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Office Apps

Although I have Microsoft Office (2003, 2007 and 2010) installed on various physical and virtual machines, it’s mostly for use as a reference when someone has questions or problems, as I standardized my personal office application use several years ago on the free, cross platform OpenOffice.

Now, since Oracle bought Sun, the original source of Star Office and OpenOffice, the folks developing OpenOffice have forked the code off and formed The Document Foundation and are offering LibreOffice, which is readily recognizable as OpenOffice.

Nice that they’re attempting to keep Oracle’s hands out of the pie. Actually, when I said I’d standardized on OpenOffice, earlier, I slightly misspoke. About a year ago, I switched to another fork (or is it just a patched version with more compatibility with M$Office, etc.? The two “sides” are argued with equal vigor by people whose arguments I just don’t care about *heh*), Go-OO, a patched and slightly slicker Novell offering. Still free and still uses all the same OO interfaces and file structures, etc. There has been some friction between Go-OO developers and OO developers, but none of that matters to me. I will take a look to see if there are differences that make a difference for me in the LibreOffice offering, though.

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Num-Num

As obliquely promised to Nicole, here’s another lil smoothie “recipe” (indeterminate amounts in a couple of cases almost require the “”).

Mocha Mint Smoothie

1C cold coffee (just chill some ahead of time from some coffee brewed from freshly-ground beans)
2 scoops chocolate-flavored whey powder
a small handful of fresh, rinsed mint leaves (you do have a stand of mint handy, don’t you? ;-))
2TPS heavy cream
2TBS finely-ground flax seed (almost to powder/flour consistency–use your blade coffee grinder or a burr grinder set to as fine as it’ll grind)
1/2 Tsp leucine
1/2 Tsp D-Ribose
2TBS sucralose
~1.5 C ice.

Blend until smooth.

Yum. A good breakfast all on its lonesome, when time to cook bacon and eggs, etc., might be short. Can add a raw egg if you want (pasteurize by dipping in boiling water for NO MORE than a minute, if salmonella is a concern for you).

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Proposed Change to Oath Congresscritters Take

Just musing here…

This is pretty much the oath anyone entering federal employment must take, including congresscritters:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”

My modest proposal would insert after “swear” the words, “I will first do no harm to the republic,” followed by “that I will support and defend…” etc.

It’d have no more force than the current oath does on that conspiracy of dunces who almost daily do harm to the Constitution and the republic it defines, but at least it’d be easier to point out to some of the dimmer sheeple how much in violation of their oaths of office they are. Maybe. There’s no way to plumb the depths of sheeple stupidity.

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Ninjas?

Well, not quite…

We needed a new blender. Smoothies, etc. This looked OK and as reasonably priced at WallyWorld:

So, I picked one up. First thing off the bat, made a chocolate smoothie. OK, I guess. Certainly easier than with the hashup hand blender/mixer I had been using, but the ice bits were larger than I like, and it even missed a cube almost entirely. I suppose I needed to pulse the thing and run it longer, though.

Reasonable, and I’ll be more likely to use this to make a quick meal substitute instead of just grabbing something I probably ought not to.

Next time, it’ll be an orange-vanilla smoothie with more finely shaved ice.

Stupid name for a blender, though.