found_drama

Via TUAW: It appears that screenshots of Microsoft’s Office for Mac 2008 edition are starting to surface; they’ve got a gallery up following some Macworld demos. Say what you will about Microsoft and/or the Office suite in particular but for a lot of us… Well, my Pages demo didn’t really win me away from years of working with Word. And I don’t do enough presentations to even care about Keynote vs. PowerPoint. (Besides, you know what the kids say about PowerPoint…)
Anyway, from these screenshots, it looks like a pretty major improvement from the cobbled-together-feeling UI that the 2004 edition seems to lean so heavily on. It’s got a bit more polish, at least. I know I’ll certainly be glad to be rid of that floating toolbar; attaching it to the window will be nice because (if they comply with the OS UI standards) I’ll be able to quickly show/hide it with “the pill” up in the top-right. That said: (1) not sure I’m down with the woodgrain effect and hope that’s easily turned off and (2) what’s up with the mixture of palettes and those floating semi-transparent film “pro palettes” in the UI? (Pick one? Please?) At any rate, I must admit that I’m looking forward to the upgrade.

• Running Mac OS X Maintenance Scripts
  (tags: launchd Mac OSX tutorial reference)

We (A. & I) think that we catch a girl in A.’s class cheating and plagiarizing.  It was something off-hand like a comment or a note scribbled on the side of one of her exams.  I don’t think much of it when I mention it — the mention comes as a joke almost — but A. takes it very seriously and the next thing anyone knows, the campus security is trying to bring her in for questioning.  The girl manages to escape and somehow I am now under scrutiny.  I go through hundreds of pages of notes and exams and term papers trying to find the evidence that I (we?) had seen before.  A couple of the notes suggest that she might be considering cheating but there is nothing definitive.  In fact, most of the comments are about how much she loves the class and how close it ties in with her true academic love — fjords.

Campus security puts the investigation now squarely on my shoulders.  They uncover evidence that the girl has fled to the south pole.  I go into pursuit, sailing in a fast ship south through the Atlantic to the Antarctic.  When we reach the ice shelf, I suit up and set out across the barren, frozen landscape searching for her.  And I find nothing but more wind, more ice, more snow, more of that huge empty sky that stretches on infinitely north, always north, nowhere to go but north.  After a couple days of this I start to panic, to give up; the ice is thin beneath me and keeps cracking.  I keep slipping underneath that surface.  The continent has eroded away and the ocean is freezing beneath.  The cracks get larger and I slip into the depths over and over, pulling myself up onto bits of floating ice, half-choked to death on the impossible flavor of frozen brine.  All this for some stupid exam cheater?  The water starts to turn a red around me as bits of my skin freeze and break off.  Finally, the support crew takes pity on me and the submarine emerges just beneath me.  They maneuver toward me and I try to squeeze myself through that absurdly small hatch in the top of the vessel, the whole time mumbling (my mouth full of brine) about how all I want is a blanket, a bourbon, and a hot chocolate.