The Time Sink

The death of MS Office... At least in this household. Sure, "you heard it here last", but after a couple of events both at work and home, OpenOffice is in and MS Office is out...

I've been carrying Portable OpenOffice and a few other aps around on a memory key ever since I switched machines at work earlier this year. ...and while I haven't had a chance to use the Internet aps all that much, I have used Open Office a few times. The other week at work I happened to have a need to produce a PDF document and thought to try OO from the place the portable version lives on the downloads section of that machine's HDD. No problem, just open the document (saved in Word) and "export as PDF". Cool, 'free' versus $300 for Acrobat; that's easy math...

So I downloaded the regular version and set it up on my machine. ...and set the defaults to "Open in OpenOffice". ...at least until the next MS update <g>. ...and for the last few weeks I've been merrily ignorant of which ap I've been working in, OO or MS Office (still the default for emailed files since we're on an Exchange server).

Fast forward to this weekend when I needed to take a look at the spreadsheet from last year's taxes. ...and found out that my copy of Excel decided it wanted to be reinstalled (or heck, maybe I've missed a reboot since an update). Fooey. ...and hey, OpenOffice is right there! Sure, why not? So I downloaded it and set it for the defaults on this box and proceeded to forget all about it. ...until Daniel mentioned his 'big machine' was giving him grief with Word. Ummm... Yeah, he needs interoperability, but I haven't found any incompatabilities at work yet, so sure. ...and of course it's what I run it on the Linux boxen; so I'm thinking Shelley's and Brad's machines (WordPerfect) are next.

I had a longish post about a phishing scam that I was going to put up for today, but I'm going to hold off on it for a day or two... I'd notified a site owner that his place was "owned" by someone else (as is my sometime practice), but then I noticed I had two more emails come through that had the same type of link as the payload to the first site. ...so I've notified the ecommerce software provider that seems to be the common denominator, and I'll hold off publishing any information until I see what they have to say (I'm not into spreading exploit information around). ...although one of the less bright ones who bought the crack and the mailing list really could use some help; his email had only this in the body:

"HERE YA PUT THE HTML OF THAT WILL BE SHOWN ON E-MAIL."

Ya' know how some days can get to you a bit? That's been this week: I just haven't had the feeling of being able to catch up with things. That, and the Great Router Fight last night left me a bit 'winded' mentally...

...but this evening Shelley needed to be elsewhere by five and I ended up at home more or less on time for a change. ...and with clear skies and dry roads, very unlike how the day started out. ...and Daniel was busy planting iris for me (yes, I'm learning that younger backs bend better than mine, and the recompense is totally worth it!), so Brad and I went out blading and then fired up the grill and headed off to the store. ...and came back with some sourdough sandwich buns and some bratwurst. Oh, yeah...

Yep, it's still a bit early in the season to fire up the beast for a full day of smoking (and the weekend rains have been a bit of a bother), but the ol' Weber will still churn out decent grill on short notice. ...and the evenings are beginning to extend themselves just a bit.

I recall reading an article, likely found over at garret's place about how aging boomers (that would be me) can help prevent exercise induced injuries by increasing the intensity but shortening the duration of their workouts. I have to say I'm down with that last part after not being able to keep up with my normal blading routine due to the rains. ...but I didn't realize I could realize an easy way to achieve the first part by just taking Brad along with me!

He's been practicing lately with Daniel's cast off blades with the goal being able to travel with me on blades instead of biking, and yesterday was the day I came home early enough to take him along. He's definitely matured and built up his stamina and skills since last Summer and we had a decent couple of miles to work out on. I suspect this may become a routine thing.

Today is fiscal year end at the company. That means if you're looking for Janeen or me we'll be down in the warehouse and central supply room doing physical inventory. ...assisted, we hope, by a small army of support staff (okay, two, but we're offering bribes of doughnuts and pizza to anyone who helps out).

Thank you for the well wishes! The inventory went just fine; we had a good crew (two staffers and one displaced field person) and knocked things out rather nicely! The old saw about 'many hands make light work' came into play. ...and those hands were full of pizza since we finished up in time for lunch!

Also finished (except for some crosschecking against last year's forms) are the taxes! Yeah! Yep, we owe the state, but we know why (a W-2 misapplied), but the feds are giving us back some of our money; we'll be about even when it's over. ...and wiser for next year.

...and the garage printer saga took another turn Friday night: I thought I had things dialed in, but then the one print server decided it wouldn't play nice this morning. So I switched back to the one that decided to have a temper tantrum last night... This evening all seems to be well; the "coast box" (Win2k) and the 9.2 iMac are both happily printing to the laser. I'm going to have to reboot this box to finish its setup though. ...and that's a bit of a pity as this thing is going on nearly a month of uptime.

Photo notes and such... I had a couple of emails on the contrail shot I posted Friday; yep that was taken toward sunset as one band of storms moved past and another headed on in. The East was darkened down pretty good by the advancing rain, but the West was trying to clear. ...and the jet was just passing through.

...as I am today: Brad's birthday is later this month, but Easter vacation is going to mess with scheduling his annual LaserQuest party. Plan B is to have it today. ...and yes, I do enjoy going inside and mixing it up with the kids. It's not every day you get to shoot your offspring and then have cake with them later <g>...

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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