Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

Thursday, August 18, 2005

If you hear a burst of profanity coming from my office, you can bet it means I'm working with a Microsoft product. Generally, it's either Word or Windows itself. (Windows XP sucks, by the way.) Lately, however, I've been forced to suffer Outlook.

One of the biggest problems with Microsoft software is that it assumes that the user is a complete idiot. While this is true in many -- if not most -- cases, it doesn't mean that the software is any smarter. Most of the time Microsoft's products are pretty stupid.

The worst of it is when they decide that the user really doesn't know what they want, even when they have explicitly done something specific. Case in point: entering phone numbers in Outlook. I am partial to the 415.555.1234 format, but Outlook was bound and determined to format the number as (415) 555-1234.

Try as I might, I could not get Outlook to leave my formatting alone. I searched the menus and the help system and found nothing. Apparently, in this version (Outlook 2000) at least, it's their way or the highway. And that's the sort of thing that encourages profanity.

Journal Description

My life is, to me, ripe with frequent challenges, occasional successes, spontaneous laughter, adequate tears, and enough *life* to last me a lifetime. To you, however, it surely seems most pedestrian. And therefore, I recycle the name I used previously and call this my Notebooks of Daily Life. Daily, because it's everyday in nature, ordinary. These conglomeration of events that are my life are of interest to me because I live it, perhaps mildly so to those who are touched by it, and could only be of perverse, morbid curiosity to anyone else. Yet, I offer them here nonetheless. Make of them what you will, and perhaps you can learn from my mistakes.

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