Christmas Cookies

FYI: I'm currently eating a christmas cookie.

I've just found out that JCTMH will not be able to be on my World Series of Pop Culture team, The Nagheenanajars. He will be at a meeting in California that weekend. I'm currently trying to find out if substitutes are allowed and if so, I'm in need of one. Do you know pop culture? Brad, are you still interested? You will need to be available to go to Chicago Friday Feb. 2--Sunday the 4th. The 4th is SuperBowl Sunday, if that matters to you. It doesn't matter to me, but it seems ironic that a pop culture trivia contest would be held on that day.

It's looking like we won't be having a "white christmas" this year in southern Indiana. Which is perfectly fine by me since my little car doesn't drive well in the snow and ice. We'll be staying here for the holiday this weekend, then going to Richmond next weekend for a late Christmas celebration. Then we're off to Bloomington for New Year's Eve/going away party for my friends Geoff and Jessica. We'll be missing the White Trach Gift Exchange/Casino Night, but we'll be there next year for sure.

I anticpate the next week at work being exceptionally not busy, if it's anything like it was last year and I believe it will be.

Trips in the pipeline for the upcoming year: Snowshoe, Mexico, Florida and that's just the first three months!

As for the cat toilet training; I said it would only take one cat to throw the whole thing off, and I was right. Jake decided he didn't want to use the toilet and he battled with me until I finally gave in. At 10 years old, he is the sterotypical stubborn old fart. I will say that the girls did a great job and were progressing nicely in our quest for litter freedom, but Jake can be an ass at times. I still love him, but DANG! So there's where that stands for now.

Merry Christmas

The Latest and Greatest

(This blog is dedicated to Bad Andy)

Since I work for a computer consulting company, the boss says we have to be on the cutting edge of all things technical. That, normally, doesn't apply to me since I just answer the phone and do other, office type things. But this week he upgraded everyone in the office (all 3 of us) to Office '07 and Windows Vista. If you're not a Windows type person, you may not want to read this, but you might cheer along in the background if you do.

Let's start with the OS:
Bossman has not been able to install Vista on my computer because my version of XP is defunkt. Right now, Vista can either be an upgrade or clean install, it can't do a repair. So I don't have much to report from a personal standpoint. I can tell you that both coworkers have been struggling this week to do work because a lot of their applications are not vista compatible. Or at least they've been spending a lot of time finding upgrades/patches/add-ons to make their programs run properly (i.e. Dreamweaver, Quickbooks, Illustrator). It doesn't keep your favorites or stored passwords (at least when using IE. Firefox is mo betta, I know, I know, but we're a Microsoft Certified Partner). So right now, I'm not too mad about going back to my broke XP OS. The only thing I notice being wrong with it is that it will occasionally close applications and I sometimes have error issues when I log on in the morning, but that's solved by shutting down my pc at night. So I'll keep it.

Office 2007:
The new office suite is fairly different than what we've become accustomed to for the last ten-ish years. The toolbars are not in the standard long, thin format and it takes a while to find the button you're looking for. I wish I could give you more technical jargon and analogies, but I can't. Here's a screen shot of powerpoint for your viewing pleasure.

Hopefully that shows alright. The buttons seem to be what I would describe as more bubbly than the square, rectangular, cold ones we're used to. Which takes some getting used to at first. In their default setup, some of the standard "file" buttons (new, save, open, etc) are not out in the open and I had to play a pretty good game of hind-and-seek before I found them. Maybe some of this frustration could have been avoided had the boss done some kind (or any kind) of training before unleashing this on us. It's sort of like you have to start all over and forget what you've learned as far as how to operate in the Office '07 environment. I haven't messed around with Access or Publisher yet, but they both open to pages a little different than their predecessors. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are all pretty similar adn Outlook seems to be the least unchanged.

So there you have it. My non-technical evaluation of Vista and Outlook 2007; hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And I know you did you weirdo.