I just wrote a long post about all the exciting things I've been up to while I've got the house to myself 'cos Helen is away, What do you mean you don't believe I've been doing exciting things? I have a life, I can throw wild parties when I'm left alone. I... okay, you got me, I actually wrote a post about how I'm bored 'cos Helen's not here, but I don't think it's that unlikely that I might be doing all sorts of exciting things. I've been doing computer things and youth/children's work for church related things, but no, nothing exciting.

Anyway, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by your disbelieving looks... I wrote a post and was just sorting something out in another browser when the computer flicked up an error screen for a split second and restarted itself. For once I allowed it to send the report upon recovering from a serious error and it said the error was caused by a device driver. Weird, the newest thing to be installed was the exciting wireless network thing, but that's been working for a while now, oh well, hopefully it won't happen again.

So, I can't remember what else I blogged, no doubt it was really fascinating, I decided to make that "random observation" thing a regular feature though, so...

Random Observation of the day:

Predictive text on mobiles (okay, I'm cheating 'cos I didn't observe this today, this has been on my mind for a while, I've discussed it with Helen, she agrees and has noticed some examples, but I don't think either of us has discussed it on our blogs, so I thought I would)...

I used to have a real hatred of mobiles, I refused to have one until the Christmas before last when I gave up (mainly 'cos my parents insisted) I still don't like them, I certainly don't want to phone people on them, but I concede that they are very useful and texting is kind of like emailing, though it costs 10p per message, so I don't like that, but admit it's useful for sending a quick message to someone. Anyway, what we want to know is why does predictive text seem to be religious?

Okay, now you think I've finally lost it, that I've let the last remnants of sanity slip through my fingers, but bear with me for a second. How does predictive text work? It looks at the keys that you're pressing and works out the word that it thinks you are typing. It doesn't do this in alphabetical order or anything like that and doesn't seem to be clever enough to work out grammar, so I can only assume that it chooses the most common word. But how does it decide which of two possible words is the most common? With some it must be guesswork, but Helen and I have found a large number where a religious word takes precedence over what we (and we're both Christians) would think would be a more common word. Here are some examples, I'd love to know if you know of any more:

Word I want Phoned Scared Maps Lose Inky Hoe Jests

Word it suggests Sinned Sacred Mass Lord Holy God Jesus

Okay, the last few are pushing it a bit. But just having the 3 or 4 that were really noticeable seemed a little too few to have a good case.