Listening to Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters album in full for the first time and reading the liner notes, I have two thoughts: 1) Mmm, the bass line is pretty heavily reminiscent of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin” — and 2) Mmm, there’s no guitar player on this album, so […]
Another major annoyance in Word. I have several very simple macros that automate very common tasks, such as adding 12 points of “space after” to a paragraph of text (instead of typing a double paragraph mark, which is a big no-no): Sub setSpaceAfterTo12() setSpaceAfterTo (12) End Sub — Sub setSpaceAfterTo(mySpace) With Selection.ParagraphFormat .SpaceAfter = mySpace […]
A telling example of how Word X’s support for Mac OS X’s key features is only skin-deep. Microsoft can always claim that they were one of the first Mac OS X developers to implement “Quartz Text Smoothing” in their Mac OS X applications… But as soon as you try to play with such text, here’s […]
A long outstanding issue with web browsing and, more general, with browsing documents that are bigger than the window in which they are being displayed, be it in web browsers, word processors, etc. is what happens when you use commands such as “Page Up” or “Page Down” or the space bar in web browsing. Such […]
Microsoft, those masters of simplicity, have just come up with a new scheme for selling Office 2003 (for Windows), which will include no less than six different versions of the product. “Microsoft Divvies Up Office 2003 Editions” by Thor Olavsrud, Internetnews Of particular interest is the difference between Office Standard 2003 and Office Student and […]
Short, but good interview with Arthur Schlesinger, historian, about the current administration: “Pearl Harbor in Reverse” by Brian Braiker, Newsweek, March 22, 2003 So if personalities play a role in shaping history, then, what can you say about the personalities of Bush and Rumsfeld? They’re ideologues. Bush seems to feel that he’s been appointed by […]
It’s already a couple of weeks old, but it’s a remarkably clear and accurate description of the current situation: “The Arrogant Empire” by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, March 24, 2003 America’s special role in the world — its ability to buck history — is based not simply on its great strength, but on a global […]
An important column on how the US is attempting to “justify” civilian casualties: “‘Terror’ as the ultimate excuse” by Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times After sweeping aside a U.N. disarmament program that was working, and now with the United States unable to produce evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, we find after-the-fact justification for […]
When you are in Page Layout view mode in Word X, and you choose to make invisible characters such as a paragraph marks visible, it automatically causes Word to repaginate the whole document. Why? These characters that Word is asked to display are invisible. So how can they have any impact on the page layout […]