The ravings of a madman

Yes, I think I quoted someone in the title, but it's a loose paraphrase, and I'm not making any money off it, so there it stays. But I am a bit fired up today. Because I had to spend several hours fighting with someone we'll refer to as "ppt," made by some global software corporation that we'll just refer to as "ms." My problem was simple: I wanted to adjust the default blank presentation template to get rid of that horrible font, Arial, which is the default. I also wanted to set a different default background and edit the default settings for inserted text boxes. See, a simple problem (or small set of problems). All I had to do was change the defaults in a program that a lot of people use all the time. Good luck with that, though.

As it turns out, ms has arranged things in the 2004 mac version of this software so as to make it virtually, or perhaps literally, impossible to change the default characteristics of a blank presentation. So, after I had tried about a million different options, all of which were complete failures, I just made a template that I liked and then set the program to offer me that option as a "slide design" in the formatting dropdown menu. I also resolved to stop purchasing products from the company that wants me to use some dumb font that no normal person would ever want to use. So that's part one of my complaints for the day. Feel free to post your solutions in the comments or in the guestbook section.

Part two of my complaints relates to a fact that I discovered yesterday. I've been buying a Brasilian decaf coffee (the roast is done locally, but the beans are imported from Brasil) to supplement my standard daily espresso habit with an afternoon chaser, without all the extra "juice" that caffeine gives me. This particular variety of coffee bean, technically known as Coffea charrieriana, naturally contains no caffeine, so it's supposed to be a great alternative to all the chemically-processed garbage that so many companies still have the gall to call "coffee" once it has been decaffeinated. I started buying the stuff to see if I could handle the flavor, and it turns out to be quite pleasant, at least in the Opus 1 (medium) roast that our coffee-emporium markets. The problem, I've discovered, is that the caffeine content has been replaced, through some [naturally?] defective gene that produces theobromine instead. Theobromine, as we all may or may not know (and as I found out yesterday) is basically the same thing as caffeine, in terms of how it affects the human body, though perhaps slightly less potent. So my interest in avoiding the effects of caffeine by purchasing this naturally un-caffeinated coffee has been dealt a severe blow. Sadly, the news came as no surprise to me, as I've been feeling a bit "hopped up" in the afternoon of late, and this feeling is what led me to research the beans more carefully yesterday. It does come as a relief, though, in that this particular coffee is quite expensive, and causes no end of economic suffering to our family.

Speaking of economic suffering, part three of the whine-fest that is today's blog entry involves the good people down to the revenuers. I had the good fortune of going through our taxes yesterday, and discovered, much to everyone's dismay, that some of the companies that pay us for our services have been less than thorough, or even sufficient, in setting aside the proper monies for federal and state collectors. We owe about what my new TV was going to cost, come August, and so we'll suffer on without an LED 240hz monster for another, unbearable, twelve months. Sigh. We suffer. My, how we suffer.

As my loyal readers are by now fully aware, I like to end all entries, conversations, and activities on a high note, and so I'll finish with the best news of the week. I'm very much looking forward to an upcoming visit to a potential employer, not least because the more I read about the city, the organization, and the position, the more interested I am in finding out how I might fit in there. Sure, I have to be realistic about my chances, and about the other positions that are still dancing around the bush, trying to get their acts together so they can all have a shot at my attentions, but right now I'm really liking the one that shall for now remain nameless. Keep thinking positive thoughts on my behalf, or maybe hoping and praying that we'll all have clarity and wisdom as we face the decisions that we have to make.

GPS? Or Wall-E?

So I was thinking about GPS today, and then I was thinking about that (average, at best) movie Wall-E, in which humans have placed themselves so deeply in dependance on technology that they just lie around all day drinking smoothies. While there are a lot of obvious advantages to being fed all the time without even having to lift a finger (I can see the advantages, anyway...), there are obvious downsides as well. Remember when we used to just remember all of our phone numbers? I could rattle off pretty much every friend/acquaintance/family member's phone number. Not because I wanted to, or because I was cool, but because I was too lazy to want to have to look the things up every time I needed to call anyone. Now I can barely remember my own number, let alone of those I call very frequently. Sure, I recognize them when they pop up on my phone's caller ID, but that's hardly even important, since my phone also knows who's calling.

So do I really want to cripple my already-mushy brain by removing yet another burden from the multi-system subtexting that still goes on, in an at least limited way? Or do I skip the GPS, suck up getting lost a bit more often than would be ideal, and ward off alzheimers and other brain-degenerating diseases for a few more years? Just a thought. No need to comment...

Speaking of comments, nobody was bold enough to venture a guess as to which beans are which in the previous post, so here's the key: the darkest beans are, not surprisingly, Starbuck's "medium-roast" beans, and those are located on the far left of the photo; next (in the picture) come Archer Farms "light roast," and those are roasted slightly lighter than the Spotlight beans, whose roast is undeclared. Finally, the lightest roast, and the beans on the far right, are the NovoDia Supremo beans. Get some at TJMaxx for $10/kg! They're pretty rad, for the price.

Finally, please notify your local colleges and universities that I'm not going to be on the market forever, and if I end up in an awesome tenure-track job right out of grad school, I'm unlikely to be on the market again. Ever. So your opportunity to have a world-class expert on many things that some people might be interested to know is rapidly slipping away. I'm just saying...

Happy 2011, just a couple weeks late!