Vista and Office woes
So I have been using Microsoft’s Vista for a few months now. After using a Mac for over two years at work, I figured the switch would be a nice change and of course the change was not completely my choice anyway. I am not a fan boy of any OS and my favourite OS doesn’t exist yet. Anyway, the transition has not been fun, Vista is not ready for prime time, although it is finally pretty looking. Not only is Vista not ready, but neither is MS Office, and this is where my rant begins.
How much does Office cost? I guess that depends on which of the nine hundred versions you have, let’s just say it’s a lot. I think I have the ultimate enterprise business bloat edition. I guess one would expect at least all of the previous functions to work almost flawlessly would they not? Well, you would be wrong if you did. The new office does look new though, in fact so new that anyone using if for the first time probably won’t know how to open or save a document. Don’t look for file or any kind of obvious standard menu, look for the big bubble with the office icon on it. I’m sure the new interface will catch on eventually though, and I guess Microsoft has to change something.
Anyway, yesterday was the day that I had to install Open Office so that I could cut and paste text. Yes that’s right, I had a tight deadline, and I needed to cut and paste text from a work document for a mock-up I was building. Every-time I did this the entire application would crash. Eventually a message popped up telling me that Office was crashing a lot and that I should run a diagnosis wizard that would take approximately 15 minutes. Okay, so maybe this would fix it.
I ran the wizard, and it found nothing, although it wasn‘t able to check one file since it did not have permission and told me I should change the security settings on that file. If I had done this I’m sure the next thing it would have warned me of are the dangers of changing my security settings. This is when I realized that in the past 30 minutes of farting around I could have downloaded Open Office. I did that, installed Writer, loaded the document and began copying and pasting my text with no problems. This is a day in the life of Vista and Office, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Havoc Heli
I bought a Havoc Heli last week. Basically this is a very small toy helicopter that you can fly around via IR remote control in your home. It’s a whole lot of fun and now it has has really wet my appetite for a more advanced hobby grade helicopter. If you do decide to try this out it just might be your gateway helicopter into something more advanced. Find out more about the Havoc Heli on the Air Hogs site. Check out these forum posts and video clips to see it in action.
28 Weeks later
I saw 28 Weeks Later yesterday. I am a huge fan of the first one, 28 Days Later, but I am always skeptical of sequels, because they rarely come close to the quality of the first film. I happy to say that 28 Weeks Later blew me away. I personally thought it was as good as the first one, if not better. Some of the types of events that are described in the first film are experience in this one. The movie was completely terrifying and I was on the edge of my seat throughout the entire movie. Even though it was such a great movie I found myself wanting it to end because the sheer intensity became overwhelming. Suffice to say, if you like Zombie movies, this is one of the best. Genuinely terrifying.
First post
My first post. Although I have not got around to updating my website in many years, I decided to give WordPress a try. I plan on customizing it with my own look and feel, but so far I am very impressed with it. I have been trying out several open source software projects, mostly to further my knowledge of PHP.
