Part 4: Email threads (or why GOOG >>> MSFT)

Suppose I am having an email conversation as follows:

Ari to David
David to Ari
Ari to David
David to Ari
Ari to David

And perhaps then Ari wants to send another email to David without having received an interceding reply.

In Gmail, Ari clicks on "reply" and it's smart enough to figure out that Ari wants to reply to David.

In Outlook, Ari clicks on "reply" and it's so braindead that it thinks that Ari wants to reply to himself!

Part 3: XLSX my tuchus

Someone in the office wants to save excel spreadsheets on a different drive. They right click the files in explorer and choose "save as" and then it only lets they save it as an Excel 2007 file, with an .xlsx extension name. Other people who try to open them with older versions are thus up a creek. But, when you choose save-as from explorer, you can't save it as a good, old .xls file. Why? Who knows. But for a company which spends millions of lines of code making their OS backwards compatible, this is horrid. I used it to make the point that when we next upgrade our computer systems we should have a real upgrade to a real operating system. I'm just glad I'm not using windows. Did you see the bit in the NYT about Microsoft execs inside emails about how Vista was not nearly ready for market?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html

And this

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0226/050.html

is a great pan of Vista. Which I hope to never have the pleasure to use.

my dad responds

I saw the Times article, well done. The Forbes article sounds like you
could have written it. Our product has to support Vista in our next
release. I cringe at having to support our support of Vista.

That change to file formats in Office 2007 (not just in Excel) is a
real pain. Most people here still haven't upgraded, and I wind up
having two copies of everything. MS was under pressure from the
European Community to move to open formats, but you can't convince me
that anyone is going to adopt their new ones just because they're in
XLS. OS X is so far ahead of Vista that it's like the lead Toyota has
in hybrids.

Part 2: ASCII WHY?

When I want to type a cents sign (¢) on a Mac, I type option-4 (option-#) and it pops right up. If I want to type a jolly pounds sign (£), it's option-3 (option-#). If I want a Paragraph marker (¶) it's option-7. Sure not all of the shortcuts make sense (option-E then __ for an accent) and some are kind of roundabout (the aforementioned accent, the option-U then __ for a diaseris) but they are all there. When all else fails I hold down the option key and the shift-option and scroll across the keyboard until I get what I want.

¡™£¢∞§¶•ªº–œ∑´®†¥¨ˆøπåß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…Ω≈ç√∫⁄€‹›fifl‡°·‚—

Look at all that good stuff!

Now...in Windows, there is no option key. There is an alt key that seems to be pretty much useless. To get one of these symbols, you have to figure out (using google in my case) that you have to hold down the ALT key and type a three digit ascii code that has nothing to do with anything. At least in html you can type & and get an ampersand. Not in Windows. Nope.

I hate windows.

my dad responds

In Word there is a whole screen that you can get to insert a special
character, and it even gives you a hint of the keystroke combination.
Talk about shooting fleas with an elephant gun...

Part 1: Scaling GIFs

I put up a new map and shrunk it down using html commands. It's a GIF. The Mac renders the shrunk-down image fine. Windows? Good luck. Good grief.