Friday, April 11, 2014

Another Ridiculous Rant

This definitely falls in the category of "white man's burden" but I just spent, no, make that wasted, over two hours trying to get my laptop back into working order. 

See, I thought that I'd get smart and install some spiffy bibliography management software to help me manage the growing set of PDFs of published papers on poultry and animal nutrition that I am accumulating. I researched the options, then went to the Apple Store in the campus bookstore yesterday to see what kind of academic discount I could get on the gold standard of such software, EndNote. Unfortunately, I was blinded by the seemingly excellent price of an older version of EndNote--about USD 50, which was in the ballpark of some of the other packages out there. I bought it. I had to fiddle around with the installation since I have a Macbook Air which is solid state with no spinning parts of any kind (like a giant flash drive), which means it has no DVD drive. But I got EndNote installed at last. I spent an hour today getting it set up with a small set of references, enough to test formatting and other functionalies.

All seemed to be going well! My advisor Dr. Ch thought it was quite impressive that I would use software to manage PDF literature files.

Then this evening I decided to get a homework assignment out of the way. I fired up MS Word (I bought the student package of Office 2011 when I got my new laptop)...and Word wouldn't start. The dreaded spinning rainbow pizza, but no Word. 

After several increasingly angry hard shutdowns, I started doing some research on the problem. 

Turns out the seductively priced version of EndNote that I bought is not compatible with MS Office 2011 (the version of the iOS that I am running has also been implicated).

Bitch, you do not mess with my MS Office functions! I blasted that fucking EndNote software into 1 and 0 oblivion.

Word is now working fine. I purchased an upgrade for the EndNote software that is two levels up from my original version--for another USD 100! Suddenly that gold standard bibliography management package is looking gold-plated in cost too. To get it functioning again, I will have to re-install the old version then install the upgrade. But those are tasks for tomorrow as my frustration level is pretty high right now.

Now some of you clever computer types might be shaking your heads and saying, lilspotteddog, lilspotteddog, why are you using that evil MS Office? And I understand, I really do. Microsoft is evil. But I am using it because of compatibility and portability. The blessed trinity of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are widely used in academia even though most of the operating systems are Apple. I would rather focus on content than fight formatting and version and extension problems with every file sharing event. On top of that, I am a power user of Excel and PowerPoint, which means I can really get a lot out of those programs quickly. And although this is a weak argument, I've been using MS Office for decades now. Wah, I don't want to learn how to use new software unless it does something that the holy trinity does not.

But I feel much better now that I've gotten this little rant off my chest. The rest of my Friday evening will go smoothly now. I'll take a break, go outside and throw tennis balls for the dogs (even Harry, although I roll the ball along the ground no more than 10 feet for him; no catching balls in the air for the old man). Then I'll get that homework assignment done. In Word. As I planned to do hours ago.

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