As I've mentioned before, my new computer is running Windows Vista. But it's not running much else, except Photoshop CS2 which I got my hands on through grad school.
But what I didn't manage to get my hands on in grad school was the latest version of MS Office, and my new university won't give it to me free of charge (since it would be installed on my personal computer even though I would be using it for work purposes). So... I tried to install the 2000 version of MS Office that we had lying around (from grad school) but came up empty handed - it refused to install. It kept requiring fonts that I don't have on my computer and when I looked them up I found Microsoft webpages that insisted that these fonts come with MS Office 2000 and that they are on the CD, but of course they weren't (or you have to find them some secret way other than following the instructions on the Microsoft webpage). So to help, J gave me all the fonts on his computer, which were apparently good enough for him to install Office 2003, but ultimately I came up short at SimSun.ttf. It's a Chinese font that I'm sure is useful if you want to display Chinese, but you know, I think I could live without it for now. However MS Office 2000 has decided that I absolutely cannot live without it and it refuses to install. (In fact, when I have to confirm that I really don't have this font, the little status bar which had reached over halfway done actually goes backwards!! And when it reaches the beginning, it then gives me an error message about how it couldn't install. It's pretty infuriating.)
I did actually find SimSun.ttf online, but I can't install it directly to C:\Windows\Fonts. I can save it to my desktop, but then if I try to copy it to C:\Windows\Fonts, it copies as SimSun_0.ttf, and then the MS Office installation thinks it's something else. I've tried to rename it, but it just won't take, and I have no idea if this is because of Windows Vista permissions or something else, but come on, this is my computer, I am the only one using it, and yes I really do want to grant myself the permission to change the name of this file!
In the end, I gave up and installed Open Office instead, which hasn't made me cry once. (Okay, I didn't really cry when I was trying to install Office.)
I have to say, I used to really hate those PC / Mac commercials that make it look like using a PC is sooooo hard that only geeky programmers can do it, but now... they strike a raw nerve. And the frustrating thing is that I just don't know where the problem is - is it MS Office, is it Vista, is it me? Should I buy a newer version of MS Office?
Well, I don't know what I'm going to do, but first I'm delving into Open Office (which is free). And for some reason, I got all excited about Open Office Base tonight, probably because I stumbled on this excellent tutorial (or at least, it's excellent for someone who knows nothing about databases) and imagined that I could turn my giant and becoming-unmanageable photography spreadsheet (which lists details about every photo I processed, if and where and when I've uploaded them, and how much they are earning as shown in various tables and graphs) into a searchable database.
Sorry, I don't know why I'm blogging about things like this and not about things like how J and I took a trip up to MA this past weekend to visit my sister. And how my sister and I spent an afternoon looking for bridesmaid's dresses and how one of the dresses I really liked in the store turned out to look like a ... um ... female body part when we looked at the photos we took of me in it (think Georgia O'Keefe). Or about how we went out for excellent Korean food in Cambridge (Koreana). Or about the lovely warm weather we've finally been having lately. Or about how one of our cats has rediscovered how much he loves J's dress shoes and now spends much of his day lying with his face in the hole of one of the shoes. Or ... well, I'm not gonna talk about work on this blog. :) But you know, all of that other stuff which is life.
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