Darkling Wood

Excel 2011 for Mac

I've toggled back and forth between Windows and Linux over the years. I much (*much*) prefer Linux, but a few applications forced me always to keep at least one foot in Windows. Those apps were: QuickBooks, Projector (a Professional Services Automation tool), and Microsoft Office. In fact only the first two really matter in and of themselves. For most of MS Office, you can shut it in a box with that bloody paperclip. I need Word and Powerpoint only to the extent that other people insist on using those proprietary file formats. But Excel is different. Excel 2007 kicks OpenOffice calc's a*se (I've used them both a lot). I do use Excel for stuff.

But I really don't like living in Windows. Apart from its exposure to Malware, the instability that's probably inevitable given its wide use just drives me nuts. Add to that collateral issues like the sheer amount of utter garbage trial/demo/ad/nag-ware that is inflicted on you when buying a new non-business machine, and also its constant attempts to "help" by guessing what I really want to do (which are never ever useful) and ... well, it sucks.

But about a year ago I decided that a reasonable compromise could be switching to Mac. A unix base, but able to run MS Office natively. Sounds cool. I'd still have to run Windows under Parallels or similar, but I'd get to live for most of my work in a much nicer OS.

But then I tried it and found that Office 2008 on the Mac is to Office 2007 (*The* Office) what the US economy is to a free market. Not Remotely The Same.

Well today I bought and installed the new Office 2011 for Mac. And after a *very* brief test I can say that I think that problem may have gone away. A key part of the test was to load up some Excel 2007 files, including some pivot tables from Projector, and some pretty intense INDIRECT()-based gaskets around those pivots. It all worked perfectly without even a warning.

Now although there were some macros in there (probably by virtue of the pivots) there was nothing in the way of VB. (VB? Messing up my lovely functional-esque pure Excel? Are you trying to be funny? If you need VB you need to go and learn more Excel. And if you *really* need VB, then you probably should be in Python or Ruby or something and dropping Excel completely.) So treat this, as I say, as a very brief test.

But so far, so good.

 

Kindling away

Brief thoughts after my first few hours of a Kindle 3. I bought the 3G+WiFi one.

Things I Like

1. The e-ink thing. It really is very good. I wear glasses, and now in my 40-somethings I actually have reading glasses too. So I was sceptical that it would be as good as paper for me. But it is. In fact, it might even be better. I'm still using the default font size, and even dropped it down a size at one point. But the option to increase the font size is a serious non-gimmick I think.
   
2. The ability to download a sample of a book for free, before buying. A friend told me this was cool, but I was worried it would just tempt me to flit from sample to sample. Well, not really enough time to assess that properly yet, but so far it has been good. Last nght I downloaded the sample of "Where Good Ideas Come From" and then promptly romped through it over breakfast. Converting that into the paid full version was as simple as saying, "aye, go on then".
3. Reading in bed. This had two components. First, light. This is not really a feature of the kindle itself (although the e-ink may be helping, but rather of the Amazon case I bought with it. It has an in-built, Kindle-powered LED, that is bright enough to read by (even given my eyesight), but not so bright as to disturb my wife. The second thing was also something my friend alerted me to. Since you have only a single page to look at, you could find a good reading position (e.g. lying on right side, or lying on left side), and then you're. There's no need to switch positions every time you go from the left page to the right. And it's true!
4. Just plain reading. Perhaps the best test of the thing is, can I stop noticing it's there and just get on with reading. Yes. No problem.
   

Things I'm Still Wondering About

1. I've realized that with a physical book, now that it's absent, that I get some kind of useful positional information from how many pages are in the "already read" portion, and how many are in the "still to be read" portion. The Kindle is giving some feedback on that, but I'm not used to that yet
2. Reading in the bath. I followed what I'd heard the Amazon CEO does,  and shoved my Kindle, cover an' all, into a 1 gallon ziplock bag. I folded the cover back on itself although it may have been possible to make it fit open. It actually worked fine. Obviously it does nothing to help the look of that cool e-ink display; and the occasional ripple I got from the ziplock plastic as I tried to flatten it was vaguely annoying. But honestly, it was fine. Most of the time I forgot about bag and Kindle and just read.

Things I Don't Like

1. DRM. To allow a comparison of reading experience, the first Kindle book I bought was one I already had in paper form. And I admit it annoys me. After all, exactly what did I buy when I bought the paper book? Was it, as many "IP" fans would have me believe just a license to use the content? In that case, why did I have to pay again for the material-less Kindle version. And in playing with the text-to-speech function, I noticed that whether or not a spoken version was available was partly down to whether the "rights holder" had permitted it. I confess I haven't fully worked out my own views on IP within a more general theory of property. So I allow for the fact that it may not simply be a lame excuse to pull a gun on someone to get their money. But it's annoying all the same. (Clearly not anoying enough, though, to stop me buying the bloomin' thing.)
2. That light thing -- the one that I said I liked. Well as I said, it's not really part of the Kindle. Since I'm guessing almost everyone who buys a Kindle is going to want to buy a case too, then don't think of the price as being around $190. Instead, think $250-ish.

More as I find it.

P.S. On price. These days, manufacturing quality just seems to be crap. The number of things -- electronic, houehold, etc -- that just break after far too short a time seems to be increasing. So while in the past I never bought shop warranties for anything, now I'm starting to do that more and more. So to the $190 for the Kindle, and $50-ish for the case, I added another $50-ish for Best Buy's "Oops I Dropped It" (as the sales lassie called it) warranty. So, total cost to me for the Kindle 3 3G+WiFi, with what I consider recommended, if not essential, add-ons was $324.72 (including TX sales tax).

Kindle 3 - A Study in Desire

Browse, browse, browse. Read, read, read. Click-link, click-link, click-link.

Oh, interesting video! It's Steven Johnson on his book Where Good Ideas Come From.

I watch the video, and then jump across to Amazon to consider buying the book. But I'm only considering. I'm still working through Crawford's Shop Craft As Soul Craft, and I have a stack of others in queue a-waiting. So I won't buy a new book at the moment. I'll just c-o-n-s-i-d-e-r.

Get to Amazon and, spookily. one of the items it offers for my consideration is Johnson. Cookies at work? Dunno. But anyway, I begin reaching to click to put it on my Wish List or Shopping List and it's then I notice the Kindle edition. The obsession begins.

Of course with my options increasingly rapidly, I don't actually do anything at this point. But my maximizing brain kicks in and I start the hunt: Kindle 3, Kindle DX, Nook, Sony Reader, and on, and on.

But then I step back for a second, and ask myself, why?. Why do I want one? Whence comes this sudden lust for another shiny object? Here are some of the reasons my brain (not me, mind) came up with, plus their rebuttals:

1. It will let me buy new books whenever I want. Trouble is, increasing the extent to which I can impulse buy books is the last thing I need! I have enough unread books as it is.
2. It will let me carry lots of books with me in one small widget. But, again, that's not a good thing for me. Choice, in the hands of a perfectionist maximizer, is debilitating. If I'm carrying one paper book with me on the plane and I decide "Sigh -- it's the wrong book", well tough. I'll just have to read it. But with a Kindle, the option to switch and chop and change will be ever present, and readily exercised.
3. It will let me read in bed without wife punching me in the eye 'cos the light is keeping her awake. Well no it won't; they don't have lights

Finally I realized, it's not at all what I need. The passion died. And by bedtime last night, I was safely reading my paper copy of Crawford again.

Phew.

 

 

Then today I went into Best Buy and bought one.

Important

In Friends Series 2, Episode 19 (The One Where Eddie Won't Go), Monica and Pheobe introduce Rachel to a book: "Be Your Own Windkeeper". Rachel's first impression on hearing of the book is that it's cool and that it "sounds kinda like the Hobbit", but after reading it through, she is deeply and personally affected. "This book could have been called, 'Be Your Own Windkeeper Rachel'!" she gasps.

 

Now I've heard about some real books being regarded with the same level of awe, but I've never read one. For example, Pirsig's, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" was deemed profound by several reviewers, but I never saw it. I can't remember getting much past the surface narrative. To be honest, I'm not sure I even finished it.

It's not that I've never read books that "blew my mind" in some way. At an early age I devoured books, and loved them. To this day I wish I could still extract from Enid Blyton's "The Enchanted Wood" or "Five Go Off In A Caravan" the joy I experienced from reading them as a child. In more recent years, most of my reading has been non-fiction, but I can get carried away by that just as much as by stories. I literally, in the car on my own, said "wow", out loud, as I began to get to grips with quantum entanglement in Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos" (the audio, by the way; I wasn't reading while driving!). And I could feel, in my chest, the desire growing to go study number theory as I finished "Fermat's Last Theorem" by Singh. And who wouldn't want to be, in quick succcession, a paleontologist, super novae finder, vulcanologist, and physicist, on reading Bill Bryson's Most Awesome "A Short History of Nearly Everything".

But while those were all breathtaking, gobsmacking, and jaw dropping, that's all they were.

The book I have just finished, on the other hand, is one of a very few on which I'd bestow that adjective to end all book adjectives. "The Happiness Hypothesis", by Jonathan Haidt, is important. It could have been called, "The Happiness Hypothesis Tommy!".

Haidt is a Jew, and atheist (he mentions both himself, and with good reason I think -- see later), and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, specializing in the psychology of morality. His book is the result of a range of studies, by him and his students, and drawing on many more, covering ten ideas pertaining to human happiness and wellbeing that share the following two characteristics:

1. They are found repeated across various religious and philosophical traditions in the three great areas of classical thought: India, China, and the Mediterranean.
2. They find backing in modern science

I'm going to leave it pretty much at that. This is not a book review, but rather a book pointing-out. It's entirely possible -- no, probable -- that the impact of such subjects is a function not only of what's being read but also of who is reading. As I say, I never "got" Pirsig. You may not get Haidt.

But read the book.

On that note, a few of words of advice.

To the religiously fundamental -- to those for whom the animals really did go in two by two -- don't force yourself to put away that position (I kow you can't, I've been there); just try to listen past the fact that he's an atheist.

To the hard-line atheist -- you Dawkins luvrs you :-) -- don't worry if you balk (you can't help it, it's OK) at this particular atheist breaking ranks and showing an appreciation for religion; just remember that he really is an atheist, and isn't positing some kind of non-science

To the liberals, and the conservatives -- oh just read the damn book and stop arguing. Or if you don't have time to read, here's a video of Haidt (dealing with only a tiny piece of the book's thesis) that you may find provoking (thought-or-other-wise).