Choice

A very nice little article on Vista shutdown choices (there are 15 ways to turn off your laptop!). It also quotes from The Paradox of Choice, which is an awesome book. Check out the article, then flip through the book. Good stuff.

Leek Spin

Leek Spin

Update: This is just too catchy for a number of reasons that I can't seem to explain, and I had to read more about it. The song is called Ievan Polkka. I now have an MP3 version of it (let me know if you want a copy!) and there's a full write-up at Wikipedia. And as with anything else on the intranets now, there's a You-Tube also. And here's what looks like the original source before there was a leekspin.com: www.wielkipor.prv.pl.

Editing

How important is editing?

Mary Poppins as a horror film.

The Shining as a feel-good family movie.

Office 2007 Micro Review

I love it. It took me a whole half hour with each application to get used to the new "ribbon" interface instead of the old menu bar. Outlook is slicker, Word is easier, Excel is more powerful and PowerPoint is smarter. The integration between the applications is excellent and generally things work the way you've wanted them to for years. Easier to format text, spell check, make diagrams, import pictures -- all the things you've always done with Office but through various menus or drag&drop that didn't behave as expected. Being able to "pin" recently opened documents is a great idea for those of us that open a ton of different files during the day, but have a handful you use all the time. So far I can't find anything to really complain about -- but I will.

There are 3 default color schemes: a light blue, silver and black. The light blue is just too soft & light (what's a nice way to say "girlie"). The black is too dark, especially with my black desktop. The silver is OK, but again a little light. This seems like something they should be able to offer 100s of choices for. Maybe I'm just being naive, but it looks like you just need to define a few different colors to use for the various background and gradients while all the buttons faces either have transparency or sit independently of the background. But the real point here is that the top bar of the application doesn't pick up your Windows XP theme. Maybe Vista is different here and these look better, but using the Royale XP (Media Center) theme, all other applications have a nice looking gradient blue title bar. All the Office apps look different and it's not easy to pick them up when you've got lots of windows open. But anyway, any of the 3 available are certainly functional, and I'm just nit-picking.

A note on PDF output: This was supposed to be a default output option, but was yanked back in June. But Microsoft is still making it available for download. Good idea. The PDF files are simple and fast to create, though the file sizes are a bit larger than using my Adobe 6 plug-in for Word 2003.

Blurry IE7 or Office 2007

If you've installed IE7, you may notice text appears fuzzy or blurry now. I'm only running IE7 on my laptop, so have been basically ignoring it becuase I usually use FireFox anyway. But I've just installed Office 2007 on my desktop, and it has the same problem. The answer lies in something Microsoft calls ClearType which is supposed to make text look better, more natural, and easier to read on LCD monitors. Of course, nearly everyone just complains that it's blurry or fuzzy. Turns out there is a calibration tool you can use to help. This did help on my laptop, but running a dual LCD setup on my desktop limits its help because each monitor is so different.

Credit where credit is due: while hunting around for this information (finding much of it on my own), I eventually fell across another blog that basically says all this and more, with examples.