Busy busy busy...

Sorry; I have been up to my elbows in alligators (probably not a funny a metaphor as it once was given the situation in the Gulf Coast) and I have just not taken the time to write. There was a time in my life (check the archives!) when I actually did entries here every day. No, really, I did. I've been trying to update all the online material for my two courses I am teaching this term and it has kept me massively busy. On top of that, all of the Powerpoint slides from a previous iteration of ITM 460 have been rendered COMPLETELY UNUSABLE because MICROSOFT IS STUPID. No big news there, I know. Microsoft determined that in previous versions of Office they had not taken proper care to protect read-only embedded fonts, so they “fixed” the problem in Office 2003. How? By making any file with embedded read-only fonts COMPLETELY UNEDITABLE! You can't even copy the text! Microsofts solution? “To resolve this behavior, open the presentation in an earlier version of Microsoft PowerPoint and resave the presentation without embedding any fonts.” Right. Like I keep previous versions installed just for such occasions. My solution? Open the PPTs in the 2.0 Beta version of OpenOffice.org and copy the stuff back into Powerpoint. Why can't I just edit and save it in OpenOffice.org? Because their Powerpoint export is not yet quite up to the task—yet. Oh, and how did the folks at OpenOffice.org and Sun solve the read-only embedded font problem? You can't edit those fonts. (Duh).

Posted by trygstad | Category: Personal | 01:31 PM