, while it is keeping you waiting, just does a double bleep from time to time to tell you that it is still there. It does not play music at you, tasteful or otherwise. I cannot think of any other site whose telephone has such good manners.

Unlike the Aviva telephone. I had occasion to phone them the other day, masquerading as someone else, in an entirely benign way. So I spent some minutes - or possibly just seconds -carefully responding to menus of the 'if you want to talk to a person, key 32' variety and listening to various dreadful music (my telephone not being clever enough to let me put the receiver down and bleep when the telephone at the other end has something useful to say). Having gone through a lot of this, and entered my policy number and various other details into the telephone keypad, I did finally get through to a person who immediately moved into the policy number and various other details script. But I have just told all that to your computer. Well that may be, but the computer often seems to lose them when it transfers your call to me. And what about the address change which I told Norwich Union about before you swallowed them up. Well their computer seems to be quite good at losing things too. The case continues.

I close with a development arising from the title of my last post. I have been using the word 'cornucopeia' for many years, more or less in the correct sense. Yesterday, my spelling being a bit hit and miss, I went so far as to check the spelling with Mr G. before posting and all seemed to be well. But today, idly turning the pages of the OCD (bought second-hand somewhere behind Wimbledon station), I learn that the word is all to do with a Greek nymph called Amalthea who doubled as a she-goat and whose horns were full of good things. Left ambrosia, right fruit and vegetables. Hence 'cornu' for horn and 'copia' for full. Both Latin words which I knew at some point. So the proper spelling is 'cornucopia' which Mr G. seems to like much better than the other one, even to the point of offering a Wikipedia entry which confirms, in its essentials, the OCD entry. The failure to spell does not bother me greatly, but not noticing that the word translates as horn full does. What is the point of all those years on the Latin if not even that sort of stuff survives?