I know a lot of people have complained a lot about Microsoft for a long time. I didn't regard most of it as legitimate; for example, every state that piled onto the so-called "consumer" lawsuits against MSFT was home to a Microsoft competitor.
But I believe they've lost their way. Vista really sucks; I took my Vista machine back and snatched up the last XP laptop available at the store where I shop, and Dell now offfers XP machines again after complaints from consumers. (Vista didn't support my Outlook account from school; AOL; or iTunes. An MSFT guy said I needed to call Toshiba; the Toshiba tech was no help whatsoever. But the then computer industry has never been noted for anything other than awful customer service.)
Office 2007 moved a lot of features to strange places for no apparent reason. It's like dogs marking their territory sometimes. It will not open some files I get from school without crashing, a task Office 2003 had no problems with.
My latest fiasco is with Money Plus. I bought Money Home and Business 2002 for business purposes and found it really, really handy. Just worked like a charm. Then we got a new computer and when we tried to open up the Money file on the new computer it said we needed a password. Of course, I never set a password on the old file. I trouble-shot this on MSFT's website and read that I needed a slightly newer version to get around this. So I bought Money Plus Home and Business but got the same message. No password, no opening.
Not to mention, as usual, the number of things that have been freakishly and pointlessly moved and changed. As has been noted elsewhere, being able to download your bank statement is largely pointless (when almost every bank now has on-line banking, why run this through another step by pushing it through Money?).
My dealings with the Help people at Microsoft have been interesting. They're from India, and they try hard, but they're dealing with increasingly inferior software.
The problem is the problem faced by many an American business; your stock options are worth less unless you constantly sell more product and boost revenues. So what we get instead are new versions of old products that are frequently worse than what they're replacing. I'm not sure of the way around that one, but MSFT needs to figure something out before they just start selling less product, period.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Friday, December 28, 2007
Paul Johnson
Random venting:
I stumbled across Paul Johnson's book Creators on a recent trip so I had time to read it. I had enjoyed what I'd read of Johnson's Intellectuals and History of the Jews, but this is tedious. He makes the kind of overwrought statements about literature that the late Richard Armour used to have fun with in his work.
More imortantly, it's not about "the courage of creation," as Johnson claims in the introduction, but rather about what he likes about various artists and writers. There's a few good chapters -- Mark Twain in particular -- but other chapters, such as the one on Shakespeare, in which one doesn't learn much about the subject except that Johnson thinks Shakespeare rocks. Of course, he doesn't use that phrase, and I don't think you have to convince anyone that Shakespeare was a major dude. Anyway, this is what happens when you sell enough books: You can write damn near anything and get published. So it goes.
It was not, as commonly believed, Linda Ellerbee (Ellerbe? I've seen it spelled both ways) who first used that phrase. It was Kurt Vonnegut. I really liked Vonnegut when I was a young feller, but found him also rather tedious as I got older. Where you stand depends upon where you sit, most of the time. I don't know who said that first.
The danger all writers face is moving into subjects about which they don't know enough (and I expect Johnson knows a lot about many of the subjects he has explored); it is in those moments that our ignorance is most exposed. I find that life has indeed been an endless search for knowledge, but each tidbit gained seems only to expose even greater areas of ignorance. Mark Twain may have said something to that effect, with much greater eloquence than I am managing at presence.
As it turns out, Johnson is an arch-conservative, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. In Intellectuals, which I had only read selections, he uses the often lamentable personal habits of famous thinkers to discredit their ideas. Of course, all the thinkers he doesn't like are lefties -- no surprise there. To my mind, both arch-conservatives and radicals see some things and miss some others. (Which is why I try to paint myself as a militant moderate -- take what works from anyone, regardless of their stripe, discard the rest. The truth, as it might exist, is often in the middle.)
My book, Wings of Power: Boeing and the Politics of Growth in the Northwest, got pretty good reviews from local folks, who understood what I was talking about. It pretty much got ripped by other academics, mostly not from around here. I think this has largely to do with the fact that I didn't automatically blast business as evil. In the case of managing growth, I didn't think they were. It was frustrating but also amusing.
I actually talked to one reviewer, a University of Washington professor (one of my former students says he's a really boring teacher -- sorry, I couldn't resist), because he so completely missed some things in the book. He didn't respond to that (it was an e-mail conversation), but did say he'd actually enjoyed the book. Right.
I am a pimple on the butt of academia; I'm not under any illusions on that score. And if you haven't read Wings, don't worry: You're not alone.
I stumbled across Paul Johnson's book Creators on a recent trip so I had time to read it. I had enjoyed what I'd read of Johnson's Intellectuals and History of the Jews, but this is tedious. He makes the kind of overwrought statements about literature that the late Richard Armour used to have fun with in his work.
More imortantly, it's not about "the courage of creation," as Johnson claims in the introduction, but rather about what he likes about various artists and writers. There's a few good chapters -- Mark Twain in particular -- but other chapters, such as the one on Shakespeare, in which one doesn't learn much about the subject except that Johnson thinks Shakespeare rocks. Of course, he doesn't use that phrase, and I don't think you have to convince anyone that Shakespeare was a major dude. Anyway, this is what happens when you sell enough books: You can write damn near anything and get published. So it goes.
It was not, as commonly believed, Linda Ellerbee (Ellerbe? I've seen it spelled both ways) who first used that phrase. It was Kurt Vonnegut. I really liked Vonnegut when I was a young feller, but found him also rather tedious as I got older. Where you stand depends upon where you sit, most of the time. I don't know who said that first.
The danger all writers face is moving into subjects about which they don't know enough (and I expect Johnson knows a lot about many of the subjects he has explored); it is in those moments that our ignorance is most exposed. I find that life has indeed been an endless search for knowledge, but each tidbit gained seems only to expose even greater areas of ignorance. Mark Twain may have said something to that effect, with much greater eloquence than I am managing at presence.
As it turns out, Johnson is an arch-conservative, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. In Intellectuals, which I had only read selections, he uses the often lamentable personal habits of famous thinkers to discredit their ideas. Of course, all the thinkers he doesn't like are lefties -- no surprise there. To my mind, both arch-conservatives and radicals see some things and miss some others. (Which is why I try to paint myself as a militant moderate -- take what works from anyone, regardless of their stripe, discard the rest. The truth, as it might exist, is often in the middle.)
My book, Wings of Power: Boeing and the Politics of Growth in the Northwest, got pretty good reviews from local folks, who understood what I was talking about. It pretty much got ripped by other academics, mostly not from around here. I think this has largely to do with the fact that I didn't automatically blast business as evil. In the case of managing growth, I didn't think they were. It was frustrating but also amusing.
I actually talked to one reviewer, a University of Washington professor (one of my former students says he's a really boring teacher -- sorry, I couldn't resist), because he so completely missed some things in the book. He didn't respond to that (it was an e-mail conversation), but did say he'd actually enjoyed the book. Right.
I am a pimple on the butt of academia; I'm not under any illusions on that score. And if you haven't read Wings, don't worry: You're not alone.
The Title
I decided to call this "The Village Idiot" because I have legal proof of my status as an idiot. To wit, the inestimable U.S. Supreme Court Justict Antonin Scalia weighed in a few years back that anyone who thinks that the U.S. Constitution was intended to be a flexible document is an idiot. There you go.
I base my opinion on the writings of James Madison, the chief author of the Constitution, who seems to have intended that it be flexible. Of course, he's not here, and we can't ask him. That never seems to keep people, including me, from making reference to the wishes of the Founding Dads in supporting our particular points of view. Perhaps more on this later.
Meanwhile, our new show, Crazy/Naked, opens in a few weeks. www.breederstheater.com
This is will no doubt help cement my reputation as an idiot. So it goes.
I base my opinion on the writings of James Madison, the chief author of the Constitution, who seems to have intended that it be flexible. Of course, he's not here, and we can't ask him. That never seems to keep people, including me, from making reference to the wishes of the Founding Dads in supporting our particular points of view. Perhaps more on this later.
Meanwhile, our new show, Crazy/Naked, opens in a few weeks. www.breederstheater.com
This is will no doubt help cement my reputation as an idiot. So it goes.
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