Rants

Last week I received this email:

Periodic audits by IT indicate that you have Mozilla Firefox software installed on your computer. Unfortunately this is not Emerson approved software and must be removed. John Smith* (our in house colateral duty IT guy) will schedule a time for removal of this software.

*his actual name

The best I can figure out the reason they wanted Firefox off is they couldn’t figure a way to prevent folks from viewing embedded video on web sites with it like they can with IE. So now I was stuck looking at annoying ads when going to websites andhaving to dimiss a several warning dialog boxes that a website was trying to connect to the intranet that was never a problem with Firefox.

I thought maybe just leaving a thumbdrive with Firefox Portable installed on it was pushing the limits, so I tried Chrome Portable. Chrome may be the fastest browser, but it was pig slow off a thumbdrive, so I gave up after 3 days. Now I just live with Internet Explorer…

Some one lent me a copy of Avatar (thanks James) because it won’t be available from Netflix for a few more days and I watched all of 25 minutes of it.* I’m thinking Cameron had a really vivid acid trip back in 1994…

Don’t ask how I can buy into a guy in a metal suit that can fly at supersonic speeds and shoot, like, plasma rays out of his palms and then one day later can’t believe 10 foot tall blue creatures. Probably had to do with what seemed to me like a continuous stream of scenes I’d seen before several times in numerous other movies.

* Edit: While pondering this morning on why I didn’t like this movie, I thought of a better title for this post, GCI’d Disney Movie, but for some reason WordPress won’t let me edit my own titles.

It is no secret here that I loved the first Iron Man, SOI have been eagerly awaiting IM2 for some time now. The trailers have looked awesome.

But now I’m not so sure. I’ve now seen a couple of clips from the Iron Man movies and I think it may suffer from the same fate as TDPM series (the first was great, the second sucked and the third was an embarassment.) In the second trailer the Stark Expo entrance entrance takes 20 seconds, in the actual movie it takes 2 minutes which is about a minute too long.

In the car race sequence where Whiplash chops Tony Stark’s car in half we get introduced to the new portable armor, the suitcase suit. The suit is a marvel (pun unintended) in that it is light enough for Pepper Potts to toss out of a car 20′ away to Tony’s feet and it is strong enough to withstand ferocious electrical whippings. Then it takes 20 seconds for it magically expand and then snap back shut bit by bit. It must have some hypnotic qualities as well because Whiplash just stands around waiting for the thing the finish coalescing into a complete suit before attacking.

The movie has actually had it’s world premier yesterday in Hollywood and the early reviews are mixed. I’m thinking that a week from Friday I may just pop the DVD of the first movie in and savor it.

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.