I, however, got chilled. There’s something about perpetually being exposed to 32 degree cold: you don’t get cold, really. But it’s the better part of two years since I’ve been that much on the ice, and the rink was, shall we say, hyper cold—I got so chilled my fingers passed beyond hurting over to numb, ditto the feet were getting cold—I’m nearly immune to cold feet. And I decided I was approaching Not Comfortable, so I got off, ran my hands under ice water until I could get them warmed up and use the warm tap a bit, and then changed to street clothes—by which time I was having that old hip pain which I get now and again since a real nasty flat-out-sideways drop onto the ice from a fairly fast circular pattern: ie—I was practicing crossovers at speed, hit a blade, and went airborne.
Well, that one hurt. That was a couple of years ago, directly after a Bloomsday Run, meaning my legs were exhausted, I got cocky, and I’ve paid for that one ever since. Now and again it gets me. And the cold did it. I was so cold the pain lasted through lunch at the Doors and going home and trying to warm up in bed under covers. That didn’t work. Neither did Advil. But a hot shower finally began to warm the muscle up, and finally it stopped, just like flipping off a switch. Cold is a remarkable thing: dulls some aches, and exacerbates others.
The galleys for Intruder arrived, and I am up to chapter 5 doing checks—most of what’s happened is something funky with the punctuation. I didn’t do it; but sometimes when you translate from Word Perfect, which I use—into Word, which DAW uses—(sigh)—well, Word is a weird and quirky program. We hates it. And I can only imagine what that wretched program does when they use it to create e-files: it loads a thing up with more garbage than can possibly have a use.
Anyway, I am using it in pdf, yet one more very ‘dirty’ program. I tell you, Word Perfect goes like a lamb into e-book correction, and any novice can get directly at its printer codes, first try, easy to fix. It has NO junk attached, goes in clean, loads into html clean. Word Perfect, or Adobe—rife with gingerbread. Why does the business world choose Word? I echo Meg’s opinion.
Anyway, we are home today working: Jane planned to skate, but stayed home to solve a problem; and I stayed home because I’m trying to take it slow getting back to the ice, let the muscles recover, then do it again. I want to get back to flying around the rink again. Right now I’m going pretty cautiously…don’t want to fall until I’ve got the muscle padding built back, and I’ve had enough birthdays that doesn’t happen overnight.
Our library just had Office 2010 inflicted upon us, and I concur: we hates, it, we does, preciousssss. Nothing has remained the same, it now takes 3 clicks to do what used to take one, and half the functionality appears to have been changed for no other reason than ‘because we could’. This is aggravated because our library system is trying to make up for about 5 years of no changes by leaping into step 47 from step 5 without the intervening steps, or time for staff to adjust to all the new bells and whistles. Office 2003 might not have been a masterpiece, but we could all make it do what we needed to.
Sometimes wordprocessors allow ’emulation’ if you look into the configuration: you can choose to have keys have the old values and functions.
Will DAW allow OpenOffice or its off-shoot LibreOffice?
yes, 2010 office … I have it too. some things are better – once you find them – all table functions are on right click, which is good when you get used to it, and some style things are handy, others have disappeared completely … like the special styles I am supposed to present articles for our local free newspaper in (I am my village’s rep, which means first base editor and mostly contributor too)
then I go back to the macbook which has a particularly nasty version of word – 2008 – horrid – everything with giant spaces, won’t clear all the text out of a table, only cell by cell …. ggggggggggrrrrrrr
(I use tables a lot because I can’t be bothered to get to grips with excel)
For cold toes you may want to try an old northern Japanese technique to keep toes warmer. Put a small dried hot pepper in the toes of your shoes. I have not tried this but have seen reports on how external application of hot peppers significantly increase circulation.
As for Office I sympathize. I have to use it for my own books and articles.
A PS While I do use Word for my book writing the Anime Companion books and web supplement are done in Filemaker, much easier to sort etc for a glossary type work. I then export to text and plug into Word.
For web pages Word is hideous, creating documents far larger than they need to be with useless code. I am one of those that prefers simple stripped down code and use BBEdit for that.
Office is, by all reports, a pain and a problem, but it comes bundled with a lot of computers, and you get these companies where IT is not adventurous, and where the secretarial boss doesn’t remotely want to do even the slight bit of work it takes to integrate more than one ‘brand’. There are a lot of training programs for secretaries for Microsoft products, etc, but training programs that give that level of user the skills to switch processors on a document or run conversions, beyond just shifting it to pdf—not so much. Paying TWO big-office licensing fees to allow other processors? Nope. And let a secretary buy a program and convert at the last minute? Horrors, no. The person in charge doesn’t know how that would work, IT doesn’t want the bother if anything goes wrong, and it just smacks of ‘not controlled’, which can get a supervisor fired; so it doesn’t happen. I hates big offices dealing with computers, I hates them.
I’ll tell you what I used to do in the publishing industry. They finally agreed to take my computer files instead of sending it to Haiti to be typed in again. But they wouldn’t let me talk to the printers’ computer people. No, I can’t have their phone number, they can’t have mine, and I’m not to communicate with them because (and I was told this) printers are crazy and you’ll confuse them.
So……..I just embedded some operational info and my phone number, plus info on choices I’d made, right into the top of the file. The printers and I did talk, in those early days, and we got along nicely.
I do recall one frantic call from production when they finally did decide to involve the writer in a case of persistent glitch in a file, and they absolutely couldn’t find the problem. I fired up Word Perfect, asked it to give me all the codes involved in those instances, and they’d been there after hours trying to find it—I found the thing the instances had in common, they relayed that to the printer, and we nailed it in about 20 minutes…their typesetting program read a certain combo of symbols as a macro for back up three spaces, erasing…go figure.
I DO like your new avatar choice. Nihon neko-chan desu ka! (if you will forgive some fairly mangled Japanese)
Office seems to have a terminal case of “creeping featuritis”. Things seem to never be the same in any two releases. Open/Libre Office, trying to be exact replacements, will sadly be the same. Left to its own devises, without the need to justify/sell new versions all the time, Libre Office might have gone the “good enough” route of stability.
Back in the day there was a saying, “You’ll never get fired buying IBM.” Now, replace that with Microsoft.
yep.
Chondrite, meet Seishi, my office assistant and increasingly so, lap cat. Jane arranged the avatar pic. He’s actually a magical kitteh, who can develop more legs than you expect when you try to pick him up or especially if you want to put him through a carrying cage door.
He can curl into a ball or expand into the biggest cat you ever tried to maneuver through an opening. 😉
If your cats are catnip eaters keep sprinkling some in the carrier as a bribe – and wee dram.
I did this recently with a friends cat who is a transport hater as we had to get her to her shots. Worked like a charm. She who normally yowls like a Valkyrie in the car limited herself to muttering. Apparently she was much better with the vet too.
Oh, we hates the M$ Office Word, we does, my preciousss. Nasssty program, is it.
I could put up with the 2003 version, halfway liked it. The 2007 version, not so much. The 2010 version. *shudder* (Picture tribble/Klingon mutual reaction). Can’t find blasted anything in it, especially what I most need and work(ed) with. I have been using OpenOffice, but dislike some features there I also need regularly. (Track Changes and Search and Replace, for instance, and some weird bug with bulleted lists or the style base for same.) I may have to get Word Perfect, haven’t used it since the 80’s / early 90’s, but I’m not happy with what I’ve got now. — Word has always been a horrible pig when it comes to web page output. Just awful. (And BTW, I’m sure pigs would be nicer.) I understand many people simply run Word files (or their HTML output) through DreamWeaver now, but alas, I cannot afford to drop a grand on Adobe CS5.5 or MS Office suites, either one or both.) OpenOffice isn’t really better at HTML output either.
Ebook output, I’m just starting to investigate and learn. (And frell, it looks like it is a step backwards in the standards tree from HTML5 basis back down to XHTML 1.1. Sigh.)
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Peppers in one’s shoes? Well, I guess that’d stop any canines, too!
A friend swears by a soaking hot bath with baking soda or other salts (such as Epsom salts) for arthritis or other joint and muscle pain. A hot shower suits me, but I will probably start soaking now and then.
BTW, that reminds me of a question for over in the book questions section.
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Magically expanding cats. Ah yes, I’ve experienced that with a smallish cat who had the superpower to use all four legs to expand instantly to be too big to fit through the small cat carrier. He inherited the big medium dog / huge cat carrier, perforce. He could not quite expand that far. — I still have it.
May have to use it to find a home for my grandmother’s aggressive tomcat, who refuses to integrate with any other felines whatsoever. (What, and give up a morsel of attention or food or top-cat status? Horrors!) I’m going to consult with my vet and another vet, and he’ll either get adopted out (to some very brave and steady soul) or to a no-kill adoption shelter. (I’m unhappy at that. He has been a loyal guard-cat for years, is still sleeping on her bed, and is absolutely the *only* cat I haven’t convinced to integrate before. I like him despite his faults. Underneath the bully-boy aggression, he is a needy, scaredy-cat who arrived at her home still wearing (somehow) a collar gone way too tight.) He’s 12 or more pounds, overweight, huge even if he weren’t, 6 years of fighting and hunting, outdoor cat (mostly) experience. My two are a 5 year old most non-assertive gentleman cat in the universe, with a hidden sense of humor; and a near-2 year old stocky short guy who thinks he owns the world, for being rescued (and not eaten!) by a two-legs, he with zero hunting/fighting experience that I know of, but the supreme confidence he could. The one cannot fathom a cat that doesn’t want to be friends. The other is outclassed by nearly three times his weight and years of tough fighting. Sigh. (My two, I think would accept Flash, if Flash would only accept any other cat. Flash has good brains, but wants it all.) — And yes, that does not at all work as a sales pitch. Aarrgh.
This putting dried hot peppers in your socks is another instance of there being real medical value in those “old folk remedies.” The “hot” ingredient in most hot peppers is capsaicin. It’s now being used in prescription creams that treat chronic pain due to injuries and due to diabetic neuropathy. I’m not sure you can get it OTC, but you might check around and see if you can find a capsaicin cream type preparation from a naturopathic, homeopathic or herbal source.
Maybe you need some of those “Glittens” (convertible mittens) — they’re a one-piece combination gloves inside of mittens that you can open back the mitten part when you need fingers. See example: http://www.amazon.com/Convertible-Mittens-Suede-Leather-Patch/dp/B004956ZKG
Casteva (warming) is available over the counter. It’s main ingredient is capsaicin. Sometimes it’s kept behind the pharmacy counter so you have to ask for it. It’s helped me countless times with wrist and knees.
Oh, and it sounds like you may have a case of trochanteric bursitis, which can result from a fall onto the hip. You might pursue this line of inquiry with your chiropractitioner, as there are stretching exercises that are good for that.
My hatred of Word boiled over tonight at 7:30 p.m. when, after spending 4 hours editing a document that needs to be delivered tomorrow, with all sorts of nasty tables and past editing errors, Microsoft decided that I didn’t really want to keep the document. It reverted back to a 1:40 p.m. version that only contained one page of changes. I tried to find it, then called the IT department; IT spent an hour searching through my computer and hard drive and server but couldn’t find it. Since I saved after every page – for fear of losing all my work – and opened and closed the document several times over the course of the afternoon, I should have been able to recover something closer to my finished product. But no. All gone. I did figure out a faster way to fix the nasty tables – don’t do the changes in the order they appear in the drop down menu, so the second go around only took 2 hours….and I saved the document under a different name each time I saved when another page was completed. Then, on the final save, the one to be proof-read by the manager, the document again disappeared. But I was able to go back one document and recover almost all my work this time! I now have 38 iterations of the document on my hard drive – which I will clean out tomorrow … after the document goes to print. Why oh why did IT managers give up on Word Perfect???
@berylkit…do you have any hair left? I would be completely crazed in your place; you sound sane.
The one frustration I have with Open/Libre Office is the way they handle horizontal lines. Once you put one in it is impossible to eradicate. Or, rather, you can delete it, but coding remains embedded; the next time you hit Enter with th cursor on that line (like trying to put an empty line where the horizontal used to be), the horizontal ruler shows back up. And on every line you try to inset after! OOo developers are exceedingly reluctant to add WP’s “View Codes” functionality, it’s been an ongoing argument on theor forums. I don’t know how the LibreOffice folks feel, this was going on before the split. I’d love to go back to WP, but they don’t make a version for Linux.
Word is evil, evil, evil: and cheeky*, cheeky, cheeky! but so ubiquitous that I have to use it. WAH! I really miss WordPerfect.
(I gave up on Word for non-professional dabbling, and do my sporadic writing in Scrivener, which is now available for windows.
*Word decides what you wanted to do there. Heaven help you (and Berylkit!) if it wasn’t what YOU wanted to do.
Hmm, I haven’t figured out why this is so yet, but OOo has developed a glitch in which an ordinary bulleted list uses not the standard bullet, but a three-pointed star similar to the Mercedes-Benz logo. I’m not aware of having changed the default style definition on that. What gets me is, on three or four occasions now, I’ve created a normal bulleted list, saved it, and when it reopens, bang, there’s the unusual character instead of the bullet. Numbered lists behave properly. It acts as though it’s not the style definition, but a bug, since it changes what’s displayed on reopening the file, from the bullet to the symbol.
On the strength of CJ et al. praising WP, I ordered the WP X5 Standard suite and am awaiting delivery, probably next week. I haven’t used WP since the 80’s and early 90’s, back when it still had the MS-DOS text interface. But I had seen, around then, a Macintosh version, I think, and WP wasn’t any harder than Word to learn.
Heck, I used AppleWorks on an Apple IIe way, way back when. I still miss that thing’s word processor at times, limited as it was; or the text editor from Turbo Pascal in the days pre-Windows.
Why do I feel like I should be proud of banging rocks together and making fire and hunting dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals? Ug good!
As of five minutes ago, I’ve got Intruder on pre-order with amazon.de. Schedueld delivery: March 10th, 2012. Can’t wait, but have to 😉
Regards
Ektus.