700 Calories

That’s the energy just from the solid chocolate Easter bunny that I opened yesterday (and will finish today). Not a good time to hold on to my diet. But that feels alright. Holidays had pretty much lost their meaning when I lived alone in Virginia, far away from family and without a “domestic partner”. It’s nice to regain some days where indulences are allowed and feel meaningful.

Dear Ticketmaster…

Please find my (IMHO quite constructive) complaint about your website below. I tried to submit this complaint via the TicketMaster page, but after a punishing process of finding the feedback form and entering this feedback, your submission button sent me with an automated response that, after listing a lot of possible solutions to my problem (none of which helped), finally left me with the somewhat hidden information that

*** YOUR INCIDENT HAS NOT YET BEEN SUBMITTED, PLEASE CLICK “FINISH SUBMITTING QUESTION” AFTER READING THE INFORMATION BELOW ***

Guess what? There was no link to submit the incident! Just a bunch of links to additional FAQ entries that didn’t help, either.

[Read more]

Impressed by Powerpoint? Not really.

Program compatability – you gotta love it. For years I’ve made my presentations in OpenOffice Impress, because it does everything I’d be doing in Powerpoint and…well, it’s free! You can’t beat that. In the end I’d convert my presentation to the Powerpoint format for downloads, so that everybody could open it. I never had problems with that workflow, and it still worked a few days ago. But all of the sudden, as of yesterday, Powerpoint refuses to open any .ppt file that I save out from Impress. Any, even the simplest onesheet. “Powerpoint can’t open the type of file represented by !GDC2007.ppt.” What the hell? You didn’t complain three days ago? And I haven’t upgraded Impress or Powerpoint, how could this be broken all of the sudden?

The solution is so simple yet annoying that it took me two days to figure it out. Oh, Powerpoint can open the file type represented by !GDC2007.ppt – but only when that file isn’t already opened in Impress. Because then, some super special “You can’t have it! I’m using it! Neener neener neener!” stuff must be going on behind the scenes, unheard by my weak human ears. That’s some weak sauce – and I don’t even know which application to blame for it…

David Reutimann

David Reutimann testing at Infineon Raceway (with help from Chris Cook). Nice guy on a crazy schedule. I hope he learned something for the race in June.