The Smudge

~One of my family's beloved cats, Smudge, passed away last weekend. While it was sad to see him go, he was probably one of the luckiest cats to walk the Earth. Despite having diabetes and a single functioning kidney, he lived for about thirteen happy years with humans who loved him and his brother Rascal. Smudge, like all pets, had many unique and interesting quirks of personality...he had a lot of them. I like to imagine him playing around someplace like the beastlands, happily chasing mice and barking at birds and squirrels.

In memory of Smudge, I present some of the better pictures I've taken of him over the years, along with a well-known poem:

(ahem) Cats sleep anywhere...

^ "any table..."

^"any chair..."

^ "Top of piano..." (or rather, dresser)

^"window ledge, in the middle, on the edge..."

^ "Open drawer, empty shoe, anybody's lap will do..." (although he liked Mom's the best)

^ "Fitted in a cardboard box, in a cupboard with your frocks..." (he loved curling up in boxes, and being the SPACE CAT when we played Omega Virus)

^ "Anywhere..."

^ "they don't care..."

^ "cats sleep anywhere!"

I hope you enjoyed the photo-poem. Here are a few other good Smudge pictures:

^ Looking regal on the front doorstep.

^ Smudge, The Cat

^ The Cat of the House

Smudge will be missed, but will live on in our hearts. He was a great cat, and remembering him will always make me smile. :-)

Venting

~I just spent 2.5 hours working on an assignment for one of my classes, which involved creating database queries in Microsoft Access 2007. Boring, you say? Indeed it was, but the reason I'm writing about it is mainly to vent. Micro$oft Office 2007 has got to be the most god-awful piece of crapware ever to disgrace the hard drive of any computer unfortunate enough to load it. It's a re-design of the many previous versions of MS Office, but features an "improved" interface that replaces the menus at the top of the screen with colorful icons and tabs.
Some people like the new interface, finding it intuitive and easy to learn. I am not one of those people. This is not an issue of not adapting or being set in my ways; rather, this is resistance to an infantile piece of junkware that forces me to wade through constantly-shifting tabs, ribbons, and icons with no logical placement. While working through the assignment, I frequently found my hands shaking with barely-suppressed rage from the extreme frustration of not being able to find things, which had been so easy to locate on earlier versions of the software. This is NOT a good change.

As if that wasn't bad enough, MS Office has somehow become the "industry standard", which means that professionals are expected to use it and be able to receive files using MS Office formats. All of this for the fine sum of $150. Yes, that's right, you're forced to pay $150 in exchange for a bloated suite of garbled software. Or your company pays comparable fees to "license" the software, and is able to install the programs on only a certain number of computers.

Fortunately for the sane people of the world, there is an alternative, a very, very good one: OpenOffice, which is open-source software originally created by Microsoft rival Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice can do literally everything that MicroSuck Office can do, without the bloated "extras" and absurdly unintuitive icon-based interface Aside from being completely free to download, OpenOffice is open-source, the computer code for open office is freely available (so any programmer is free to modify it, as long as they don't profit off of it). On my home computer, I run StarOffice, which is based on the original form of OpenOffice.

StarOffice comes with "Writer" (a word processor), "Base" (a database program, which I would have vastly preferred to use over MS Access), "Calc" (spreadsheets), "draw" (for art and charts) and "impress" (slide show presentations). You may note that these are suspiciously similar to comparable programs in MS Office (Writer=Word, Base=Access, Calc=Excel, Impress=PowerPoint, etc). They can even read and save files in Microsoft formats (so StarOffice Writer can save in .doc format, which can be read by MS Word), so I don't need to worry about not being able to send and receive files to and from those poor unfortunate souls still using MicroScrew Office.

Another interesting piece of software I've been using recently is Google Docs, a free online document service (it's still in Beta testing, but works fine). For a recent class project, I created a "Google Presentation", which is basically the same thing as a PowerPoint slide show. I was then able to "share" the presentation by sending "invitations" to the email addresses of my groupmates, who then became "collaborators" able to edit it. It's hugely convenient, because the presentation and the tools used to edit it are all online and can be used at any time, eliminating the need to trade files by email. I've done the same thing for a group paper, and it's worked out great.

So for those of you still stuck in the dark ages of monopolistic, overpriced office software, do yourself a favor by going open-source: download StarOffice or any of its many freely-available variants. You won't have to worry about paying to "upgrade" the software every couple of years to pad out Bill Gates' paycheck, or put up with "Office Assistant" ever again.

LibraryThing

~I've signed up for a free account at LibraryThing, and online book recommendation database. It allows me to post the books I've read/am reading, and add metadata about them such as reviews, subject tags, related books, recommendations, etc. Of course, I can also see what others have written.

There are a number of fun features on LibraryThing. For example, check out the hilarious Unsuggester, a reverse-recommendation search engine. Type in the name of a book you like, and it will return books as unlike your title as possible. For example, if you type in "Dracula" (and then clarify by selecting the book by Bram Stoker), you get results like "The Opinionated Knitter", "Purpose-driven youth ministry", and (most disturbingly) "Pierced by the word : thirty-one meditations for your soul". Type in a book you like and be amused. Or, on a more practical note, type in a book you *hated* and get some better ideas.

I've added some of the books I've read and am reading, so in the future I'll add something to this blog that will let you see the titles.

By the way, there's a new poll on the right. Cast your vote on the downfall of humanity!

Fung-Fu Monkey

~I was all set to write about an amusing incident in class, but that will have to wait, as I've just stumbled across this amazing video:

^ Whatever you do, don't take his bananas!