Why are the ferns the first to poke out of the ground after they do a prescribed burn in the woods.
This picture is from last weekend’s walk in Hitchcock Woods.
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.
I missed celebrating 420 today. Bummer man, might have helped watching tonight’s episode of TDTVS.
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.
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.
Last night we cleaned house, the outside anyway. I blew off the roof and deck, Donna mowed the front and back yards and I used the blower to clean our driveway.
When we got home tonight you could barely tell I had cleaned the driveway, enough oak pollen clusters had fallen to leave a sparse coating the whole front yard. Oh, well, I was still going to wash the car, had to because the MMC has a breakfast event tomorrow and we couldn’t very well show up in the pigsty the Emperor was. Plus I have that awning-carport thing that will at least keep the stuff off the car *while* I’m washing it.
The Emperor is filthy. Tree sap from parking in the wrong spot somewhere, pine pollen, dead bugs and mud from an aborted geocache attempt cover the exterior. The inside isn’t much better, pine pollen there too, plenty of dirt and debris in the mats, plus some stray M & M Minis under the seats.
I need to wait though and get the driveway cleaned off first. Adding water to it’s current coating of pine pollen (surprise), oak pollen clusters and dogwood blossom petals would create an awful soup.
I need to wait on cleaning the driveway until I blow off the roof, which is covered in, well, you can guess.
Ahhh, spring.