Office 2008, you suck!

I never thought I'd have to say this... but I long for the days of Office 2004 on my iBook. Office 2008 has been nothing but a pain since we've gotten it. It takes forever to load (I think it's even slower than 2004 under Rosetta) and it's buggy as hell. I just upgraded to SP1 last week and now found that I can't open documents from the Finder by double-clicking them. *sigh* I'd say that's a pretty large issue Microsoft.

The other huge problem I've had is trying to work with the new Excel. Making a chart is a nightmare since the wizard is gone. The interface for modifying formatting is a huge mess. I think I'm going to download and give OpenOffice a try. Anything has to be better than this nightmare of an office suite.

A (really) long drive to work

A long drive to work
Originally uploaded by Jamison_Judd

I really need to start listening to the radio before I leave for work in the morning. Now that I'm going to be driving to UConn five days a week over the summer, preparation is becoming imperative. This morning there was a terrible car crash on I-91 and it took me 2 1/2 hours to get to work (it usually takes me about an hour). Had I been smart and listened ahead of time I could have taken the Wilbur Cross up to Meriden and cut back over. Lesson learned!

Oh ActionScript...

Today I finally admitted to myself that I need to sit down and learn ActionScript. I've tried before in the past to learn how to use Flash, but never could quite get a handle on how the timing works. The site redesign at work is going to require a few flash-y banners to make it look nicer, and being able to create those through code rather than through the Flash UI makes me happy :)

So I just took at look at Flash CS3 and am currently downloading the Adobe documentation in PDF. I'm excited at the prospect of creating some of our internal web applications in Flex, and possibly trying out AIR for producing little apps to help faculty, staff and students access important information.

The neatest thing I've seen as of late is Papervision3D, which I gather is a library for doing 3d rendering in Flash. I'll have to check that out later as I skill up. There are a neat series of examples of it being used linked from their blog. I particularly enjoyed Dasai Creative Engineering's site and Den Ivanov's PV3D garden.