Living without Word
Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend about the fact that I must be nuts not to have MS Word installed on my computer. I am probably among the 0.01% of professionals that don't have Word on his computer, I don't even have a substitute like open office. The reason I don't have Word is not because it is a Microsoft product but rather because it's useless to my needs.I very rarely need to produce paper documents. Most of my reports to clients are published straight to web where they can live a more useful and dynamic life than a paper document. Almost all my correspondence is email. That leaves just a couple of paper documents a month and for those I use indesign an application that produces beautiful document and leaves me in control.
So the only down side of not having word is that people tend to send me word files. Most of those I can safely crap and the few that come from clients I can have converted by friends or colleagues.
Back to active posting
I guess the big news is that I finally quit smoking. This meant that my brain has largely been mush for the past month, I have been crawling up the walls unable to keep my concentration long enough to post a coherent thought.Also difficult to handle have been my mixed feeling on the war in Iraq. On the one hand, I am still totally against this war but now that it has started can only hope for an American victory. In the US some people are already claiming victory. but the military campaign was always going to be a push-over. Now starts the hard part, creating a stable secular democracy in Iraq. I don't even know it's possible, I sure hope so, because the alternatives are scarier then Sadam.
But my biggest frustration has been the demise of journalistic responsibility. Seems like journalism has been reduced to reporting what others say without ever analyzing it.
The silver lining has been the internet, it looks like it is working as designed and routing around stupidity. I have been amazed by the amount of interesting stuff about the war that has been floating to the surface via the weblog community. In the coming days I will try to catch up by posting some of those links.
At least I have one reader ;-)
Greg comments on my new design.The only thing I'm missing compared to the previous version is the little picture on the top, which was clearly showing in which category we were...I was so frustrated that I could not create categories on the fly. It required a trip to PhotoShop each time. By dropping the image I could make it much easier. Irony has it that since the change I have of course not added a single category. But at least I just activated the multi category and it seems to be working. Well anyway, I'm starting to prepare the next lift that will bring back the icons without the trip to PhotoShop and hopefully fix some other annoyances.
Welcome Naomi
Congratulations Elsa and Eric I bet you will make wonderful parents!Oh and while I am at it congratulations to Xavier for his new baby of a very different kind!
Congratulations Isa and Greg!
Oups! I missed the arrival of the Alice on October 22. I bet Greg will be a fantastic daddy and will spoil Alice like crazy.Amazon Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 Reviews
I can't figure out which of these reviews are genuine and which ones are spoofs but they are very funny nevertheless and the official description does describe the toy as vibrating. via BoingBoingNetcenari
Sacha, a webdesigner friend of mine just went public with his icogs powered site, the first one not directly connected to the project. The cool thing is that it represents the typical application we hope to see. He had just finished a draft version of the site when he sent it to me for comment. We added a couple of sitems and the cog code and bingo his news is now driven by icogs.
BBQ at JP's
Sitting here enjoying the weather and a great BBQ evening at JP's place. Tomorrow I'll hopefully upload some images.
Update: After nursing a really bad case of hang over all day I finally uploaded a little montage of the evening. I only kept the low flash picture as they gave the best ambience even if they are all fuzzy. Thanks for sending the pictures Kris.
