Tag: Technology

Bad Back Then, Still Awful

Technology

I see that Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program has just turned 40, which is proof that you can fool a bunch of the people all the time (provided that you bundle your foul, inadequate software into a compendium suite which just “happens” to work okay with the core operating system which, lest we forget, you also created).

I don’t know a lot about a lot of stuff, and even less about software, except that I’ve been a spreadsheet user — at times, a very heavy spreadsheet user — all the way from early 1980s VisiCalc, to SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 through Quattro Pro, while having all that time avoided Excel because its first iteration was dreadful.

Then I joined a company which only used MS Excel, and insisted that I do too (as well as the stupid Word and even-worse Access.  Of course, it required re-learning all my old commands in a new language — not too difficult — but what was difficult was discovering that Excel had not really improved much over the years.

So I quit using the thing, did all my development and report design work in Quattro Pro — which was still the best spreadsheet program extant — and then translated everything into Excel, which was time-consuming and also counter-productive because a great many commands I’d used in Quattro as a matter of course had no equivalent in Excel.  (Bear in mind that this was back in the 1990s and early 2000s, and things may have changed since then.)

Also, Quattro’s companion database product Paradox was streets better than pretty much all other such programs back then, which hamstrung me even more.

It always struck me that MS products, like Apple’s, are great if you’ve never used anything like that before.  If you have, however, and are familiar with the competitive products, MS always comes up short.

Nowadays, my needs are a great deal more modest than back then, so I use Apache’s Open Office suite (Writer and Calc) because a) they work just fine for me and b) they’re free.

Now, if I have to send someone something I wrote or crafted on a spreadsheet, I just tell the recipient to download Open Office to be able to read the stuff.  (I should point out that the Son&Heir used OO Writer exclusively to write his papers all the way through college, and never had a problem — to this day it’s the only thing he writes with — but at his job at Global MegaBank Inc. he has to use Excel, which he hates more than I do.)

So Happy Birthday, Inferior Spreadsheet Product, for what that’s worth.  (Nothing, by comparison to Open Office’s Calc.)

Dust Settled

Technology

Okay, all that connectivity bullshit seems to have cleared up.  I won’t go into detail, but the past two days have been somewhat nerve-wracking because I kind of like keeping this here back porch of mine going, and because without an Internet connection in my house, I was going to have to go to places like Sta*buck$ or my apartment complex’s front office to use their free wi-fi.  And the rent had to be paid,yesterday — and there was no guarantee that I would be able to do it online.  (Not that I care that much;  my bank has a branch literally in the next block — actual walking distance, no kidding — so at worst I could get a cashier’s check cut in about five minutes.)

Also, my plagues & poxes episode finally seems to have cleared up — although New Wife is now showing some worrying symptoms of same — but at least I’m no longer hacking up bits of lung or whatever.

The downtime meant I had no time to assemble the Monday Funnies or News Roundup for their respective days, but that’s not important in the grand scheme of things, what with so many others putting out the same type of content anyway.  And to be quite frank, both involve quite a lot of work to put together (“curate”? I hate that fucking word), so I might just make the Roundup a weekly thing.

Anyway, normal service will now be resumed.

Assuming, of course, that in the general mood of whatthefuck that I described last week, that there’s anything I feel like ranting about or even giggling at.

Dislocation

Technology

Having reached the end of my tether with AT&T/DirecTv, I’m swapping Internet providers.  So please don’t be alarmed if there’s a shortage of posts over the next couple of days as I grapple with the promised “easy self-installation” promised by the new guys.

The last “easy self-installation” promised by AT&T ended up taking over four hours with a techie, as Loyal Readers may recall.

In the meantime, feast your eyes upon this:

…and go here to see the price.

Back soon, I hope.

Update:  Forget that shit.  Spectrum is worse than AT&T, so I just kept the status quo.

Better Or Worse?

Lifestyle, Technology

I suppose enough time has passed since cell phones became cheap and therefore ubiquitous to ponder the question:  is life better with cell phones?  Denise Van Outen thinks not:

Denise Van Outen reckons smartphones have killed the fun of the hedonistic ’90s as revellers’ antics are now being recorded instead of remembered.

The 50-year-old actress and telly host made her name as one of the ballsiest women on TV more than a quarter of a century ago – partying with the likes of Sara Cox and Zoe Ball.

But the mum-of-one is now lamenting the loss of the ‘Cool Britannia’ decade – and blames the likes of Apple for sucking the joy out of life.She blasted: “We never had access to everything on our smartphone. So, you’d go out and you’d just be in the moment and really enjoy it. I remember going to the big festivals like Glastonbury and Reading and you wouldn’t have your phone with you, you wouldn’t be videoing anything.

“I think people are starting to see now that smartphones can be a hindrance and stop people actually enjoying themselves.”

“And I think we’re gradually getting to a stage where a lot of people… for example, if you’re going to a party – are putting on invites that it’s a ‘No phone policy’.

I dunno.  I find myself hopelessly conflicted about the whole cellular phone business.  Never mind an early adopter, I put off buying one of the things for years, until Connie actually forced me into getting one.  So I had a Nokia flip phone for years until my kids finally shamed me into getting a smartphone.

But maybe that’s just me.  As someone who guards his privacy fiercely (I know, this blog yadda yadda yadda), I don’t like being at someone else’s beck and call, and at least the advent of caller ID made things bearable because I could decide whether or not to take the call.

And cell phones — at least the smart ones — put in an appearance quite long after I’d semi-retired;  I cannot imagine having one in a workplace environment, and finding out that no matter where I happened to be, I was still in the office.

Ugh.

That said, there have been times that being connected to the outside world has had its advantages — a couple of emergencies, helping the kids out of a jam, etc. — so yes, there’s that.  And I can see that for some jobs (e.g. realtor) cell phones have been a tremendous help to productivity.  I remember going to the airport during the early 1990s (when I did most of my business travel) and feeling sorry for those souls who were glued to pay phones (remember them?), contacting clients, the office, family etc. in those few minutes before takeoff.  For them — the people whom Woody Allen in a rare moment of actual humor termed “connectivity assholes” — there’s no doubt that the cell phone has been a boon.

I remain unconvinced, however, that the conveeeenience of the cell phone has been that much of an improvement to society.  And I resent like hell the intrusiveness of the things, enabling the outside world to contact me whether or not I feel like being contacted at all, let alone by people I have no wish to communicate with (politicians, pollsters, scam artists etc.)

I’m not a Luddite by any stretch, by the way.  I embraced email, for example, with a vengeance and to this day I prefer to communicate by that method instead of a phone call.

But I’m a reluctant user of the phone — any phone, not just cell phones, mind you — so don’t expect me to sing its praises.

And the lovely Denise has that part right:  going out is a much better experience without a cell phone.  We all used to make fun of Japanese tourists who experienced their entire trip through the lens of their Pentax.

Now, of course, we are all Japanese, who have to record our every experience lest we forget it.

What bollocks.

Not That Unusual Anymore

Technology

Following the recent Crowdstrike/Microsoft debacle, we apparently now have this little problem:

Students in Singapore are scrambling after a security breach wiped notes and all other data from school-issued iPads and Chromebooks running the mobile device management app Mobile Guardian.

According to news reports, the mass wiping came as a shock to multiple students in Singapore, where the Mobile Guardian app has been the country’s official mobile device management provider for public schools since 2020. Singapore’s Ministry of Education said Monday that roughly 13,000 students from 26 secondary schools had their devices wiped remotely in the incident. The agency said it will remove the Mobile Guardian from all iPads and Chromebooks it issues.

Allow me to repeat the warning:  the more centralized the dissemination method, the greater the vulnerability becomes, and the more people will be affected.

I’m not all for going that far back to when lecturers and teachers handed out paper copies of material, and students took actual notes by writing them out during class — but you have to admit that this Singapore incident would never have happened under those circumstances.

Sometimes, conveeeenience comes with a high price tag — something I’ve also often said before.