Blog Moved

Hello, my blog has moved to a new home:

http://blog.jordan-west.com/

I’ll be archiving all the posts up until now on here, but all new posts will only appear on that above address.

11 Blue-Screens of Death in Real Life

EDIT: OK, I’m a bit slow, but I can’t not include this classic from the Beijing Olympics:

The world relies on Windows. Good job Microsoft.

OK, this next one isn’t really in real life but its entertaining nonetheless.

Starting Today

My quest to become fluent in speak Japanese began today. I’m taking Japanese classes for 6 hours per week, plus 2 extra hours of conversation practice. After one hour in class, and one hour of conversation class (with native Japanese speakers) I have already learned a lot more from the conversation class.

I remember while studying a little Japanese in high school I underestimated how difficult it would be to learn a language. I am hoping that these extra conversation classes will help. When learning a language, I think it helps to put it in context by actually conversing with a Japanese person – it takes away the whole academic aspect to the language. Japanese to the English speaker can sometimes feel like doing maths – it takes a while to understand, but then it just suddenly makes sense. Then you realise there are a zillion other rules (like English – the I before E except after C rule is the most stupid spelling rule I’ve ever encountered – what about ‘their’?!).

See more progress on: become fluent in japanese

OpenOffice – It’s Not Cheating

With the launch of Microsoft’s new suite of software with an interface make-over comes an offer no money saving uni student could refuse. Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, for $75. The website advertising it all – itsnotcheating.com.au – is clearly aimed at uni students who pirate their copies of Office. After all how many students can afford the pricey Office suite, even with a normal student discount? It sounds like a great deal – you can even get a year’s trial for only $25, however I propose a better one. How about free? And no it is not cheating.

OpenOffice has been around for quite a while, however it is only just starting to pick up momentum as it becomes discovered by more and more individuals, businesses, and NPOs. The great thing about OpenOffice is that it follows the open standard. Basically this means that it is designed in such a way that features can be continually added, and remain standard across all office software which use the OpenDocument format.

The OpenDocument format was created as an ‘open-source’ format with the purpose of unifying all of the different document types into one public standard. Remember how annoying it was not being able to open Office 2000 documents with Office 97? OpenOffice can open both of these formats, and many more, however you are encouraged to save documents in the OpenDocument format. So it would seem logical that Microsoft’s new Office would embrace this new ‘universal’ format to eliminate all of the compatibility problems. Instead, in the Microsoft tradition, the company has opted to create yet another proprietary format, the Office 2007 format. By default, files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 cannot be opened in Office 2003. So Microsoft released a patch. Another bandage to fix up another wound.

One more thing to note – Microsoft’s offer is only available to Australian university students, and expires 28 May 2007. OpenOffice is free for anyone, for any use, forever.

Office 2007 (Australia University Students only)
OpenOffice