Category Archives: Life

Charlton Heston, eh?

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Your result for Reincarnation Placement Exam…

Deep Space Explorer

Hmm… You’re a tough one to place. Your answers indicate that you like technology and education. You enjoy intrigue, adventure and chaos. You’re fine with hard work and civilization. This all bodes well for an interesting, adventurous life.

What makes it difficult, however, is that you don’t seem to be much of a ‘people person.’
If you were more of a people person, we would have commissioned you aboard the Starship Enterprise. But since you don’t care much for the complications of dealing with your fellow man… we have another deep-space mission, more tailored for your tastes… a way for you to enjoy the benefits of high-tech civilization without having to put up with civilization itself. Let’s set you up to pursue the solo career of a deep space explorer. You can go ahead and hibernate through the boring parts of your mission, and not worry so much about being a few decades out of touch with your fellows by the time you get home. In fact, you pretty much don’t have to deal with people at all, but you can still enjoy a high-flying adventure of a life. Far, far away from the madding crowd, you get to play with your scientific instruments, serve your glorious civilization, and do interesting things with strange discoveries in exotic places.

The career might work out all right. Look what it did for Charlton Heston.

Take Reincarnation Placement Exam at HelloQuizzy

Open letter to Microsoft

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Dear Morons,

Office 2007 sucks to three decimal places.

Now, I will concede that (apparently) the new version can do all kinds of clever things. That’s what your marketing people tell us, anyway, and I can’t think of any instance in the past when they’ve made overblown claims with no factual basis. No, really.

But you’ve gone the extra mile and made it look different. The official view is that everything is now arranged much more logically and is easier to find, spread out in full view over various ribbons. But WHY??

I even concede that one interface is pretty well like another, and if this is what it had looked like 15 years ago when I started using Windows then I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. In fact I would be as irritated as I am now if you had suddenly started to use a strange system of drop-down menus for the latest release. But here’s the rub. In those 15 years I’ve picked up the basics of Office pretty well. I know its strengths and I know its weaknesses. I know exactly how much I can achieve with it and I know – I knew – how to achieve it without even thinking about it.

And no, I’m not going to quietly unlearn 15 years of experience just because you lot think I should. It’s your job to keep up with me, not vice versa. At my level of usership you haven’t made a single improvement with your mindless tinkering.

Even this wouldn’t be an issue if you could have an option to display the old menus. You even do this with Windows, kindly giving us the option of New SuperDuper Windows Look or Classic Windows look. Why not do the same for Office?

This is actually possible, a quick Google tells me: there is an add-on that I can purchase that will bring back the old menus. But I don’t want to pay for what should come for free, and if I did I very much doubt IT Support would install it for me. (You may guess from mention of IT Support that this is a work-based problem. Home runs Office 97 just fine, thanks very much, and has no intention of changing.)

Fiddling with software is a bit like the age of consent at 16. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Fogeyishly,
Ben

PS anyone leaving a comment that even hints at the existence of OpenOffice will receive a cold, hard stare.

Without our stories or our songs / How will we know where we come from?

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I’m not a natural folk music fan but a year or so ago, late one night on Radio 2 as I drove from somewhere to somewhere, I caught some lyrics that spoke to me.

… And a minister said his vision of hell
Is three folk singers in a pub near Wells [*]
Well, I’ve got a vision of urban sprawl
There’s pubs where no-one ever sings at all
And everyone stares at a great big screen
Overpaid soccer stars, prancing teens [**]
Australian soap, American rap
Estuary English, baseball caps
And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look, and the way we talk
Without our stories or our songs
How will we know where we come from?
I’ve lost St. George in the Union Jack
It’s my flag too and I want it back

(* Have to admit I may be with the minister on this one, but I accept the spirit of the song.)
(** Why do you blush and shuffle your feet, Ladygrove in Didcot? Boundary House in Abingdon? I may be looking at you but I’m thinking of plenty others.)

And I thought no more about it, until today’s dose of the Life and Opinions of Andrew Rilstone actually included the video from whence it came. I can now reveal – because I’ve found out myself – that the lyrics, and the title of this post, are from “Roots” by Show of Hands. Here are the lyrics; here’s the video.