Alice the Technological Genius

Today I sat down at the brand new computer that was purchased to handle all the video from the Great Horned Owl breeding project. After checking to see what Rusty and Iris were up to, I was going to quick check my e-mail. My login failed. Over and over. I tried logging into my work e-mail account. My login kept failing. I tried it on my computer upstairs and it was fine. Huh???

I knew Alice had been walking around the keyboard of the new computer, but there was no poop or dander in it...so why wasn't it working?? It had to be Alice's fault one way or another.

This evening I sat down to try a few things. I could type out all the letters, small and caps, and all the numbers. That couldn't be the problem. But when I tried to type my password on a sticky note on the computer, it didn't work. I tried both passwords. Both goofed up. What???? I finally realized what was going on: I couldn't type two of the same letters or numbers in a row. Somehow she must have screwed up one of the settings in the control panel.

I found the keyboard part of the control panel. The repeat time was fine. But when I held down a key to test the repeat rate, it only typed the letter once. But there was no place to change the "repeat" settings. So I typed something into the search box and found a filter function that would prevent a letter from being typed twice...there had to be a one or more second delay before the same character could be typed again. And guess what? There was a shortcut to make this happen--hold down the right shift key for more than eight seconds. Aha! It's no problem to imagine an owl foot standing on the right shift key for eight seconds.

So I changed the settings back and disabled the shortcut. Now things run fine, and hopefully Alice won't find any more ingenious keyboard shortcuts (although she turned a screen saver on on my Mac and heck if I can figure out how to disable it again!)