How to get around the time-sucking Ribbon in MS Word

I had to upgrade to MS Word 2007 -- unwillingly and mainly because I could get a full, legal copy of Office through work for $20. It was 2007, though, not any of the decent versions. Suddenly I had to spend as much time time trying to find commands I'd used every day for years as I did writing. This article describes how to avoid Word 2007's Ribbon without spending too much or having to learn another app. They're lifesavers. Kill the ribbon.

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Password keeper falls flat

I've always avoided password-automation software for two reasons: First, storing your passwords all in one basket, so to speak, reduces your overall security by putting all your valuable access codes in one place, behind one password. Without a password keeper, someone intent on stealing all your info (after, say, finding your lost laptop in an airport) would have to guess all the banks or online services you use, find your username and THEN figure out what your password is. With a password keeper, all that info is in one place, theoretically making all your business info available in one place.

The second reason is that I always figured if you have so many accounts to log into that you can't remember your username/password combos, you need to simplify.

I finally changed my tune, after going freelance and having the wonderful opportunity to log into the CMAs of several publishers several times per week. A couple of them make me log in several times -- for each of the micro-sites I work on. Then I have my own emails, domains, blogs and various other detrita.

Having some of that logging in automated suddently looked attractive.

Since password keepers aren't particularly fun to play with, I went to Freewaregenius, AppAholic, Lifehacker and Downloads.com looking for recommendations. I eventually downloaded KeePass Password Security which, appears to actually be secure.

It encrypts your passwords in a database, avoids keyloggers that might otherwise grab your passwords as they go through, and generally works hard to keep bad guys from getting your data.

On the other hand, every time you want to log in to something, you have to either cut-and-paste password data from KeePass to your browser, or drag the information to the right field. That's actually a cool feature, in one way of looking at it. You can open the list of your logins, click on the Username field for the one you're working on, and drag it over to the Username field in your browser. Then do the same with your password, which is obscured with hashmarks.

If you drag the password to the username field, though, you're out of luck, which means you have ot pay that much more attention than you would ordinarily. And KeePass doesn't log in automatically for you.

So you're left pretty much with a relatively secure database for your passwords rather than a utility that will securely log in to your Web sites for you.

Firefox comes with a password-keeping feature, and it logs in automatically for you. But if you have Firefox set to clear all your private data when you shut down the browser, it forgets both the sites and the login data when you shut the browser down. Even when you (or at least I) tell it not to, it clears your password info as well as your surfing record.

So, even free, KeePass isn't worth the cost of installing and using it. I still don't trust Firefox's ability to keep a stored password safe, but at least it won't make me add another step to every additional login.

KeePass goes back where it came from.

User error: Romanian Man Superglues Condom to Penis

I'm all in favor of hacking your own stuff to make it fit better or work the way you want it to. I've even been known to do it wrong (more accurately, I've occasionally done it right[ish]).

And god knows I oppose reading the directions on the package, in whatever language to which they've been badly translated.

But this guy was doing things seriously wrong:

The 43-year-old father-of-five told doctors he and his wife didn’t want any more children. Their obvious solution was to start using condoms, but the condoms Nicolae Popovici’s wife bought were a bit ‘roomy’.

Sigh.

Good technology, bad judgment

In 2009 certain Volvo models will offer to massage your back and blow on your butt while you drive. Just the thing to help out toward the end of a long drive, when your back is most likely to be sore, and your eyes want to close, a nice little massage would be just the thing, right?

Rear-view cameras so you don't run over Rover? Great. Automatic parallel parking (not on the Volvo, which will be busy blowing on your nether regions)? Great. Ports to plug in your MP3 player, built-in GPS, DVD players and screens in the back seat, real-live plugs to plug in your gadgets? All great.

Things that actually help keep the car upright and on the road? Great. Not as cool as the GPS and the rear-view. But still great.

Massaging the driver while the car is in motion? No.


On the other hand, when I'm jumping lanes at twice the speed limit, wind in my hair, bugs in my teeth, tiny little helmet perched ineffectually on my head, screams of startled motorists echoing in my ears as I blow by, stretched out over the tank of an overpowered superbike, organ donor card signed and safe in my wallet, I'm not worried about an involuntary dismount. I'm thinking about the inconclusive evidence that exposure to the electromagnetic fields generated by the engine might increase my risk of prostate or colon cancer.

Thank god someone worried about the real risks of motorcycling has developed a bike seat to shield your bits from an EM field that's completely different and more dangerous than those generated by your phone, your microwave, your laptop, monitor, TV and electric lines in your house.

Maybe if it could give a little massage or nice cool breeze.

Book handles? Bad enough Amazon wants us to pay $400 for a display screen with less going for it than the laptops or iPods or phones or handheld games that could all display large amounts of text with no problem. Now we need accessories for actual paper books.

This video, on the other hand, totally rocks, or did, once I realized the legs were part of the robot, not half a homeless person. Completely pointless, as far as I can see; purposely, elegantly pointless and therefore fully justifying its own existence. Until it caught fire and exploded.

Nothing's perfect.

What's next, the all-toothpick British man 'o war?

And what music Hrothgar the Good Humor man play on his rounds to offer kids a cold treat and bloody, horrible death from a ship filled with murderous barbarian raiders?

Plus, you have to wonder what is the point. If you can make a speedboat made out of fibers of carbon or glass held in place by resin and glue, what great advance have you made doing the same thing with little wooden sticks.

DEN OEVER, The Netherlands (Reuters) - A Viking ship made from ice-cream sticks set sail for England from the Netherlands on Tuesday.

Ex-Catholics are second-largest US "denomination," what about physicists?

I don't agree with people who think science and religion are incompatible, though I don't have much patience for the specific mythology of most religious doctrines. I know plenty of people who combine the two (and some who say they are atheists, but attend religious services and participate in a religious community actively, more as a community of conscience than a doctrinal one).

It's pretty interesting to watch the migration of belief, though, as an indicator of what people are actually looking for in their lives, in the same way that U.S. immigration patterns highlight periods of economic difficulty or political instability in the source countries (or comparative changes, as in the times that the U.S. economy or social freedom increase faster than those of the rest of the world).

A recent Pew Forum study of religion (released March 3, 2008) shows that one third of those who said they were raised Roman Catholic in the U.S. are now former Catholics. That group (about 30 million) is almost twice as large as the second-largest single denomination -- 16.5 million Southern Baptists. Despite the loss, the percentage of the U.S. population and total number of Catholics in the U.S. has remained relatively stable at 66 million, presumably because of the large percentage of recent immigrants from Latin America who are Catholic.

The weird thing is that at the same time the Catholic church is losing so many of those born into it due to its doctrinal rigidity, equally rigid and unforgiving Protestant denominations are growing as well. What does that tell you about the underlying priorities of Americans? That they're pushing forward into a more objective, empirical view of the universe as something not intimately controlled by an invisible puppet master? Or that they're starting to think that way, and don't want men in dresses and funny hats to tell them what to do, but still want the fuzzy comfort of some kind of deity and religious community to take the edge off the image of a harsh, impersonal universe?

I'm guessing the latter, in most cases, based on the number of people who describe themselves as "spiritual, but not religious," which is having your cake and eating it, too. You don't acknowledge a deity or denomination who can tell you what to do, but don't want to think you're just one of a type of forest ape who's learned to build particularly secure nests.

It is a scary, big universe out there, if you put your own existence into the context of a universe with millions of galaxies compared with which our whole Solar System is just one of a trillion motes of dust.

But if we're so good at focusing on our own concerns and ignoring those that don't have any day-to-day impact on us -- Darfur? Bosnia? Tibet? Your best friend from elementary school who you haven't talked to in a couple of decades? -- why worry so much about how big the universe is compared to your own little slice of it?

I'm optimistic about humanity and it's persistent existential angst. (Not my own, of course; since I'm so close to it I can see that it's far more significant than the global concerns of an entire species.)

We're easily self-obsessed enough to narrow our field of concern to things that can fit in our own brains. Why worry about a universe so big you can't conceive its size, made up largely of dark matter you can't even perceive, when the lawn needs raking, you're worried about work and your car keeps making that weird sound that's not quite bad enough to do something about?

Think about lunch, instead; it'll have a more immediate impact. Or about why a Pope so concerned about the dignity of religion and the church in the modern age would go out in public wearing a silly had and red designer loafers? Then you can claim to be thinking spiritually and get a laugh at the same time.

Besides, there was an article out yesterday claiming that physicists (the most quantitative religion, if you consider how strongly they believe in quantum mechanics and string theory and how ridiculous both seem compared to the behavior of the super-quantum universe) found evidence of what came before the Big Bang that created not only everything in the universe, but the universe itself.

They now think that before the Big Bang, there existed -- wait for it -- a universe exactly like the one we're in now. Talk about an anticlimax. Who cares. Once you've seen one universe...

On the other hand, they may just be trying to hang onto what shreds of dignity they have left, as sub-nanoparticular points in an increasingly large universe.

When you grow up enough to shrug off the mythological comforts of your childhood, you probably still like to have something fuzzy and warm to hold onto, however weird it turns out to be.