Monday, September 26, 2011

A laptop takes a fall

Watching a movie on a laptop is not without risks.
If you set a laptop on a low table, getting ready to watch, setting down some glasses of sweet soda.
If someone gets up to adjust the lighting and trips on the mechanism of the Lazyboy chair, then what happens?
The front of the chair suddenly springs up and hits the table.
The table tilts forward and falls on the floor.
As it falls, the glasses of soda fall on the open laptop and spill.
The wet laptop hits the floor and closes.

The table can be set back up, the floor and laptop can be wiped dry (although still a bit sticky), the laptop can be rebooted,
and then you can discover something completely new: what a cracked computer screen looks like. It's not without aesthetics!

But this raises a new challenge: how does one work with a screen that is only functional on about 40% of its surface area?

I think that designers of slick environments should have a version for sick computers. There ought to be simplified settings suitable for each type of damage that can happen to a laptop. That would be progress.

4 comments:

  1. Don't drink soda. It's not healthy.

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  2. While I was reading this post, for some unknown(?) reason I was thinking that you were watching the movie from a DVD. And then I thought that the complete new thing was this: the soda gets into the drive, makes the disk sticky, and now you cannot eject the DVD anymore and you are bound, in a sisyphean way, to watch the same movie again and again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. SoloGen: you are describing my car. I had a tape stuck in the tape player, and it's been in there for close to a year now!

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