What? No spreadsheet application on my MacBook?

After searching my MacBook, and then googling on the subject, I've discovered that my new computer does not have a spreadsheet application on it! Not even a light-weight one with minimal functions.

I may be in the minority, but I do have several spreadsheets I use and add to on a monthly basis, so I do need this type of application. I think since I have a few spreadsheets of 60+ connected sheets on the go that I can call myself a power user of spreadsheets. So a light-weight spreadsheet is not for me, but I'm not paying for MSExcel one more time...

So I've loaded Open Office (OOo) onto my MacBook. I was a bit worried after looking at several posts in blogs - was this still in Beta or not? I'm still not sure - but it has been working fine! It did have a bit of a hiccup the first time it tried to open a 60+ sheet spreadsheet for me, but the second time I tried it I had no problems... no satisfying reasons for starting the second time but not the first, but it works now, so I'm wary of it, but I can work with this.

I haven't tried other spreadsheet applications that work on the Mac, but I used OOo on my old Windows system as well, so there is no learning curve for me here. The transition to the Mac world has so far been easier than I expected.

Battle Plant Update: Tea

A fitting update for my 42nd post, a nice cup of tea with mint flavour added by steeping some of my mint leaves in hot water and adding them to tea from my favourite blend!

There are still some flowers coming out from the Bachelor Buttons, and now I've been able to have some mint added to my tea. Not bad for having a pot with no plans for growing anything in it and old seeds that didn't do anything last year, so may not have even sprouted! I think I'll try this kind of random planting again!

Why are old road names used for new roads when the old roads still exist?

In Vancouver - well, in a suburb way outside of Vancouver, but kind-of attached - is Dewdney Trunk Road. A few blocks away there is another Dewdney Trunk Road. They both go in the same general direction, but one of them gets lost in the middle of a field and suddenly becomes 132 Avenue - and the other one starts where the first one ends off - but about 13 blocks south of it on what would be 119 Avenue if they had stuck to numbers! What vintage of BC Bud were the city planners smoking when they named these streets?

And Google Maps will give you a meandering route that uses both of the Dewdney Trunk Roads liberally to get to Golden Ears Provincial Park in Maple Ridge and waste a lot of gas and time doing it.

According to the early morning traffic news, Dewdney Trunk Road is a very important road that broadcasters keep their eye on when giving their audience advice on roads to take. But which one are they talking about?

"Well, everyone knows that one's the old Dewdney Trunk Road, and the other is the new one." Yeah, that helps. Did anyone ever consider naming one of them "old" or "new". Or better yet, there are 26 letters in the alphabet, if you put a single ounce of creativity into your life, you can use any combination of any of these 26 letters to create a new name for a new road!!! (They can't use the numbers because someone put the new road between 119 and 120 and there is no 119-and-a-half street. That was good planning too.)

Did anyone ever consider making the go lights green and the stop lights a different shade of green, just because everyone knows which one is which by their relative position on a set of traffic lights? Of course not!

Do city planners ever think that a person who hasn't lived somewhere for the past 40 years may want to travel through an area? Did they consider that naming a new road with the same name of a road about 13 blocks away might just be a tad confusing? Have they never heard of using new names for new roads?

The dearth of creativity in city planning is appalling.

What input device should I use?

My new MacBook is much easier to work with than I expected it to be! But now I have so many choices of keyboard and mouse pointers, what should I do?

My wrist started hurting after using the touch pad for the mouse movements, so I have bought a bluetooth mouse from Logitech. When I turned the mouse on I clicked on the symbol in the upper right hand corner of the screen (with the touchpad) that had the same symbol as on the mouse, the MacBook found the mouse. It was a brief period of hand shaking, and the mouse was off and running. No need for any opening of CDs for the software etc. etc.

When I put my new MacBook in my regular work area, I have a keyboard that I use for my PCs at an ergonomically good position. I plugged it in to one of the USB ports on the MacBook. The MacBook saw this as a foreign object that was likely a keyboard and I was guided though about a 10 second process to identify the keys to the left and right of the two shift keys and viola, my MacBook will work with my keyboard!

(OK, previous post about not having a spelling correction facility in this TextEdit program was wrong... I just used it with the right-mouse button on an underlined-in-red word and got the expected variety of possible words I meant to use... I guess the unique 3 finger mechanics of using the touchpad for the right button click was what had confused me... I am a right mouse button addict, and I guess Apple is new to the concept.)

So now the problem is... there are so many other interesting keys on the MacBook, but should I be exploring them, or doing something useful? Would exploring those keys actually be "doing something useful"?

From the looks of it, the "command" key on the MacBook is just like the flying windows key on the PC keyboard ... which I have dug out and removed due to it's annoying way of booting me out of video games when I accidentally hit it. This may be a concern.

Hmm, yes, there are some other interesting keys I've never seen before, but the MacBook is now up at a good viewing height, not a keyboard height. I guess this means a retreat to the comfy chair where I can use it in my lap! This is an exciting thing for me because my old Dell laptop has a touchy keyboard that doesn't work when you move the laptop off it's flat desktop surface... not really a laptop at all anymore, part of the reason I'm abandoning it!

Such an adventure!

Is Google indexing my life?

Last weekend I wanted to make cornmeal puffs. They are something I've made before, and a great way to use up left-over egg whites. But I couldn't remember where the recipe was. I keep most of my favorite recipes on my "for fun" website when I've modified them, but not this one. So I checked the indexes of the recipe books I thought it was most likely to be in, but I couldn't find it.

After a short time searching through my recipe books I gave up and did a google. First I searched on "corn puffs" and got several thousand results. Then I searched on "cornmeal puffs" and got 74 results, which was getting better. So I searched on "cornmeal puffs" and "egg whites" and got 1 result!

Getting back 1 result in Google is a rare thing indeed, but it gets even more odd. The recipe that google found was a Google Books result, a scanned-in version of a book page. The recipe looked very familiar. I looked at the image of the book cover. The book looked very familiar. I have that book. I went to my bookshelf and found that book. I looked up the page I was seeing on the screen in my book, and there was my recipe! Google found the recipe in my book!

This is just too good! Has Google gone into my personal bookshelf and indexed all my recipes? Can I use it as an index to my own paper-based books? I've often wanted the ability to use an electronic search facility when reading a book - when I've forgotten who a character is and want to find where they were introduced or what city they were in.

Is this just an aberration, or will Google be indexing the rest of my life soon?

Is a power outage a good thing or a bad thing?

Due to a underground fire in downtown Vancouver yesterday the power to most of the business district was out yesterday and continues to be out today. So is this a good thing or a bad thing?

From a business point of view, productivity of workers is zero unless they can work from home. From a retail business point of view profits will suffer - but if they have insurance, maybe not. But from an individual's point of view, on a gorgeous sunny summer day, I'm thinking this is really a good thing.

Yesterday all of the traffic lights in the affected area were out. That meant many police officers found themselves directing traffic all day. But today there are portable generators on almost every intersection powering the lights so traffic is back to normal - just a bit noisier due to the generators humming. So that's not good, but it's not that bad either, it's interesting to find out that portable generators are enough to run the traffic lights in a downtown this size.

Workers from the power company are underground replacing more than a dozen power lines that were burnt in the fire, it's quite an education to see on TV news reports just how many power lines there are down there. Education is always a good thing. It's important for people to think about how much their lives depend upon things they don't see because they are underground - and to realize their lives won't end just because the power is out. There is a difference between necessity and convenience.

Some of the office buildings are completely closed and there are chains on the doors because the elevators won't work, so even if the daylight is enough for workers to do work in their offices, they can't get into the building. So that means a lot of people must have used the stairs to get out yesterday. That would suck. But why are people even bothering to try to get in today? That's a wake-up call that should make them think.

Oh look, over there, it's water, it's park, it's beach! So if you can't work from home... you've won a day off, and it's a great one! Celebrate!

I was walking through the affected area earlier today (on my way to a courier shop that was not in the outage area) and I actually found an open coffee shop! It was on the edge of the area that was hit, so they were open, and according to them, very busy yesterday. They were not as busy today, and when asked, the woman behind the counter said "It depends on how you look at it" when asked if she was happy the power outage didn't affect them. She looked like she longed for the beach. Words of wisdom in a coffee shop, the right place for them really.

I won't trivialize the inconvenience to hotels and apartment buildings in the area without power - for them it's a really bad thing, but for the office workers who have the day off today, take time to enjoy the bad thing that can be a good thing "depending on how you look at it".

Battle Plant Update: Flowers!

An early winner in Battle Plant! The Bachelor Buttons may look a bit short and the leaves are a bit stressed, but there are flowers!



I don't remember the Bachelor Buttons I grew last year actually flowering, so the left-over seeds that I planted this year just in case something would grow have done quite well!



The mint is getting a bit more bushy as well, but it hasn't taken over the pot and I do have flowers, so this is actually working quite well. I hope to report a surge in the mint so I can make some mint tea in the near future, I will wait and see.

Is this a MacBook I see before me?

Why, yes, it is. I have acquired a new toy! After working since 1982 almost exclusively with Microsoft's Windows operating system (with a few blissful years on IBM's OS/2 and a foray into Sun's Unix, Red Hat Linux and then Suse Linux, and VM and MVS just to hit the high spots) I have purchased my first Mac.

I have worked with Macs before, in the 1980s. ( Yes, I'm old, thus this blog exploring questions in my 42nd year on the planet.) Back then I found Macs extremely aggravating. It wasn't the boxy shape, it wasn't the funky clicking of the keyboard, but it was the most annoying little icon of a smiling computer that smiled out at me every time I went to the computer lab at my University that turned me off Macs. That may seem odd - it does to me - but the touchy-feely, "don't be afraid", kid-gloves approach was just too condescending for me to live with.

So now I'm exploring this new Mac - I've had it for 2 days now and no smiley faces yet, so we're doing well. Some interesting mental shifts have had to be made. Instead of picking a file and then right-mouse-button clicking to "open with" whatever program I felt like using at the time as I did on Windows I've decided to give all the native Mac applications a go. I've found I was actually getting quite manic about choosing which program to open on Windose - I was flipping back and forth between Opera and Firefox - Excel and Open Office Calc - MSWord and Open Office Writer and Notepad - it was all getting quite focussed on the application rather than what I wanted to do with it.

So I'm using TextEdit to write up a draft of this post - I didn't feel like using the blogger editing tool today. TextEdit seems to be a step up from Notepad, it does flag a word that it thinks is spelt wrong, but I don't think it has a correction facility - nope, I can't find one.

I just found out the Mac comes with a dictionary - with Canadian spellings for me Yay! (even though TextEdit thinks humour is spelt wrong, silly thing, and the dictionary gives the definition of humor for the word humour, it does still have humour there) - and it also has a thesaurus and a link to Wikipedia in the dictionary application. Now that was good thinking on someone's part! It's a giant leap from MSWord that guesses about your spelling and often "corrects" misspelling by using the wrong word - homonyms are deadly for MSWord. I like having a dictionary an easy click away, rather than a program doing guessing at which word I meant to use!

So far, so good. I like this Mac. It's not smiling, but I am, that's good. Now I'm off to explore some more applications...

Why would anyone import pie?

It used to be that we could get some locally grown or packaged food at Capers Community Market in Vancouver. Now that it has been taken over by Whole Foods, an American chain store, it has mostly American, Chinese or Argentinian food. So much for the local food movement.

But they have gone too far now. Last weekend we were looking around their baked goods area, and we were dumbstruck. Apple Pie IMPORTED from the US. We swung around slightly to view the kitchen in Capers on Robson. On a second floor in the Northwest corner they have a full industrial kitchen. Steps away. So close you could spit on it, and we almost felt like it.

Oranges and lemons don't grow in B.C., so they need to be imported. Vanilla and coffee don't grow in B.C., so they need to be imported. Apples DO grow in B.C. so you can get them locally. Pies DO taste better when baked fresh, not when they've been baked, packaged in non-biodegradable plastic, shipped across the border using way too much fuel, and sitting on a shelf waiting for some sap to buy it.

There is no way a pie crust will get better with age and shipping. Even if the apples were superior to the local ones – which they are not – why would anyone buy, and why are these idiots trying to sell, imported pies?

We have greatly reduced the amount of food we buy at Capers now, and are seriously considering giving it a pass altogether. It doesn't make sense anymore. They are mentioned in the book The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating but the food they stock now has nothing to do with eating locally. They are going out of their way to import food with no good reason.

Did anyone press the button?

In Vancouver, and indeed in many places on the planet, we have pedestrian controlled cross-walks. This means a pedestrian can press a button on a post at a corner, and when the timing is appropriate for the greater traffic flow, the motorized traffic will get a red light and the pedestrian is then mostly safe to cross the street without too much fear of being hit by a motorized vehicle. (Note the caveats “mostly” and “too much” are from my advanced years of experience that make me not automatically trust any human in control of a motorized vehicle, you still have to look before you cross.)

Also, we have elevators which are summoned by pressing a button usually found on a panel on the wall beside the elevator doors.

So when do you press the buttons? When you want the light to turn red and the pedestrian sign to light up, or the elevator to come to your floor and the door to open.

That's why it's so much fun to sit and watch people.

I admit I am assuming that everyone is familiar with this button pressing action. But it is so much fun to be sitting at a bus stop watching as people slowly congregate at the corner of a cross roads, waiting for a red light that none of them have requested by pressing the button. It's not just one person who may never have pressed a button and doesn't know about it, but it's 4 corners full of people of various ages, backgrounds, and group sizes, next to 4 different buttons, one on each corner.

Surely one of them must know about pressing the button!

Oh finally, someone presses the button! The light changes and people start moving. Oh relief! I thought they'd all be stuck forever!

So why are people so reluctant to press a button? I think it's from experiences with overly hostile elevator riders.

I have seen people get downright pissed off at strangers because they have come up and pressed the button for the elevator when it has already been pressed. They take it as a personal affront, as if the strangers either didn't acknowledge their existence, or saw them and assumed they were too stupid to press the button themselves. These angry people can then go on and on about the assumed affront for half an hour after they get off the elevator.

Message to the angry people: You know, it's not always about you.

Sometimes people are in the midst of their own thoughts, and just haven't noticed you, you're not Elvis. Sometimes it's hard to see if the light around the button is glowing, or people have vision problems. Sometimes people who are talking are in mid-sentence and the pressing is a tangible note to punctuate something they are saying. But sadly, sometimes people are just like you and need to hit something, the only socially acceptable thing to hit is that little button with the glowing light.

If you walk around downtown Vancouver, or likely in the downtown core of many other cities, you will see homeless people, angry homeless people. These people will curse bad drivers in traffic with a variety of racial slurs, gender-specific insults, and general swears and spitting. They will curse other people who are walking down the same street. They will curse the government, health-care workers, squirrels, anything on the planet actually. But if you look closely, they aren't that much different than the business-suite attired elevator riders who are cursing the people who hit the elevator button. They may smell worse, and are in more danger of falling over their own feet, but the cloud of rage that surrounds them is just like the one around the angry elevator rider.

So relax. It's just a button. Press it if you want to. Don't worry if someone has already pressed it. Don't take it personally if someone else presses it too. You all want the same thing anyway.

And if that's not enough, just remember that you may be providing some very humorous viewing for strangers at the bus stop!

Battle Plant Update: Mushrooms!

On Friday we found new univited guests in our battle plant pot! Mushrooms!



By Saturday they had, well, mushroomed!

This was an unexpected learning experience... so that's what the term "mushrooming" means. I always though it meant blowing up like a nuclear explosion that resembled a mushroom in shape. Now I see it means growing and poofing at an incredible rate like a mushroom plant - we could almost see them get bigger!

And the next day, they were shriveled and gone, so I removed the carcasses... but they have left a fine dust on the pot and soil which will likely grow into more mushrooms. This could be a problem. I have other plants in other pots that I don't want to be part of this experiment... will I be fighting battle mushroom for the rest of the summer???