Random Shorts (11)

The update rate for this blog has been so agonizingly slow of late. I had no excuse for it, but i was indeed has been away for a couple of weeks. I went out of the island for a week or so, and went on a training immediately after. Thus, when i got back in the office, the work things piled up nicely on my desk which effectively forbade me to doing even a small update. Added to that, the film industry wasn't much talked about subject in these months. Alas, i was quite surprised that for two weeks i've been away and the very first thing i did when i was back is to check the local cineplex schedules, i don't feel like going to a movie nor was i missed anything important during my absence. I opted to dig my collection instead and spent almost an entire weekend for a Star Wars Episode I through VI marathon. And i feel geeky right now.

Further, probably due to the long travel - although i've been very very careful in handling it, as always - i've got a hairline crack on the corner left of my MacBook's palm rest. The first noticeable damage for 15 months. Well, i've been planning to buy a 17" MacBook Pro anyway so it doesn't really matter. But at first, it was annoying.

In the working world, I'm sure that someone has pointed it out, but it was my first experience. In my office, everyone has their own laptop. And regularly, every two years, these laptops were renewed and with every renewal, the first and foremost request from every user in my office was to completely migrate their emails from the old laptop to the new one. I usually delegated these menial tasks to my subordinate. Because really, it was his job description after all. However, he was called in sick in the last couple of days, so grudgingly, i have to do the migration myself.

If i could say so myself, I've been quite successful in influencing others to loathe Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. My recent experience further established the fact that in terms of portability, Office 2007 and Vista won't get any recommendation from me. Even so, since the latest laptops were usually pre-installed with Microsoft Vista, i don't recommend my users to downgrade to XP - it was actually due to my general reluctance to waste my precious time to deal with the task. It was either use it or shove it. Another thing that my users often had a concern with was the Office 2007. Many times a day i got a call on my extension complaining to me (as if i was the one responsible for the creation of Office 2007) that they couldn't open a Word or Excel file a colleague sent them because the origin files were written and saved in an Office 2007 format, and all they've got to open the file is an Office 2003. Compatibility issues that therefore, i urged my users to use Office 2003 instead or if they insisted to use Office 2007, to save their documents as an Office 2003 document format. But yesterday, as i've said earlier, i experienced another compatibility issues involving these 'cutting-edge' technologies.

Everybody here, uses Microsoft Outlook (of course, everyone but me) to read their emails. And since everybody loved to keep their two-three years old emails whatever laptops they were using, it was usually their first and immediate concern regarding with the migration. It turns out that i can't import the emails to a Vista machine had i imported it to Microsoft Outlook 2003. At some point in the import process, the green bar of progress was just stopped, and sometimes the Outlook simply crashed. I spent most of my days dealing with the issue. Re-exporting doesn't worked, and reboot doesn't worked. The only solution i hadn't tried was to drop the laptop from a height. But i highly doubted that it would worked either. By chance, i found out that in the same machine, using the same previously exported emails, importing it to Microsoft Outlook 2007 worked flawlessly. Compatibility issues, friend.

Granted, Microsoft made its software, and software only. They left the implementation of the hardware on which their software runs to other parties and if there's a compatibility issues, that was more or less, acceptable. Unlike Apple with its Mac OS X, of course. They built the software and the hardware. Therefore, if a Macintosh machine runs an OS X shown even a little less reliability than they were normally known for so far, i would be the first to suggests that you should buy a WIndows machine instead. But of course, i'm using a Macintosh machine, and would planned to do so in an unforeseeable future which is a rather long word for saying, "incredible".

Had Microsoft built their own hardware, we might not have these issues every too often. But then again, we have a reported thirty percent failure rate for the XBox 360.