(no subject)

Wow, excitement.

A little before 3 AM, I heard something that sounded kind-of sort-of like two .22 gunshots coming from the Blighted Fucking Dump across the way. Then I heard some clanking around. No voices.

Anyway, after turning off the main light, stopping the music, and stepping away from the window, I went back to take a look at things, and saw some jackasses monkeying around on top of one of the lower roofs. Then the MPD showed up, turned on some spotlights, hollered real loud, rolled up a couple of cruisers, and basically started the party off right, proceeding to make all kinds of racket and spectacle. I can hear 'em talking to or at some people, and vice-versa, but I really have no idea what's going on. And now they're doing something that sounds like a huge staplegun? WTFF.

While it's true that that building keeps my rent nice and low, I really just wish it would, you know, stop existing.

Also, if you are in a city and you make noises that sound like gunshots at 3 AM, please fuck off and die.

(no subject)

HAHAHAHA HOLY CRAP! I just downloaded NeoOffice for a look-see, because I'm always interested in ambitious open-source replacements for high-profile proprietary software suites, and I thought it would be worth seeing where the OpenOffice project had gotten to since last I saw it. And damned if it wasn't the most aggressively foul software experience I've had in the last six months or more. I think it took about a minute and a half to boot up, and once it got there, I could barely control it. This is a 900 megahertz processor, people, with 384 megs of RAM; I should be able to run a word processor without herniating the poor thing.

Slowness and lag aside, how was it? STILL BAD. It didn't know the proper behavior for command and option when modifying the arrow keys, the mouse wheel barely worked, the interface for using styles was completely brain-dead (it took me FIVE MINUTES to figure out how to modify a style!), the style system itself was really difficult to control (are we not allowed to have span styles? Are paragraph styles the only things that exist? I honestly couldn't tell), and all of the dialogs were really unintuitive and punishing. In the interest of fairness, I'm not going to go into any details on the aesthetics of the interface—it's a work in progress, and irrelevant anyways. But I can't cut it any slack on the usability front—just imagining trying to get any real work done in there made me want to vomit. Oh, and then there's the official Mac OS release of OpenOffice.org: picture the ocean of badness that is NeoOffice, and then picture running it inside X11. No, that wasn't screaming you just heard; someone must be watching TV in the next room.

I think OpenOffice.org is a noble and necessary project, and that the NeoOffice people are an important part of that ecosystem, regardless of the politics going on between the two groups. Nevertheless, there is no fucking way that this product is ready to be used by real people. I've got no idea when or even if it will be.

(I should stipulate that it's entirely possible that OpenOffice is usable on other platforms; like I said, I haven't checked in on it for a year or two. But on the Mac, Microsoft Word crushes OO like a bug. I suppose it's a good thing I'm word processor-averse in the first place.)