The Lair

It’s true. Powerpoint makes you dumb. (Woo. Bugmenot has been revamped).

I’ve been working frantically on a set of slides which are due to be presented in an hour and err.. 15 minutes and my mind is mush. This isn’t to say that my mind wasn’t mush before I started, but now the mush has been permeated by silly decision points like “should I use that template with the squiggly lines across the top left corner … or the plain white template”. Anyway, presentation done… sorta. 32 slides later, if my forbidding looking assessor hasn’t fallen asleep, I would have finished one of the two major jobs I need to do this week.

In random snippets, people are talking (online at least) about meeting up. Something about enough or the other, but anyway… After hearing some other folks’ plans, I think it’s all going to be some Road to Gandolfo-esque comedy where there may be more people lurking around in the MickeyDs opposite watching than there will be people at the actual venue. I coulda done my best flailing-around-trying-to-be-a-papparazzi flickrb0y impersonation had I been in country too. Pity I’m not, huh?. Think of the photographs that people could have egged me to take? On a more serious note, I want to believe that I’m just being a cynical old fart about all of this, but I wonder… how much good, really, does talking ever do? Yeah, so jaw, jaw, jaw is better than war, war, war but I seriously doubt that the people who are jaw, jaw, jawing online at the moment were going to war in any case. All they’re doing right now is lowering the S/N ratio. It took a couple of days in the country myself to realize exactly the minimal impact of blogger opinion on events at large in SL. People I’ve actually talked to in SL are rarely as vehement, rarely as extremist, rarely as in-your-face as people who seem to write online. Trapped as I was away from opinions, save for those online, I forgot that for a while.

On a slightly more technical bent - Opera 9 was one of the most eagerly anticipated software releases of the year for me. How then, is it possible that within 15 minutes of installing it, I had to run for the beta 2 installer and regress? Because it appears that the release was rushed. DOM behaviour which was sorted out in the weekly builds (never mind the betas), started breaking in the final build. The browser kept crashing. This is a final version, for heaven’s sake. There has to be something wrong if a beta build of your browser works better than the final release, surely? I see that the first 9.01 weekly is already out.