Now that my heart can start again…
The USA Men’s hockey team beat Canada last night 5-3, sealing a first or second place position in the standings (Sweden’s victory put us in first due to the way the tiebreaks at the Olympics work). It was a hell of a game — and when Canada had pulled their goalie, Martin Broduer, my heart was skipping all over the place. That empty net goal helped me breathe again.
On to the quarter finals!
These geniuses are lucky no student’s parent came to their office and killed them for this. I don’t know who approved giving 1800 students laptops with webcams and microphones that the school could (and did) monitor remotely during off-hours, but this person should spend some time in jail. For?
All kinds of privacy violations, wire tapping violations, oh, and I don’t know, conspiracy to create and distribute child pornography. If we’re going to go after 17 year old kids for sending each other pictures of their genitals, we should definitely go after adults who willingly expose 1800 kids to the possibility of being spied on while they undress or, because they’re teenagers, masturbate with the laptop in the room.
Fired and jailed. They’re lucky they’ve not been strung up.
I’m a huge advocate of free/open source software. I like to use it, and I think it makes the world of computing better. Some of it is that the open source software I’ve been using is easier to customize and more fits my particular mindset — I like the way Fluxbox and vim work, for example. Usually, it comes down to open source stuff pissing me off less than closed source.
OpenOffice.org is an exception. I’ve had to use it a lot for work lately, building spreadsheets and whatnot, because there is no Linux version of Office. I come into this as someone who has spent more time in OO.o than in Microsoft Office by about a 10:1 margin, 1000:1 when it comes to the 2007 variety.
For one, we ran into some compatibility issues between OO.o and two versions of Excel. Of course, we also ran into problems between the two versions of Excel — I had a file saved in Pre-2007 Office, opened it in 2007… and it crashed the program. This should never happen. I finally tracked it down to an issue with trendlines, deleted those graphs, and it works. So that’s actually a point in OO.o’s favor. No file saved by one Excel should ever crash a NEWER version.
But the real problem, and the real reason that OO.o is a dog, came running large spreadsheets. It is obvious that no one uses OO.o’s Calc to do any real work, because when I had four sheets filled with data — the spreadsheet is around 400kb — the thing lagged my system down to unbearable speeds. My machine is a dual-core, 3ghz processor monster with 4GB of RAM running CentOS 5 and Fluxbox. The underlying OS uses almost no memory. But a few worksheets and hundred rows of data and OO.o Calc takes sixty seconds to highligh 100 lines of data (one column, 100 rows).
Excel in a virtual machine worked 100x faster, no exaggeration. Point to Microsoft Office.
Then when actually trying to make graphs, the ability of OpenOffice.org Calc to do polynomial trendlines is crippled. I spent at least an hour on the Google trying to figure out how to do it and there was some macro I could download and use (imagine that makes it much slower…), and that is a deal breaker. When someone has to go to a conference and give a report in front of people they don’t want to rely on some wonk macro to get the R^2, they want to push a button and get it. Point to Excel.
One more point in OO.o’s favor, though this may be fixed in 2007: In Calc I could label data points with text, while Excel (pre-2007) only wanted to use their value. What the hell? So point for OO.o — tied game and all.
Excel, like Word, is just more polished. I know that OO.o is probably safer to use, but this is a big point in the favor of MS Office. It’s just prettier and easier to look at for long periods of time, it makes better looking graphs (OO.o is just above the command line graph program), and it has, in my opinion, a better interface (even the ribbon). Options are easier to find. Point for MS Office.
You may say, well, it’s a close game here, and OO.o is free! Win for OO.o!
But that’s not how this thing called reality works. That trendline thing truly is a dealbreaker, as they are a requirement for this project. So is the general sluggishness — sure, OO.o is free, and Excel crashed, but there is only so much waiting I can do on a project that is going to be do. You can’t go to a client and say “hey our project you paid for is going to take 50% longer because our software lags.”
I love Linux, and I love open source stuff. But OO.o is NOT an acceptable replacement for Microsoft Office. Open Source proponents are going to have to do better. Some applications — vim, fluxbox, the gnu tools, ImageMagick, xscreensaver (or even xlock!) — are svelte and do what I want, following a perfect sort of logic. But OO.o is not one of them. At least not when it comes to Calc or the Word clone (Writer?). Fortunately, at home, I don’t need any sort of complicated spreadsheet, and Calc is passable.
As a side note, I tried to do some of the work in Gnumeric, and it also wasn’t up to snuff, but it didn’t irritate me quite like OO.o did. I didn’t try KOffice. But Excel won hands down against the spreadsheet programs I tried. (Personally, I’m starting to think “awk and a perl script for the math that runs gnu plotutils” for my personal spreadsheets…)
I don’t usually do this, but this person almost got me killed, so I’m going to do this.
Dear fat white lady in a navy blue Silverado (I think, I was a little stressed at the time) with the Mississippi plats JG? 239 (not sure of the third character): You’re lucky I didn’t get hit.
So here’s the story: I’m on the I-10 exit. I left work early today for personal reasons. The exit is two lanes, both of which turn onto the highway - left onto left, right onto right. I’m in the left lane. Apparently this retard is in the right. Light changes, but there are a lot of cars on the highway due to the onramp. Left lane is more full than the right. This twunt zooms ahead of me and takes the last available space in the lane — but seeing as how I assumed we were all human beings, I was already most way across the highway when she did it. This left me hanging out onto the highway because she couldn’t be bothered to STAY IN HER LANE and wait to merge.
So I hit my horn a bit to let her know, hey, lady, I’m stuck out here thanks. And she flips me off! Now I’m pissed and in my head she’s exploding from a terminal case of genital herpes.
Seriously, what the fuck? I’m pretty sure none of your actions fall under what Jesus would do.
Who dat is right. 31-17. The Saints win their first Superbowl — first they’ve even been to. Any given Sunday.
And Washington extended the streak to 14 games straight today over the evil Penguins, in overtime, and Ovechkin got another hat trick — almost sweet revenge for the elimination last year in playoffs.
Almost, but not quite. However, WHO DAT!
Apparently confused by what exactly the words Aeronautics and Space mean, Obama wants to push to have NASA study climate change and forget all that astronaut nonsense:
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.
…
In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change — and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system possible.
One administration goon said “We certainly don’t need to go back to the moon,” later in the article.
I don’t know how to put this any clearer for all of you anti-space travel fuckers, but this is our future. We have to keep going. There is no alternative. We have to reach higher, go further, get out there. No one is going hungry because of space spending, no one is going uneducated because of it, no one is losing their job because we’re spending money on this. The amount of money given to NASA every year is a pittance.
But hey, at least the guy is finally keeping to a campaign promise.
Apparently I can update the blog through the Drivel, a Linux livejournal/wordpress/etc updating program. This is the second best solution for me because the WP interface lags like a dog on my computer for whatever reason.
So if this works…
In a game that was filled with drama and emotion — including the heart wrenching feeling of seeing Favre hurting and soldiering on, solidifying his role as a hero — overtime was no exception to the drama. With multiple plays reviewed and an amazing field goal kick by Hartley, the Saints win their first shot at a Superbowl.
Who dat!
And lo, the warriors clad in red did defeat the vile and heinous Pittsburgh by a score of six to three. Ovechkin got two goals, one being an empty net. Them’s the breaks I guess.