The Book of Genesis - Bill Gates Style

In the beginning Gates created Windows and 

The Windows was without form and void; and the darkness was upon The face of the computer and the spirit of Gates moved upon the void and said ...

LET THERE BE OFFICE! And it was good.

BUT! Not good enough apparently because we are now on version/incarnation 6, 355,567  10 and as yet there isn't a soul alive who holds the key to all its power!!!! 

Now a couple of days ago I was seen to be ranting profanely and in quite an unseemly manner at an integral component of Office, namely Word. I may well have jeopardised my initiation into British Mummy Bloggers (I am still pending approval!) with all my f*cking and fr*ing and all because WORD - the arch nemesis of any wannabee writer - was flagrantly disobeying me and putting images into my carefully crafted chapter willy nilly! 

Well I would like to take it all back because today I discovered something which has made me genuflect at the Alter of Bill Gates once more (see below) 

The Alter of Bill Gates 

(even though I am an "out of the closet" iMacophile but shhhh don't say anything - I wouldn't want to hurt Bill's feelings. Oh and please ignore the voodoo doll in that Picture - this isn't actually my alter - I stole borrowed it from Steve Jobs' blog - I think he is still a bit bitter!) 

I have lit a candle in his honour, retrieved the ubiquitous tome 'Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual' from the dusty corner in which it landed when I last hurled it across the study, and I have reinstated Word on my 'All Time Greatest Inventions' list! (Please don't ask me what's on the list - I don't actually have 'a list'; it's a rhetorical trope that we writer's sometimes employ to make ourselves sound far more interesting and erudite than we actually are - aka BULLSHIT!) 

All this has been helped by the fact that yesterday I managed to place the images correctly! YEEEHHAAAAAA!

So ...

Are you ready for this little gem which I am about to share - it could revolutionise your essay writing!

It is a bit of a breakthrough ... BRACE YOURSELVES! 

YOU CAN PUT BOOKMARKS INTO WORD DOCUMENTS!!!!!

You can actually put a little bookmark into your document, give it a little name and when you next open said document you can use the 'go to' function and locate the place you were last working!

Now this may seem a simple and ordinary thing for some of you out there who gloatingly know all there is to know about the behemoth of functions that is WORD... but when you have a document that is nearly 100 pages long with several sub headings and subsections, that you often have to jump back and forth to, basically using your scroll button, THIS IS A MAJOR REVELATION!!!!! Also by the time I finish I shall have approx. 80,000 words and probably around 500 pages to edit so this feature will be immeasurably helpful to me in the long run! 

Now the only problem is that once I discover a short cut to anything I tend to over use it ... so I must resist the urge to immediately insert 101 new bookmarks into my document, thus voiding them of any real useful purpose as a short cut!

In summary - from this post you can probably tell that I have actually managed to do some work on my thesis today! I deliberately stopped myself from blogging yesterday as it would have been an 'I did this, that and the other and blah, blah blah,' which is all very well but it is tedious to write and even tediouser  more tedious to read... Also I have a tendency to become obsessed if I haven't complied to that day's tasks (BLIP!) - of which blogging is threatening to become another victim. So I forced myself to go cold turkey! 

Should read I am an Idiot! 

Today wasn't without its major idiot moment, however. I had noted in the margin of my MSS that I should 'insert the quote from the letter X as quoted by Scholes  p.13' - so off I went to locate said quote - I looked on every page 13 of every book I have been using for the last few days - and no quote! I felt my irritation levels rising as looked again - I scoured p.13 of the Scholes book even though I had diligently scored out the name which to any sensible person would indicate it WASN"T in Scoles' book! 

Took me 45 minutes to realise I was referring to page 13 - OF MY OWN THESIS!!! 

Sheesh! 

To give you some idea of what I have been dealing with today get a swatch at this excerpt from Paul Edwards' Book BLAST: Vorticism 1914-1918 - if anyone can make sense of this sentence email me please ... because I'm f*cked if I can!

"Just as the conditions of 'life' prevent any self becoming, unalloyed, the true authentic self towards which it nostalgically aspires (wtf?) , so the condition of painting or any other signifying system prevents the work of art from becoming (it's about to get even whackier) the direct communication of that self or of any pure, transcendent world of spirit." (OK then?????? I want a shot at whatever he was drinking when he wrote this!) 

And finally - I have added a few extra features to the feedback/comments are of the blog - please feel free to express your opinion but if possible try to be kind (you can swear as long as you are swearing with me not at me!)  I may look like I have the hide of a rhino but that's only because I can only afford Nivea face cream! 


 And on that note I shall bit you adieu and go and play (sparingly I promise) with my bookmarks! 

Today's expletives were brought to you by courtesy of the letters 'F' and 'B" and the symbol "*' ! 

Life Interruptions...

...are never ending.

I am pulling out my hair with them all! Last Friday it was my daughter and her 'sore tummy' which remarkably turned out to be nothing judging by the very speedy recovery she made (she was scoffing sweets by 415!) and today it is the trials and tribulations of a teenage boy in his final year at school.
He wants to do - wait for this ground breaking revelations -NOTHING! Yes that's right during a conversation about his courses (the timetable's been altered yet again!) and what courses he wants to do next year, I frustratedly shouted 'You can't spend the rest of your life doing nothing!' to which the reply was 'I wish I could!'

Teenagers!

How do you counter that? How do you instill a work ethic into someone? Do you do it by example? Was spending the largest portion of the last decade in full time study insufficient? Is the fact his father spends most of his life working not enough to show him how it's done? Or has all this excess of work ethic and ambition done the opposite and turned him off the thought of doing anything with his time? Does he look at us and think - sod that? Far too much effort?

I could relate to the idea of him being fed up of school, study and education and wanting to do something completely different to experience the world - but doing nothing is not an option. Even my socialist principles balk at the thought of society paying for lazy kids to sit and do nothing!
He is currently frustrating all of the people who care about him and want him to work out a how to obtain a decent, enjoyable life for himself. All we want is for him to have choices! And he is fighting us every inch of the way! He also seems to think that when he has a free period at school he can come home? This is not acceptable given my hours of peace and quiet at home are my work hours and it is hard enough when I have absolute solitude - him appearing at odd hours during the day is just not an option.

My to do list is growing, my patience is thinning and my ideas are bogged down in the here and now mundanity of constant interruptions! I need an Island somewhere - Isolated - to write! It seems a 'room of one's own' is never truly one's own when you have kids to consider!