It’s Jif lemon day, incase you don’t know this is how to make pancakes, and this is how they make jif lemons (not very exciting it has to be said).

Oh and it’s also snowing!

In case you’ve missed it the beeb website is having a ’season’ on public information films.

My favorite one so far, has to be SPLINK, which is an attempt at the green cross code, it actually came after stop look and listen, so why they thought SPLINK was better we will never know, and all with a quite scary Jon Pertwee.

The TV detector film, still begs the question, did those vans actually work as well as they claim,
“there’s a TV on in number five, it’s in the front room, and there watching columbo.”

and a lesson for us all, if you want to keep your ‘bird’ learn to swim.

The more observant among our huge readership may have noticed that I’ve been tweaking with the website over the last few days. It’s what I do to stave off the underlying nerdy urge to start all over again. You must understand I do like the current design, it’s nice, and as Ruth so rightly points out, it does at least have some individuality to it, it’s just my inner nerd likes nothing better then a blank piece of paper (ok a empty document), and to start all over again.

Occasionally I do start over, but more often than not I end up with something that either isn’t as good, or is so near identical as not to be worth the hassle. So to keep me happy I tinker. More often than not this just involves making a new banner and changing a few colours here and there. But this week, I’ve done a couple of font changes, I’ve decided to go for big titles, and little dates. As a way of a change. I’ve added little bits of code (because after all I’m a programmer) just to make external links have a little icon, just like wikipedia. But the biggest change is something I guess most people never see, the printed version of the site.

One of my pet hates is how most websites never print well, a good bad example is the beeb pick any story and go look at print preview, and you get a copy of the web page. Which is fine, except that’s a lot of wasted space, an even worse website for printing is it mag the register, because you end up with a page of links at the top, and even more at the bottom. All I want is the article, not the links, what use are all the links when I’m holding a piece of paper?

Well I can’t do anything about them, but I can control how printing works here, I know most people (including me) will ever print pages from this site, but I’m happy knowing if they do, they get a nice clean page, with just what they wanted to read on it*.

*if your wonder what I’m going on about, go to File -> print preview on this page, and yes it does look like the guardian.

The UK Metric Association (who knew such a thing existed?) is calling for the UK change all its road signs to metric over the next five years (shouldn’t that be 2 Kilodays?). They say converting to metric signs will help the UK “join the modern world”. I can’t wait. I’ll just drop this abacus in the stream, leave t’mill and go join t’modern world (see how, I reverted to stereotypical northern country speak there to emphesize my point?).

Well I think it would be a complete waste of money, I like my miles, I (strangely) have more of a sense of a mile than a kilometer. I know how fast 40miles an hour is, and while I know I would learn, just how fast is 112k/ph ? it’s 70 m/ph if your wondering.

I think we need an UK Imperial Association, if for nothing more than to make it a bit more interesting.

Snow

It’s a happy, upbeat Thursday today. So I though it would just pass on my days posistivity. Even when it started sleating on me on the way to work I kept positive “it must be warming up” I thought (do you put thoughts is quotations?, or do you put them in brackets like now? Or maybe you don’t put them in anything? But you want to break them out of the normal sentence structure, right? Italics. That might be an idea…..).

You often got my mother saying, “it’s to cold for snow”, so if it’s snowing it must be getting warmer.

Ruth’s Mum is getting a new PC, so we we’re going through the Dell site, pricing up and checking it all out. When we get to the Microsoft Application Software (where you add office to the price). Office Small Business is ?211.50 extra, while Office basic is ?105.75 but that doesn’t have Powerpoint, which depending on what you do can be important (I’ve seen teachers.tv they use powerpoint a lot in schools now)

“that’s OK” i said, “your a teacher, you can get the office student teacher edition” which amazon sell for ?92.99, that comes with word, excel, outlook and Powerpoint. but is that still to much money for office?

Now, I’m being a bit of a hypocrite here, because i use office. both at home and work. You see one of the benefits of working for the university, is what’s known as the campus agreement, basically as a university, it is adventagious for Microsoft to have all our students using there products so we get office very very cheep (I’m not sure what it is now, but it use to be a few pounds per PC), and staff get to use it at home for free too.

So when i say office is expensive use something else, i am of-couse not doing that myself. that’s because office is the best ‘office’ suite you can get, and if you’re getting it for nothing or nearly nothing then there’s no competition but if you are paying ‘full wack’, then is it worth it?

So what are your alternatives ?

Lotus SmartSuite, if you can buy it, it’s quite cheep, and older versions do occasionally pop up on the front of computer mags, but at best you’ll end up with quite an old set of software tools, that won’t work all that well, and not work for anyone else*.

Star Office, this is office by Sun. it’s much closer to office than Lotus, and still cheaper than office, at ?41.97 from amazon, you can save yourself a lot of money, but to be honest, no one can tell me why as a home user it’s better to pay for this than just download…

Open Office:, this is the free open source version of star office, but as I’ve said if we are looking at home use the differences between open and star office, should mean you don’t have to buy star office.

There are more wacky alternatives to office, you could just use Microsoft Works, which comes free with most computers, but there is a reason for that. You could even ditch installing software altogether and use web tools, writley is an on line word processor, where you can import and export documents, work with others on line and publish to the web. it’s not quite an office killer, but it quite nice to use.

If it was me

If it was my money (and again i get office for free so who am i to tell you?) i would use open office, it’s free, close enough to office not to be officenive and most importantly it opens Microsoft files.