Idiot season, CCNA, a shop!, gaming; news

[tcpip]

Allan Hartzog put a little piece on Online Opionion, which attracted the usual responses from people who don't understand. That's tolerable enough. What I find extraordinary is the debate I've had with a property consultant who doesn't understand how Council rates are charged in Australia.

Other idiot of the week award goes to the community development group Borderlands. With a mere three licenses for MS-Office I've done the responsible thing and installed the ISO standard and community-developed OpenOffice on other machines. Apparently users don't know how to open a file with a preferred application and they don't know how to save a file according to the desired file type. I'm going to write these people some real basic instructions. Then I'm taking off the TiL I've accumulated. I might come back.

Apparently I have to re-sit the theory exam for CCNA semester 2 because I didn't complete the prac exam. Makes sense? Not really, but I'm cramming just the same.

Over the next few weeks I have three major website projects. Good lord. Work is pouring in. My little room in St Kilda is no longer big enough to store all my computer equipment; so I'm also looking at setting up a retail/home outlet in good ol' Spotswood.

Last night played HeroQuest with droog64 as Narrator; setting is 5th Century Britain, a dark and stormy time. If we're lucky we may even see the boy Arthur pull a sword from a stone. Or we'll have to find the Eagle of the Ninth (OK, so that was a lot earlier), or deal with Catweazel

Nepal becomes a secular democracy. The "Hobbits" weren't a new species. Aus.politics joke; Mosley's ancestors discovered. Concerns about ectasy and political lies.

Comments

[blot.livejournal.com]

come to the darkside. why is it the responsible thing to do to install open source office look alikes? you know you wanna work for bill gates. specialize in security and get yr butt over here

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

*snerk* Yeah, it would make some sort of perverse sense to give people the familiar poisonous teat rather than something which is now an ISO standard.

[blot.livejournal.com]

at least my office suite doesnt require religious fanaticism to operate it. ;) and when the other 98% of the world sends me files I would like to open them and keep the formatting intact. besides there is a thriving community of aussies at microsoft, you should work there.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

FOSS is not a religion. FOSS is a secure and cost-effective business model.

and when the other 98% of the world sends me files I would like to open them and keep the formatting intact

Plain text ;-)

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

ITYM "7-bit ASCII plain text".

Accents? Why would anyone need accents?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

More to the point on formatting, the nice free and open-source standard XHTML is best, especially when distributed across the free and open-source TCP/IP... And with those caveats in place, adhering to the standards is a good idea...

As Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, put it so clearly many years ago: "Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." (Technology Review, July 1996)

I so don't want to go there again.

[zey.livejournal.com]

Where the XHTML vision goes astray, of course, is that only some browsers can render it properly ;-).

Re OpenOffice... If it were me, I'd probably have given them the option of what to do next. Options being: (1) Install Office on the other machines, purchase the appropriate licenses, (2) Install Office on the other machines, disclaim responsibility and hand over the job of being licensed to their Purchasing Officer to act on or neglect at their own peril, (3) Install OpenOffice and be legal, (4) Install OpenOffice on all machines and have an OpenOffice workplace.

As far as compatibility goes, maybe I'm not an office apps power user, but, I haven't had a MS Word document fail to open legibly in OpenOffice this century. Worst case: how hard is it to get someone to resend in PDF or RTF, really?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Where the XHTML vision goes astray, of course, is that only some browsers can render it properly ;-).

Well, that's hardly XHTMLs fault is it? ;-)

Regarding OOorg, option 2 is what is being undertaken - and I'll set the appropriate defaults.

As for PDFs and RTFs the problem was that people didn't know how to the 'save as type'.

Thank god I get paid for this.

[zey.livejournal.com]

As for PDFs and RTFs the problem was that people didn't know how to the 'save as type'.

Eeek. That's seriously scary.

What I don't get is how people can know enough how to read a newspaper yet not know how to read their software user interface, dialog boxes or manuals.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

What's even more scary is that none of them are computer novices, nearly all have degrees and quite a few are at PhD level and above.

[zey.livejournal.com]

The "hobbit" humans that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores some 18,000 years ago were actually a population of modern humans stricken with a genetic disease that causes small brains, a new study says.

Given the tiny brain pan of those Hobbits, I rather suspect Mosley might be the last remaining one. That said, that doesn't rule out his mating with chimps too ;-).

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Heh. I thought you'd get it. The lasting and final aus.politics Net Kook of the year!

I actually conversed, quite by accident with Mr. Gregor-Scott once as well.. He seemed OK at first.. Then things got strange

[zey.livejournal.com]

It's kinda sad the auspol NKOTY award died out, really. But there's only so many years you can award it in a row to Mosley, even when he's by far the stand-out candidate. (His only challenger might be that French guy, Turcard, who keeps claiming Australia's about to be swamped by natural disasters caused by the WA govt not granting his land claim.)

Ah, yes. I remember Anthony Grigor-Scott. He's toned his writing down a lot since his NKOTY award. IIRC, he was quite the loony Christian nutter before then.

One thing that really shows how much the newsgroup changed when Howard got in: The two earliest award winners (Omri Schwartz and some other guy) won largely out of being vehement libertarians in an era when we sensibly thought they were half insane. These days, they'd be given ministerial positions.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The thing with Turcard's posts is that he claims of impending disaster get more and more crazy; and when they are not fulfilled he goes quiet for a while. Mos would have never done that!

As for the newsgroup changing... well, that's hardly surprising. In 1998 knowing that USENET existed was still a minority position.

[sjkasabi.livejournal.com]

I'm all for both Eagle of the Ninth and Catweazle. But if you want the boy Arthur in the Eagle of the Ninth universe, you need to read one of the sequels, The Lantern Bearers. I haven't read it for years, but iirc, it'll be nice and dark and stormy for you.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I seem to recall that was one of the books that droog64 plonked on the table. Now I have two positive recommendations I'd better read it!

[droog64.livejournal.com]

It's a good book; if a little nice. For a more savage, adult look at the Arthur myth I recommend Henry Treece's The Great Captains. Not at all historical, but a ripping tragic yarn.

I've been trying to read Bernard Cornwell's The Winter King, but I'm finding it a bit tedious. It's like an Arthurian airport novel.