Adventures on the internet (07/07/08)

I have a love-hate relationship with my computer. It seems that my computer is convinced that I am a fan of internet pornography and every time I try to get on the internet it offers to protect my privacy by removing all traces of pornography from the computer.

When I tell it that I have never visited such sites and attempt to close the window it then proceeds to show me things I would rather not see. Thank goodness there are no children who use my computer.

Once I finally get away from that I open my home page and find it is now in German! I tell it that I don't speak German and to please speak English. After it tries two or three times to help me learn German it will finally come up in English. I'm glad it doesn't try to teach me several other languages before it comes up in something I can actually read.

Instead of pornography, I go in search of lost relatives. My mother has told me that one of my cousins wrote a book. I go to my favorite bookseller and look up his name.

Nothing.

I know he trains police dogs for a living. So I try connecting his name with K-9 training and amazingly enough his name pops up in a work by someone else. He was cited as one of the experts in the book. There were several pictures of him being the "victim" as the dogs attacked. It looked enough like him for me to verify that it really was the same cousin whom I hadn't seen for more than 30 years.

I felt like I had hit the lottery. I read every excerpt and looked at all the pictures that it would let me view. It seems unbelievable to me that once we were as close as siblings and now I am searching the internet just to see a picture of him.

It was so long ago that he lived in a trailer on our farm. He was just a toddler then. I loved having him close by even if he did tie me to a tree when we played cowboys and Indians. He and my aunt and uncle eventually moved to a tiny apartment at the next farm over and from there they moved to a little town just down the road. Then his dad died from a rodeo accident. My own home life fell apart and we lost touch.

I never in my wildest dreams would have thought he would grow up to be an expert in training dogs. According to what I have found out he trains canines for various police departments and private individuals. He seems to be very well respected in his field.

I look up other relatives and come up with nothing. So I add the new-found information to my genealogy records and move on to my other favorite internet activity - shopping.

I leaf through dozens of books and add several to my shopping cart. For me it is as satisfying as real shopping. In many ways it is better. I don't waste any gas. I don't have to fight the crowds. The best part is that as long as I don't enter my credit card information it is free!

Then I check out "United States Code Title 4 Chapter 1 - The Flag" and I find out that I am in disagreement with my government as to how to properly display the United States flag. It seems that it is a custom to fly the flag from dawn to dusk as I prefer, but according to this website it says "the flag may be displayed twenty-four hours a day if properly illuminated during the hours of darkness."

It also says the flag may be displayed during inclement weather as long as it is an all-weather flag. I say, "Bah, humbug! Take it down at night and when it rains!" Obviously the law will prevail and I will continue to tilt at windmills.

My husband kindly shows me an easy way to get my computer to speak English as a first language. It responds to him immediately and says, "Sure!"

I look forward to finding more unexpected information and am convinced that the machine will think up other ways to surprise and annoy me. Maybe next time it will speak Japanese.

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