Even Google’s Not Perfect
Posted by Jim at May 9th, 2005
Recently I was trying to fix a problem with someone’s pc. The pc had mysteriously stopped sending system events noises (email beep, start windows, stop windows…) through the speakers and would only make the rather unpleasant beep that comes directly from the computer speaker itself.
It turned out that it resulted from an entry that a downloaded program (the Weather Channel client) had made in the registry. Eventually I discovered this and deleted the entry.
The amusing thing for me was the stuff that showed up when I was searching. I was putting in words like “windows xp beep system events registry key” in various combinations, but when I searched with one of those combinations what were the first entries?
Stories from alt.sex.spanking. I have no idea why.
That’s really quite funny.
Topher
Jim, are you sure you weren’t searching your browser history by mistake?
James
Er… I hadn’t thought of that possibility.
Amusingly though, it wasn’t my computer. It was the computer of the pastor of a church I do some work for. That’s the major reason I don’t know how I got the stories I mentioned earlier.
Ordinarily I’d have checked the Google cache for highlighted key words to see how it happened. As it was, the last thing I wanted was to have him walk back in the office and find me apparently reading stories about spanking.
Jim Zoetewey