Dear LPG, 

I have been retired for about fifteen years now and it was not long before I realised just how much my mind missed the luxury of having lots more to think about.  Most of us humans seem to thrive on having lots of things going on all at the same time and I soon worked out that that sense of being busy as what was missing from my life.

They often say that learning something new is one way of filling that gap so, like many others of my age I suspect, I got serious.  Over the past ten or so years, I have learned a little about computers and, while I still have so much to learn the one lesson I have learnt is that the virtual world reflects the real one in so many ways. 

Some things are so obvious, while you miss other really little details that can make all the difference.

I have learnt the secret of ‘copy and paste’ which saves so much time when you need to type something.  I am not the fastest or most accurate typist in the world and, when it comes to finding things on the internet where the name of the page must be typed in perfectly if you are going to succeed, being able to copy and paste the webpage address (URL) means that you are more likely to get it right first time.  

The other day my friend sent me a web address so that I could find the page where I could buy something and, while I have always found it easy to type sentences that make good old-fashioned English sense, those long sets of letters, numbers and punctuation marks are so easy to get wrong.  

The answer is to get the computer to do it for you and it is quite easy to learn, but the other day I managed to copy an extra space at the end of the address and, I tried for ages to get the page to work without knowing that the space was the problem.  A computer takes everything into consideration including the spaces that the eye can’t see unless you use the mouse pointer to check.

Once I had taken the space away the computer took me to the webpage without any problem, but I think I learned two lessons…

The first is that computers can see all (including the details that we humans often miss). 

They say that nearly every virtual thing a computer does is reflected in real life somewhere which has me thinking about those people around us that don’t stand out enough, could do with some help or just a few more people taking a bit more notice of them.  They are often the people that we say hello to every now and then while we miss the fact that they could do with a bit more support than that.  

My thought is that perhaps it would be a good idea for us to be a bit more like a computer and notice a few more of the ‘space-people’ around us… 

KW, Rushey Green.

LPG suspects that many readers may have no idea what the ‘copy and paste’ technique is, let alone a URL, so we have tried our best to find a couple of relatively simple explanations… 

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