Rants

I’m Starting To Get Worried

It is no secret here that I loved the first Iron Man, SOI have been eagerly awaiting IM2 for some time now. The trailers have looked awesome.

But now I’m not so sure. I’ve now seen a couple of clips from the Iron Man movies and I think it may suffer from the same fate as TDPM series (the first was great, the second sucked and the third was an embarassment.) In the second trailer the Stark Expo entrance entrance takes 20 seconds, in the actual movie it takes 2 minutes which is about a minute too long.

In the car race sequence where Whiplash chops Tony Stark’s car in half we get introduced to the new portable armor, the suitcase suit. The suit is a marvel (pun unintended) in that it is light enough for Pepper Potts to toss out of a car 20′ away to Tony’s feet and it is strong enough to withstand ferocious electrical whippings. Then it takes 20 seconds for it magically expand and then snap back shut bit by bit. It must have some hypnotic qualities as well because Whiplash just stands around waiting for the thing the finish coalescing into a complete suit before attacking.

The movie has actually had it’s world premier yesterday in Hollywood and the early reviews are mixed. I’m thinking that a week from Friday I may just pop the DVD of the first movie in and savor it.

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Miscellaneous Monday

Added a link in the Miata section called Miata Mondays. It is from a site called Cold Track Days and features a photo every Monday of a tricked out Miata.

Watching LOST last week, every time they showed Jack standing there in his dark blue t-shirt I couldn’t help but notice the resemblance to the protagonist in that video game Another World that I so loved, but couldn’t get to work back in December.

There are only 3 episodes and the two hour finale left of TDTVS and then it will be all over on Sunday, May 23 (why Sunday?) But that’s OK maybe they will make Saturday morning cartoon of the show.

You know how I spent a couple hours the other day ridding my work PC of ClearType after the Office 2007 install? Well guess what is running on the home laptop and hasn’t bothered me one bit?

House viewers must buy a lot of trucks or someone thinks they do because the big three have all run truck ads during tonight’s show.

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Removing ClearType From Office 2007

I was upgraded to Office 2007 at work yesterday. My cubical neighbor (Hi, Jim) has had it for a few weeks and has done nothing but complain. I have to admit I am not in love with the new interface, it does look like it might be helpful to novices and today’s big button/colorful icon lovers, but I’m old school and like the drop down menu thing better. I quickly figured out how to hide the Ribbon and add my wanted buttons to the top menu, so I can deal with the changes.

Office 2007 turns on Microsoft’s ClearType automatically which they have designed to make text look crisper on LCD screens by blurring the edges. Some people love this “advancement”, most don’t even notice and another faction hates it. I thought I fell only in the hate column because at work and home when I have run into Clear Type in the past the first I did was to disable it. To me the slight blurring of the characters, just makes them look out of focus.

Off to the web to see about shutting off the Blurr Type in Office 2007. Before you jump in to let me know Microsoft has Control Panel App for tuning ClearType, I tried it and it didn’t help.

Depending on which version of Windows you have there are different ways to turn off ClearType. For XP you have to:
1. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Appearance and Themes, and then click Display.
2. On the Appearance tab, click Effects.
3. Click to select the Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts check box, and then click Normal in the list. This turns it off for a lot of things, but Office 2007 still uses it.

To shut it off in Office you need to follow these instructions:
1. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click program Options.
2. Click Popular.
3. Under Top options in working with program, click to clear the Always use ClearType check box.
4. Click OK to close the program Options dialog box.
5. Restart the 2007 Office program. This is all well and good, but Outlook is still holding out!

To bring Outlook into line you need to go to View -> Current View -> Customize Current View -> 1) Other Settings Button – Change the 3 fonts, Column, Row, Auto Preview & 2) Automatic Formatting Button – Change all 5 rules. Then go to Tools -> Options -> Mail Format Tab -> Signatures Button – Change the font if needed. Then select the Personal Stationary Tab – Change the three fonts there. I changed them all to Tahoma and left the point size alone. Arial would work pretty well here too.

After all that, the documents now use the crisp sharp fonts I know and love, but guess what, all the menu text in Office 2007 still looks fuzzy. Turns out Microsoft commissioned some new ClearType friendly fonts to be use in the Office interface. Bastards!

There may be a different way to cure this issue, but I opted for the brute force method, my Google searching turned up a site that listed those fonts and I moved them and all their variations from the windows font directory: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel and Segoeui.

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Stolen Thunder

Because it is Patriot’s Day the FRS game started at 11:05 AM this morning. By 11:08 they were losing by one run. At the end of the third inning they were trailing by eight.

I had an idea for tonight’s post, but before I starting writing I did my usual check of select links from the sidebar and there it was in the second panel of today’s Soxaholic, I’m not the only one thinking it.

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The Dead & The Wounded

The the past week or so, maybe longer, the wheel on mouse of the desktop PC was acting up. When you scrolled down it would jump and jitter, sometimes huge chunks of pages. Scrolling up it was fine…so Saturday we went to Staples and bought a new mouse. We opted for a corded mouse for a couple of reasons, its eco-friendly (no dead batteries filling the landfills) and cheap at twenty bucks. As a bonus it had a PS2 adapter which I used so as to free up a USB port and now I don’t have to crawl under the desk and swap out the cables for the web cam or scanner depending on which one I need at the moment.

Today while sitting on the screened porch listening to the FRS getting their hats handed to them 7-1 by the Tampa Devil Rays the cordless mouse on the laptop quit working. 6 weeks and kaput. The cute little receiver which barely sticks out of the USB port was HOT to the touch. Just to be sure I swapped the AA battery out of the mouse with a different one, I tried the receiver part in another port on the laptop (I had to pull it out with a pair of pliers it was so hot) and tried it on the desktop PC and it still didn’t work. Guess I’m going back to Staples tomorrow.

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Fajitas Para Dos

Tonight Donna and I treated Mark and his wife to dinner at Sala’s for him helping me panel the laundry room. Donna and usually split a single order of Fajitas, but because the steroids she is taking make her hungry all the time she said we should go ahead and get Fajitas for Two and that way the leftovers (if there were any) would be good for her lunch the next day. Mark wanted a Speedy (a taco and an enchilada that is on every Mexican restaurant’s menu), but here it is only offered at lunch, so he had to order a “Pick 2 Combo” which doubled the price (at least it came with rice and beans instead of just one of those with the Speedy.) Mark’s wife Susan ordered the same thing she always gets, even though she read the menu front to back and vocalized a couple of different choices, in the end, it was the usual Chicken Fajitas for her.

When the food came to the table Mark’s plate came out with our tortillas and rice and beans. No sign of meat for the Fajita Folks. In what I’m sure was a shorter time than it felt, out came the Fajita platters, but without the telltale steaming sizzle that normally makes everyone in the dining room look and nod knowing that someone is getting Fajitas. Minus one point for presentation.

When they placed our Fajita plates on the table I noticed that Susan’s pile of chicken was the same size (if not a teeny bit bigger) than our steak and chicken for two. Donna pounces on the waiter and lets him know that we are not paying any more than for the single fajitas because we certainly didn’t get twice as much meat. He mumbles something about that it wasn’t his fault it was the cooks and hurries off.

When the bill comes Donna says to me, “Check to make sure that he charged us right.” The waiter hears this and knowing what I’ll find says, “If you want to have the bill changes you have to talk to the manager.” Ooooh, what. Is he going to come out with crossed ammo bandoleers and 45 revolvers strapped on? We said, “We’ll wait.” The manager comes out a few minutes later, listens to our story, and says, “I’ll take care of it.” Which he did.

We probably would not have said anything about it with the meat portion being the same if the cost was a couple bucks more and not fully double a single fajita dish. Afterall we did get twice the tortillas, rice, beans, pico de gallo, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, sour cream and guacamole.

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The Silence Is Deafening

Radios and CD players have always been strictly forbidden at work and when the Internet on our network became available, they added streaming music to the ban too. And over the years there have been periodic reminders that this is a no-no. In spite of this I have always listened to music by storing mp3s on the hard drive and playing them using Winamp (which makes it doubly wrong because loading unauthorized software and using the work PC for anything besides work is forbidden by a different set of rules.) I do play the music at such a level that unless you are in my cube, practically sitting on my lap, you can’t really hear it, so I don’t think any of my neighbors complained.

Last Friday another reminder on the music ban made the rounds via email from Human Resources, for some reason I took this one seriously and deleted several gigs of music and uninstalled Winamp. The last two days have been really quiet in my cubical.

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