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

[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.