For example, yesterday I was e-mailing some 10- or 15-megabyte documents to myself with copies to someone else.  Usually I type in www.yahoo.com in the address box, open my mail-box and proceed with no trouble.  This time, I noticed that www.yahoo.com.ar, the Argentine URL, was already visible in the address box, so I just clicked on ‘Ir’ (Go).  I tried three or four times to send such an e-mail, but each time I got a message that the page could not be found.  So I went back to www.yahoo.com, and tried again, experiencing no trouble.  The only thing I can figure is that there is a size-limit on e-mail on Argentine Yahoo, just as there is on Hotmail.  There seem to be endless little loops and catches in navigating the system.

For the first time this week, I used a scanner.  I have a novel of about 300 pages written in a language of my own invention that uses many characters that I myself invented.  Since my alphabet has 328 letters, it is very difficult to transcribe it into English’s paltry little 26-letter alphabet.  I don’t plan to lose the manuscript, which took me more than a year to write out longhand and proofread, but in my travels, it could well happen that I do, so I wanted to suspend the novel somewhere safely in cyberspace.  But I had no one to instruct me in using the scanner.  The proprietor of the cyber café was always swamped with customers, and gave only one or two very stingy hints, even though I offered to pay him 20 pesos extra to walk me through the procedure.

I sat at a computer for hours trying to figure out, first of all, how to read and copy a document at all.  It must have taken an hour to realize that I had a choice of 600 or 150 pixels per inch, which makes a 16-fold difference in the number of bytes, with the sparser resolution running at 6 megabytes per document (page) in .gif format, and the denser at over 100 megabytes per document.  Once I finally figured that out, I had to find out how to compress a document to .jpg or .jpeg so that I would end up with 700 kilobytes to one megabyte per document.  I searched for what must have been hours, but I couldn’t find the applicable dialog box.  Finally, I importuned the proprietor and he showed me very reluctantly the necessary steps, so that after about 6 hours I was finally producing one-megabyte documents.  With over 300 documents to suspend in cyberspace, this will take up a good part of my 2-gigabyte mailbox.

Not only are the documents all handwritten in my own super-alphabet, but many of the pages have pictures of scenes and characters in the novel.  Of course, this is all ultimately just a game, but I like to fancy that it is at least as elegant as playing chess or building miniature sailing ships in bottles.

Sometimes, I try to find needed information about computers on online tutorials, and I have had some success.  Unfortunately, the tutorials are in English, but all the dialog boxes, toolbars and dropdowns on the machines I am using have been in Spanish and Portuguese.  I remember when I was trying to submit the English-language version of my novel for copyright registration to some outfit in England that has an advertisement on www.writers.net, I had an instruction to go to such-and-such page and click on ‘Browse’.  I visited the page but could find no ‘Browse’.  I spend hours trying to figure out what to do.   The whole page was in English, but there was one click that read ‘Examinar’, which I saw but just ignored.  That turned out to be the ‘Browse’ button.  Who would ever guess that ‘browse’ would be translated as ‘examinar’?  It’s true that Spanish often sounds much more formal and elevated than English because Spanish is the derivative of Latin, whence English gets all its fancy words. 

These sessions are just maddening.  Oh, if I just had someone at my elbow, saying, “Now click on ‘My Pictures’, now on ‘Scan Pictures’, now on ‘Image 7’ and you’ll be set to start compressing!  Now go to ‘Start’, etc., etc.

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