Alien Attack

I love technology! Whenever I learn something new and accomplish what appears to me to be a daunting task there's that feeling of "YES! You can teach this old dog a new trick!"

I was feeling pretty smug the other day when I figured out how to let the followers of my blogs subscribe to them by email using Feed Burner. I couldn't wait to announce the news and I quickly wrote a little announcement on my blog, a crabulous life!

Within the hour my new post rolled over onto Facebook and I was horrified to discover that my blog had been hijacked by an alien and it looked like this:

Tulisan ini saya buat selaku seorang newbie, jadi sorry-sorry aja kalo anda merasa yang udah senior menerima tutorial ini. Jujur, saya adalah seorang newbie, newbie yang imut dan newbie yang lucusangat manis, enggak percaya

Only it was worse because it went on and on and on. It was much longer than what I had written.

Of course, being a red blooded, middle aged, American female, my natural reaction was to point a finger and blame someone else. "Facebook has messed up my blog post!" I angrily announced to the world. I was sure that Facebook would discover its mistake and correct its error and everything would be all right. After 24 hours things not only still looked the same, but my subsequent blog posts refused to feed to Facebook. Now I was starting to wonder if the problem could be my fault.

I had been so sure that what I was seeing was some sort of computerese gibberish, but upon closer inspection I began to suspect that maybe it was a real language. I found an online language identifier and discovered that, in fact, the language was Indonesian. Then I got help from the cute little Word Monkey that I keep on my Google home page, for just such an emergency, and learned that aliens hadn't hijacked my blog; instead, I'd managed to hijack someone else's blog.

This particular blogger is named Keren and is a self described "cute and sweet newbie" who is humbly giving instructions to more experienced computer users on how to overcome a certain obstacle they face when using computers in an internet cafe. She apologizes profusely for her audacity and doesn't want to insult anyone, hence the "jadi sorry-sorry" in the first line.

Great! So now what?!? It took me another two hours of experimentation to fix the problem, but I managed to figure it out and once again I'm feeling pretty smug.

But, gee! Of all the blogs in the world, how did I manage to cross lines with this one? How did it happen? Just like I'll never know why my husband's sound dock plays reggae every morning at nine, I'll probably never know the answer to this question either. It's just another Question for the Universe. Jadi sorry-sorry!