Are you human?

Two things I really dislike about Google blogging and similar sites. Firstly, the automatic fill-in on the tags. Sometimes I fail to notice that the tag has been changed from what I wrote to what it thinks I wanted to put in (on its past experience) – e.g. If I had a previous entry ‘Holiday Weather’ and then went to put in ‘Holiday’ it would automatically add the ‘weather’. If I notice it I can go back to edit and change it but only by backspace deleting – straightforward typing in ‘Holiday’ will always produce ‘Holiday weather. That’s all extra hassle. Even worse is its refusal to accept that I can make a mistake. So I typed in ‘SumMER WEther’ as a tag by mistake and when i went back to edit it every time I put in ‘Summer Weather’ it automatically changed it to SumMER WEther.’ In the end I just gave up trying to use that tag.

My second pet hate is those letters that one sometimes comes across to defeat computerised entries. You know, the sort that say ‘If you are a human fill in these letters’ –



So what letters are these. I had one very like this the other day and I had no idea whether it was sjhn; sjfin; sjhr; sjfir..... Knowing I was bound to get it wrong I copied it onto a piece of paper out of interest. When I typed in sjhn it produced another one for me so obviously it was not that! And this site didn’t even have the option to go to the trouble of switching on the sound and the speakers and getting a spoken version. Fortunately i got the second set of letters correct so it concluded I was not a machine – merely a stupid human!