Mmmm Custard Tarts...

View it here

Only in LA... 3

All taken by Ian...

Only in LA... 2

Only in LA

Just in case you need to see where I'M going...

I didn't have time to make a whizz bang you tube masterpiece, so I tried to cover the whole trip on one shebang...brisbane doesn't count. Onwards!

Just in case you need to see where I'm heading

Saw this map on the wall at auckland airport. Couldn't resist.

Word 2007 annoyances

Well no-one's posted much so I think I might post a bit of a rant about one of my favourite programs to criticise, Microsoft Word. This is the 2007 edition, which although is a huge improvement in many ways to previous versions, it is still rediculously frustrating. And although Microsoft released a Beta version of this stuff, it's seems most of my "Send-A-Frowns" were ignored. So here's a list of stuff that annoys me with this latest and greatest edition of the most-used word processor on the planet:

• The dictionary seemingly changes at random intervals back to US English. I'm not sure why, considering my copy of Windows has everything set to Australia, and even the template I was using had Australian English as the default.
• The template I'm using has an image in the header and no text. Every time Word autosaves, it resizes my headers to the height of the non-existent text, leaving my picture cut off. I just have to double-click the header and it is fixed, but obviously this is rediculously annoying. Doesn't seem to happen on other people's computers though...
• Only half of the drop-down buttons on the ribbons will change to your most-recent selection. This is extremely annoying when you want to repetitively do the third thing in the list. Why do some buttons work in an annoying way while others work fine?
• I continuously get a message that Word can't find "Building Blocks XML" or some such nonsense. Not sure what that is or why I would want it either.
• Sometimes if you drag a textbox to the next page it will instead pop back to the top of the page you just dragged it off. It doesn't happen all the time though. Also sometimes just resizing a textbox will whisk it away to a mysterious location elsewhere in your document.
  
• Whenever I've copied something, exiting Word asks me if I want to keep the contents of my clipboard. Why ask me? Why not just keep it? Obviously this was put in because the programmers were lazy, it doesn't matter at all to the user if it is kept.
• If you're highlighting a line, then you accidentally pop up to the preceeding line, then back to the line you want, the highlight has lot the word at the start of your selection and you have to start all over again.
• I copied a large chunk of code written in Visual Studio and pasted it in Word. Curiously, some of the characters were changed somewhere in the process. It was a bit like those dodgy text-recognition things with scanners, where it can't read the letter properly... only in this case it has no excuse.
• Dragging the square bit on the indent ruler has been made a bit easier, but it doesn't always update when you move it... which is quite confusing.

There were plenty of other annoyances, these were just the ones I felt like noting down. I can't wait until someone comes along and revolutionises word processing so we aren't forced to use Microsoft products.