The Kingdom Come

Well, it's time for another installment of my random blogging. These are bits of stuff I've been thinking about or doing.
First up, let's get the geeky stuff out of the way.

LIBREOFFICE

At my place of employment, I'm responsible for developing "tools" to make us more efficient and accurate. I've developed custom auditing "tools" designed on Excel. The problem is, my is work utilizing Excel 2003, Excel 2007 and OpenOffice (a free knock-off version of Excel). As you can imagine, these application don't always play nice together, so something I make in Excel 2007 may not work properly in the other applications.

Well, after researching OpenOffice a bit more, I found out its commercial development was terminated in April 2011 (source). No wonder it can't do simple things like Excel; auto-filtering properly, run basic macros and such. This led me to investigate the history of this promising application. I mean, it is a bold story, how a group of developers took on Microsoft who has a corner on the Office Suite market; and were giving it away for free. From what I understand, OpenOffice's developers dropped the project when it appeared that the company Oracle was poised to take over the project and begin charging for it. From there, the developers started LibreOffice, continuing its development even now.

I like LibreOffice for at least 3 reasons:

1. It's faster than OpenOffice.
2. It's auto-filtering and sorting functions like Excel.
3. It can run basic macros designed in Excel without any special tweaking.

I'm trying to convince my employment to move everyone who is using OpenOffice off of that defunct software and onto LibreOffice. It would sure make my job easier. If you are interested in LibreOffice for your home computer, again it is FREE and you can check it out here: http://www.libreoffice.org/

HOWLIN' WOLF BLUES
I don't listen to much music, mainly because if it has words, I find myself analyzing it too much and it is then not very enjoyable. However, there are several genres I do like and try to listen to when I'm in the mood. Blues is one of my favorites; especially old time blues. Perhaps one of my favorite blues singers is a guy named "Howlin' Wolf" or his birth name; Chester Arthur Burnett.

I think I like Blues, not so much for the lyrics or subject matter but for the very simplistic instrumentation -- as for "simple" I don't mean these performers weren't talented but only that it is easier to distinguish each note.

Perhaps one of my favorite songs from Howlin' Wolf is Smoke Stack Lightning. Listen below:

CAPITALISM: To A German
At my place of employment we hire interns from foreign countries. I always enjoy getting to know them and understanding their culture. I have befriended a German fellow and we have all sorts of chats. I explained a basic truism of the freemarket, capitalistic, American ideology is -- SELF-SUFFICIENCY. In simplistic terms, I explained that it means that the government should not take from one person and give to another. Or as Obama once declared, he wants to "redistribute the wealth". This is ANTI-American.

It hit home when I took his lunch and put it on my desk. I explained it is like the government coming in and saying that he doesn't need to eat every day and that the government thinks it should take his stuff and give it to me. He has had an "ah-ha" moment. You never know, when these interns go back to their home countries, they may end up being politicians and such and their time here in the U.S. could dramatically affect them.

Well, that's it.