Operose sortition

Operose – arduous: characterized by toilsome effort to the point of exhaustion; especially physical effort.

Sortition – casting lots: making a chance decision by using lots (straws or pebbles etc.) that are thrown or drawn.

Today I decided to try blogging with Microsoft Word 2007. I realized the other that, when you go to create a new document, it always gives you the selection of making a blog post instead, and when I tried it out the other day, it seemed to be able to post to blogger blogs (like ours), so I am trying it out. I don't really see the difference between posting in Word 2007 and posting with the word processor that blogger gives you automatically, but whatever. Actually, there is one difference – Word 2007, like usual, is very annoying to use.

At first, Word 2007 doesn't even come with the rulers at the top and on the right of the page that you would use for indenting, and it took me almost a month of using it to figure out that you could manually put them back. Then, you don't even have your normal File, Edit, etc menu at the top of the screen! Once I played around with it for a while, I managed to find most of the tools and features that I usually use, but the documents that I had to make without knowing how to indent, change paragraph spacing, or add header/footers, were very annoying to write. It's not that the new Word is bad, just that it is difficult to change from an older version to 2007.

Recently, news of Microsoft potentially buying Yahoo has been all over the place, from all the newspapers, to the news bar at the site of this page. I'm not quite sure what to think of the matter – on one hand, Google is getting very powerful nowadays, and this would at least push it a bit more to improve and release more features, while on the other hand, I don't think it really matters whether or not Google has lots of power. Though, as this article pointed out, the features that I like to use on Yahoo might go away, which I would not like very much. I don't know what I would do without Crazy Cube. If they happened to get rid of Yahoo answers, though, that would be fine.

I hope some of you have solved my previous logic puzzle, as it was really very easy, so I have decided to give you another challenge. Starting at this page, you have to get to the Wikipedia page about Aardvarks, only by clicking links in the articles (i.e. not the Navigation links on the left, and no searching!). The fewer links you have to click, the better. My best for going from Tennis to Aardvarks is 5 links: Tennis > Court > Rituals > Mating > Animals > Aardvarks. If you can beat that, post your path in a comment. Good luck!

Last but not least, I decided to put a Dilbert widget on the blog, because reading Dilbert is fun, and maybe it will give readers an incentive to come check the blog every day. I have to go now, but next time, I'll talk about Guitar Hero, and why it is better than Flash Flash Revolution. Until then!