The Proletariat Congress

Once again, the NDP are the champion of the average Canadian.

Cell phone carriers Telus and Bell are going to be, next month charging their users for every incoming text message, spam or not.  Each of these messages will cost 15-cents.  The problem with this is that the person receiving has no control over the messages that he or she will receive and the person sending it likely already has a plan to cover it or they don’t mind stomaching the cost of sending a single message.

By this logic, spammers will already be paying for a plan and it would likely cover the process of sending an unlimited number of messages.  The receiver doesn’t want spam.  We hate it in our mail, we hate it in our blogs, we hate it in our email.  We hate it period.  So why should we have to pay for this?  I’ll tell you why; some poor CEO is only able to afford one luxury vacation this year instead of two.

Fortunately for Canadians, despite our very closed market, we do have two options, Rogers (the least of the three evils) and my preferred carrier Virgin (who I am currently with an enjoying an incredible cell phone plan because they don’t feel the need to gauge me at every turn).

Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that we as Canadians are being just plain fucked over because the Conservatives don’t want to open up the market to foreign competition, which would drastically reduce our dependence on these large oligopolies.

Even if we don’t open our market, we as consumers deserve protection from unscrupulous corporations out to make an easy buck.

Even if you don’t fundamentally agree with the NDP on most issues, I believe this is one time when you will want to.  Do yourself a favour and visit the link at the top of this entry.  Click on the nice picture.  You know you want to.

It is bound to happen to most of us sooner or late. It will happen to you. You may not know it now, but it will happen and when it does, it will irritate you to no end. Am I talking of death or tax? No, this is the other thing in life that can be considered inevitable: Windows XP turning on its user!

It happen to me! And why did this horrible thing happen to me? What could I have been possibly doing at the time to deserve having this happen to me? Was I looking at a website I shouldn’t be looking at or was I doing something else equally as naughty? What could I have possibly done to incur the wrath of Microsoft, who feels it necessary to treat legitimate users like common thieves?

What did I do to deserve this? I was only trying to plug my MP3 player into a USB port on the back of my computer and I unplugged my USB mouse. Now, when I plugged my mouse back in, I found it wasn’t working and I tried to reset the wireless receiver for my mouse as well as the mouse. Upon failing to do so, I got a pop-up window telling me that it was an unrecognisable USB device, so I rebooted.

Upon rebooting back into Windows, I encountered a window telling me that “significant changes” were made to my hardware so I had to reactivate Windows. I had known about this kind of thing (see: Namaste, Microsoft)but until tonight, it had never happened to be before. Alas…

Mind you, I haven’t had this install of Windows up for long. I recently got a better desktop (Athlon Dual-core 4200+) than the one I had before, which was an Athlon AMD 3200+ , and I had to upgrade from my old, loyal faithful 60gig IDE drive since my newer machine had no way for my IDE drive to work. So, on my first SATA drive, I installed my copy of Windows XP Pro (Vista is too buggy for my liking and takes way too much file control away from me) and I had no problems with my legitimate product key. This was back in December of 2007.

Now when Windows Activation pops up, after your first boot, it kindly informs you that you have 3 days to register your product. It registered successfully. Fast forward to today where my itsy-bitsey little itty-witty action of unplugging my wireless USB mouse triggers a ’significant change’. So, now I can’t even use my legitimate key.

I wasn’t even touching any part of the MoBo.  It was something as meaningless as a mouse.  Mice break all the time.  Why should Windows think that this is a ’significant change’?  Do they want to inconvenience their clients; their business clients whose last concern is that replacing a mouse would amount to a loss of productivity because they have to reactivate Windows in order to continue business?  Or do they reserve this “privilege” for  home users who are likely to only buy a Windows (genuine) product once every few years?

Microsoft is nothing else knows how to make the Windows experience nothing short of aggravating.  Thanks to this, I, or rather my husband, (since I’m at work tomorrow), has to call Microsoft’s ’support’ desk to resolve this.  Too bad I’m going to miss the fireworks.

A couple of months ago, I made an offer to the author of the demodulated blog. I made an offer for the author to make a guest appearance in my blog. They agreed to do so and will be making an entry at a later date. At the same time, the author asked if I would do an article for his blog. At the time, when I agreed to, I said I would make a link here so that any of my readers wanting to see the article could head on over to read it.

The Art of Rampaging is the article I wrote for the blog. Unlike the majority of my posts here, this one is about Oblivion, a first person fantasy game that I’ve played for a long while, on and off. It’s not necessarily a game review so much as just a commentary about a certain aspect of the game itself.

Head on over to the demodulated blog to read it if you’re interested.

While this blog tends to primarily focus on political issues, we would like to take this opportunity to talk about Microsoft Word 2007 now that we have been using for quite some time. We had tried out during the beta release. It was clunky; it had a few bugs, which is normal for any beta; that’s what makes it a beta edition, though most people would claim that everything from Microsoft is in permanent beta because they are always patching it.

Some people on the NationStates General forum seem to think it’s user-unfriendly and inadequate. We simply think they are resisting change because they are used to earlier editions of Word, when everything was harder to find because they learned how to in time find that they were looking for. Sure pull down menus are great if you enjoy the thrill of having to search for a simple function, one such as that changes your indentation.

The new office uses a tab system instead of pull down menus, though the sole exception is the menu for file saving, making a new file and changing word options.

Since there is a lot to say about each feature, I’m going to break it down over the next few days.

Today’s blog entry will focus on the Home tab.

The first tab is the home menu, with the most basic and frequently used functions.

Each box has its own subtitle or menu name, which tells us what the core function of each box is if we don’t want to look at each icon. It allows for the human eye to move quickly and figure out what you need from this tab. This feature applies across all of the tabs in the new Word.

It has your list of fonts, font sizes, and other font tweak options, as well as basic styles, including your most commonly used ones. It also makes it easier to use the “Find” and “Replace” options, which used to be in the Edit pulldown menu.

From here, the only functions that were not in a pulldown menu before were the options to stylise the text, indent and the list features. The font list and size selector are the only two that remain pulldown menus here, though the nice feature of the two is that you don’t have to click to see what it looks like. You only need to have the mouse cursor on the font name or size to see a real time update in your document, though the change won’t take unless you click.

The clipboard box in this tab is a little badly designed though. The “Paste” button doesn’t need to me so big. The icon used to represent it is too large. It should have been scaled to match the layout of the other buttons in this box. However, the Paste pulldown menu lets you chose whether or not you’re retaining all the text options associated with the text you’re putting in or just keeping the text by itself.

I cannot say I actually use this feature manually. I use the keyboard shortcuts of “CTRL+C”, “CTRL+X” and “CTRL+P” to do my copying, cutting and pasting, since it’s faster than using the mouse. Though the paste option here is useful if you’re copying from one document to another and you don’t want the formatting of the other document reflected in the one you’re working with.

The Font box is designed pretty well. It has a list of all the fonts available for your use in the document, including a preview in the menu, with the name of the font written in its style. The resize menu is next to it, with a little new feature, a button that lets you resize up or down without using the menu. This however is unnecessary, since the pulldown menu is still very viable.

There are a couple of nice editions to this area that are worth noting and it’s that the subscript and superscript buttons are now easily accessible. They were previously hidden in a pulldown menu, just as strike through and case toggle.

The highlight and colour buttons have also been moved to a better location. While they had been in the main bar for Word in earlier versions, they are now in a location that makes logical sense. As the two functions pertain to the formatting of the document’s text, they are now located with the rest of the text stylisations.

Which brings us to the Paragraph options. The paragraph alignment buttons were always readily available in the earlier version, as well as the list options. However, the line spacing button, which is next to the four buttons for alignment wasn’t so easy to find before. It was nested in pulldown menus. It is now in a logical spot, with a little arrow to allow for user adjustment of the line spacing.

While the bullet/list feature buttons were present before, there was no pulldown options to allow the user to change the bullet type quickly, nor was there an option for nested lists.

There are a couple of buttons which aren’t fairly useful here, and they are the fill-in one and the border button. The button could have been moved elsewhere, but they weren’t.

The show/hide paragraph indicter is easily accessible, though it should have been put next to the four paragraph alignment buttons, with the line spacing button located where the “sort” alphabetically button is located and it should have been placed where the paragraph marker is.

This is one of the ugliest features of Word 2007. It’s big, clunky and not terribly useful if you don’t frequently switch between styles in your document. This is one of the features that would have been better left as a pulldown menu. The Change Styles button is the only one good change in this area. The preview panes don’t add anything to the interface.

Nevertheless, when you hover your mouse cursor over one of the different basic styles, it gives you a real time preview in your document, as with the font pulldown menu.

The last box in the Home tab is the Editing tab, which should have not been placed at the end of the Home tab panel, since it has functions you’re more likely to use than the styles. the “Find” and “Replace” functions should have not been placed so far to the right. It should have been located with the clipboard options, as the third, with the first two boxes as the Font followed by the Paragraph box.

That is it for the Home tab.

Part two of this will look at the Insert tab.