I’ve noticed this issue for as long as I’ve been running Windows Vista… I’ll be happily typing along when all of a sudden my keyboard starts spewing out random characters instead of what I’m expecting. The most annoying switch is when I get an accented e (é, from French or Latin) instead of a question mark (?).

Well it finally annoyed me one time too many, so I figured out the solution. I’ve long known that it has something to do with the keyboard layout that you have selected. This selection is buried in the Control Panel under the “Regional and Language” settings. Of course it would be too much to ask for this to be included with the “Keyboard” settings… It will only occur if you have more than one installed keyboard layout AND if you have a shortcut enabled to switch the keyboard layout.

By default the keyboard shortcut to change the input language is enabled with the key combination “Left Alt + Shift”, and the keyboard shortcut to change the keyboard layout is enabled with the key combination “Ctrl + Shift”. That makes total sense because I’m sure nobody ever presses Alt and Shift or CTRL and Shift at the same time. (Editors Note – Sarcasm Applied)

Fortunately if you disable either one of these things then your random keyboard troubles will disappear. Let’s do both:

Remove Unused Keyboard Layouts

• Go to your Control Panel and open “Regional and Language Settings”
• Switch to the “Keyboards and Languages” tab and select “Change Keyboards”



• Before doing anything else, ensure that you have the desired keyboard selected. For most of my readers that is most likely to be “US“, but if you are in a different country or use a different primary language, your preference will be different.



• Select all other keyboards layouts other than the one you wish to use. The default installation of vista seems to include the “US” Keyboard as well as one or two other layouts specific to the country you told Vista that you live in when you first installed it. I’m Canadian so all of my computers have “Canadian French” and “Canadian Multilingual Standard” installed.
• Click “Remove” to delete these keyboard layouts.

Delete the Hotkey combination that changes Keyboard Layouts

• Click on the “Advanced Key Settings” tab
• Select the “Between input languages” setting in the Actions window, then hit the “Change Key Sequence…” button



• Choose “Not Assigned” for the “Switch Input Language” AND for the “Switch Keyboard Layout” settings, then click “OK”
• Click “OK” all the way out. You may need to reboot your machine to lock in this change

Well, that’s it. It may seem like a lot of steps (and it is for such a ridiculous setting), but it’s fast and easy to do and it will eliminate lots of headaches!

This is another one that I assume will be the same in Windows 7, but I haven’t been able to test it yet. I’ll get back to you sometime on or near October 22nd!!

UPDATE Oct 27, 2009 – This trick is definitely still applicable to Windows 7, and it works perfectly!

NOTE – on the surface this post is about sport, but that’s really not the focus at all.  Please stick with me and let me know what you think…

I’m in the middle of watching a rerun of the UFC 101 and I can’t help but think that these guys are insane.  While that’s probably obvious to many of us that would never dream of getting ourselves into that kind of situation, I’m not referring to the most obvious case to prove my point…

I’ve watched the first two bouts so far and in both case the losing fighters obviously came in with a fight strategy or a mental map on how they wanted to see the fight go.  And in both cases the fight went completely the other way, yet the fighters kept going with their original strategy.  The result, after a series of take downs in both fights, was the being awarded an easy decision that any judge would give them simply for being the perceived aggressor.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– often attributed to Albert Einstein

In the first fight I might concede that the fighter didn’t have much control over his fate and he simply got overpowered.  But he also didn’t try to do anything different and he allowed the judges to make the easy decision.  He needed to try to do something different to really show the judges that he deserved to win.  But he didn’t.

In the second fight the loser, a man that many might describe as the better fighter, came in with a strategy that it would be a stand-up fight and he fought tooth and nail to keep himself from being taken to the ground.  Except that he was taken to the ground repeatedly.  He didn’t sustain a lot of damage, but he was on the bottom and therefore was the perceived loser. He even had an opportunity about half-way through the final round to take the upper position and potentially inflict some damage on his opponent.  Instead of taking that advantage, he stood up.  And then got taken down again.

Both fighters lost because they didn’t change their strategies even after repeatedly being shown that they weren’t working.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for repeating things until you can’t learn any more.  Many of the major advances of our civilization have come about from people trying things over and over until they got it right.  But sometimes you only have so much time to change course, and if you act too slowly then you lose it all.

These fighters were both insane by the most common of definitions.  But of course many we know it was true because they were in the fight in the first place!

What can you learn from this that you can apply to your day to day life??