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Illogical, Jim


“Anything that looks like a number”? This one always raises a smile. How do I know that what you think looks like a number is the same as what I think looks like a number?

The following message from nickserv on Freenode doesn’t quite make sense. Does it make me someone else? Is this a split personality diagnosis?

The following error was highlighted on the Windows Crash Gallery a long time ago and I was amused yet dismayed to see that Excel still persists with its meaningless assertion.

How can I have a Sent column of a drafts folder? Isn’t there an element of mutual exclusion there somewhere?

Mr Anonymous showed me that Entourage has exactly the same problem:

And this one is really weird: a smiley in a control name? And how comes most of what comes up in that list isn’t anything I want to base a new file type on in the first place?

I produced the following spreadsheet, I imagine, as a test of graphing on the Psion Revo for an article on EPOC:

But when I generated a graph, I got decimal points in the Y axis: {0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2 …}. I found this somewhat perplexing given that all the Y values were integers. So I adjusted the axis settings to switch off decimal places. Whereupon it simply rounded all the numbers thus:

Fantastic.

I tried Open With on a text file in Explorer, and received the following list of “recommended” associations:

Upon what, pray tell, are these recommendations based? Taking the primary recommendation, I receive this:

D’oh?

Finally, this following set of conflicting messages encountered when trying to get my office PC’s speaker to bleep:

Let’s recap. I don’t need a speaker driver and one is not loaded but I can uninstall the non-existent driver anyhow, as well as install a replacement to the one that is already installed but apparently isn’t? It is clarity of vision like this that keeps the well-oiled machine of Windows running so smoothly.