Three quick things

[jadesfire]

#1. No, I hadn't forgotten rustydog's birthday, but I had to wait for her to open her present before sharing it with everyone else. It's now up here. "Tears of the Gods". Torchwood fic, Jack and Hugh, 1300 words. Just something gentle and sweet.

#2. For laughs, try Torture: most bizarre and terrible by thingswithwings. And yes, it's SGA, and yes, it's PG-rated and very funny. I promise. You can probably actually read it without knowing SGA, although it's funnier if you do.

#3. Would anyone have any idea how I've managed to swap round my special characters in Word? When I press shift+2, I get an @, and when I press shift+comma I get ". And lord only knows where the ~ went... Oddly, LJ seems to have them all where they belong, but it's seriously hampering my writing - I never knew I wrote so much dialogue! Help!

In other news, the SGA fic broke 5k (woo hoo!) and continues on target, so I'm happy. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you panic hard enough...

Comments

[greyias.livejournal.com]

#1 and #2 will have to wait for me to get home (or at least figure out my latest powerpoint strange text mystery)

#3 - Oh my... what special characters are you looking for?

<-- knows next to nil about Word, but is insanely curious and wanting to distract herself from headaches in PowerPoint

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Heh. Mostly I just wanted the " and the @ back to where they were! Which I achieved by the highly technical and complex method of turning the computer off and on again :)

Hope the powerpoint mystery resolved itself!

[greyias.livejournal.com]

The " and @ should remain in their proper places! (If it was just happening in Word... it could be one of the AutoReplace functions got confused? I dunno, strangeness.)

The PowerPoint mystery was resolved. Turned out the person who made it put his BRIGHT purple shadow on the text, not using the text shadow feature, but the object shadow feature. It has been removed now, so the audience does not develop a headache from looking at it like I did.

And dang it! I totally forgot to check out #2 last night!

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Nah, I just managed to turn my keyboard into an American one by mistake. Would have been fine for you, but it baffled me :)

Glad that you will not be blinding your audience. That's generally considered to be a good thing.

[unfeathered]

#3. That happens to me sometimes too. Usually it's fine again if I shut down and restart my computer. I believe it's something to do with turning it into an American keyboard? Do you get a dollar sign instead of the pound sign too?

[thalia]

The shift-2 being @ is definitely American, but shift-comma should be <. Very odd.

[unfeathered]

Oh. Yes, it is on mine too. I thought Jades said shift-apostrophe, because that's where my double inverted commas when that happens. Which is a kind of obvious place to have them - is that normal for an American keyboard?

[thalia]

Yup. And that's the thing that drives me most insane when I use a UK keyboard--I spend the whole time hunting for the double quotes... which are above the 2, right?

[unfeathered]

Yep. :-) It really does make sense to have them with the apostrophe!

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

*coughs* shift+comme was that. I was getting it mixed up with the apostrophe... My brain had been working hard yesterday ;)

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Huh. I didn't think to check that. You were right about solving it, and you were right about shift+apostrophe, clearly realising that when I wrote shift+comma, that was what I meant... *facepalm*

Sorted now, thanks to the technical method suggested :D

[unfeathered]

Well, I realised it because that's what it did to me - I've had that happen loads of times, on various computers, and yeah. Rebooting has always worked for me! :-)

[smtfhw.livejournal.com]

I would say that you have somehow reset your keyboard from the control panel keyboard option...

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Without going to control panel, which I consider to be quite the achievement :) Back to normal now, but I shall be watching it carefully in the future...

[smtfhw.livejournal.com]

It can be done... it's certainly happened to me before.

[miss-zedem.livejournal.com]

#3 - if in doubt, reboot :)

And nothing concentrates the mind like sheer, blind panic...

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Yup. The John Sheppard method of computer repair works every time :D

It's amazing how much you can get done when you really, really flail at it...