Ever has this happen to you?  You’re happily typing away several paragraphs into something.  Suddenly, your application closes and your computer reboots.  What happened?  A crash?  A virus?  Spyware?  Nope.

Think more in terms of a subliminal dialog box.  Appearing for only a second, it becomes visible and steals your keystrokes from whatever you were happily doing.  Maybe you were about to hit the space bar between words in your document.  Since the subliminal popup window has buttons in it, and the space bar will click one of them, you’ve chosen to do something.  Probably this is something windows related, such as rebooting to install updates.

I’m so glad that our computers are protected by automatic updates from multiple software vendors.  I’d hate to think of what kind of loss of data or productivity might occur if all of this loss of data and productivity didn’t happen to prevent it.

Grumble grumble grumble.

Update:  Don’t know how I forgot to cite this sooner!  The headline of this post is a quote that I found from someone else experiencing this issue here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001011.html