13 April 2001 putting the parts together

The road to simplicity is very poorly paved, if paved at all.



The attempt to switch to Open Office is not going smoothly.

My primary office suite use is in word processing. I can open, write, and save documents but I have yet to determine how to apply a standard format/style of my choosing rather than that of the program's. I suppose that will happen with time but until then the frustration levels are higher than desirable. I've word documents dating back to 1987, that initially lived on 5 ¼ inch floppy discs. Those migrated to the wonderful new 3 ½ inch hard floppies that could actually hold a megabyte of data. The migration continued through tape backups, to CDR's, and now to an external hard drive and SD cards. So the attachment to Word in its various forms is longstanding. The cost of Word, however, is higher than I wish to pay when there is a highly similar program available at no charge.



Equally, perhaps even more so, annoying is the transition from Excel to “spreadsheet.”

I have weather data logs that date back to 2000, recorded at hourly intervals until the 2004 hurricane season when I changed the interval to 15 minutes in order to track the eyes of the storms that brushed by or that hit us. Now the weather station we have is set for 15 minute intervals on one program and at 5 minute intervals on a real time feed to Weather Underground.

I spent an hour last night just trying to make the two spreadsheets record the same data in the same places. I'm not there yet but I've got a new angle to investigate tonight.



Added to the insanity is the different set up on the net book from my notebook. The sharing privileges, alone, are enough to make one spit nails. Permissions are not applied as they should be. Each bit of hardware wants supremacy. Only the notebook should have it.



This morning was the monthly Microsoft update circus. There were 18 updates for the netbook and 25 for the notebook. Fortunately I was able to download those for the netbook, leave it in standby, and let it finish the installation during my first class.



Dinner last night was spaghetti carbonara for me, and eggplant Parmesano for Gloria. Tonight's repast is as yet undetermined.

I'm hoping for a drop in the creek level. We had 0.83 inches of rain yesterday, most between 0000 and 0600. The grass, badly in need of mowing, is far to wet to mow.



That's enough for now. I have to run some tutorials.