Thursday, May 24, 2007
Growing pains
Perhaps unwisely have upgraded my primary laptop to Office 2007. Fairly radical changes to the user interface (at least, over that that I have been using), some nice new features, some irritations fixed (most importantly for me, the limit on the number of columns in a worksheet) and some new ones arrived. I have also had two Excel crashes of the sort that try to send a report to Microsoft - something I don't recall getting for ages. Fortunately, only a few minutes work lost. I am reminded of all the flapdoodle we used to go through in the world of work when considering an upgrade - and all the now absent support staff that used to go with it. Having to learn to paddle my own canoe. If it floats, I might have to bite the expensive bullet and upgrade the other two PCs, one at least of which will need an OS upgrade for this to be possible. Working across versions can be a real pain.
Today's DT has a good crop of trivia.
Interesting to see that the boss of the National Audit Office runs a generous expense account, generously shared with his wife. I imagine that such things are largely tax free - not an unimportant consideration when you earn lots of dosh. I don't suppose that this would be a problem for someone of his standing in the private sector - but he isn't. He is a fairly grand civil servant, sufficiently grand to sign his own expenses claim and it is hard to see who, apart from the likes of the DT, is going to call him to account. Oddly, he has just cancelled an important foreign mission.
And then that a new division (4 civil servants, 3 consultants, 2 lawyers and a tea lady in a pear tree) is about to be created in whichever ministry is responsible for the buyers' packs debacle in order to work on regulations which will define a four bedroom house for the purposes of non-exemption from the requirement to have such a thing. As things stand it seems it is perfectly OK to put one's house on the market with three bedrooms and an upstairs study - which is exempt - with the fact of a bed in said study not being material. A house is only a four bedroom house if the owner so designates it. At least one's home is one's castle to that extent. But not for long. The control freaks are coming!
On a differant tack, I have just learnt that the biodegradeable tuna fish sold by Mr Sainsbury is packed in spring water. Persumably the marketing people have decided that spring water has a positive ring about it which might as well rub off on their tuna fish. As far as I recall brine was the thing last year and olive oil the year before that. Presumably olive oil had the positive ring OK, but brine was a lot cheaper - overlooking the fact that brine, while it might be the fishes' natural medium, has no ring. Sounds cheap in fact and 'packed in its own juices' sounds a bit off. So spring water it has to be. In any event it diverts attention from the tradition that tins for tuna fish bear no relation to the amount of tuna fish in them. (Perhaps no is a little strong here, there is a relationship in that the tin is always substantially bigger than it needs to be).
Today's DT has a good crop of trivia.
Interesting to see that the boss of the National Audit Office runs a generous expense account, generously shared with his wife. I imagine that such things are largely tax free - not an unimportant consideration when you earn lots of dosh. I don't suppose that this would be a problem for someone of his standing in the private sector - but he isn't. He is a fairly grand civil servant, sufficiently grand to sign his own expenses claim and it is hard to see who, apart from the likes of the DT, is going to call him to account. Oddly, he has just cancelled an important foreign mission.
And then that a new division (4 civil servants, 3 consultants, 2 lawyers and a tea lady in a pear tree) is about to be created in whichever ministry is responsible for the buyers' packs debacle in order to work on regulations which will define a four bedroom house for the purposes of non-exemption from the requirement to have such a thing. As things stand it seems it is perfectly OK to put one's house on the market with three bedrooms and an upstairs study - which is exempt - with the fact of a bed in said study not being material. A house is only a four bedroom house if the owner so designates it. At least one's home is one's castle to that extent. But not for long. The control freaks are coming!
On a differant tack, I have just learnt that the biodegradeable tuna fish sold by Mr Sainsbury is packed in spring water. Persumably the marketing people have decided that spring water has a positive ring about it which might as well rub off on their tuna fish. As far as I recall brine was the thing last year and olive oil the year before that. Presumably olive oil had the positive ring OK, but brine was a lot cheaper - overlooking the fact that brine, while it might be the fishes' natural medium, has no ring. Sounds cheap in fact and 'packed in its own juices' sounds a bit off. So spring water it has to be. In any event it diverts attention from the tradition that tins for tuna fish bear no relation to the amount of tuna fish in them. (Perhaps no is a little strong here, there is a relationship in that the tin is always substantially bigger than it needs to be).
# posted by Jim @ 5:42 AM 
