{"id":353,"date":"2004-04-08T17:54:37","date_gmt":"2004-04-09T00:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=353"},"modified":"2004-04-08T17:54:37","modified_gmt":"2004-04-09T00:54:37","slug":"battlefield-baroque","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2004\/04\/battlefield-baroque\/","title":{"rendered":"Battlefield Baroque"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been using the latest version of Microsoft Office for Windows<\/a> a few weeks now at work. Save your money and stick to whatever previous version of Office you have.<\/p>\n

We (and by we I mean you who ordered this software for me) should have seen the warning signs in the last upgrade: Office is entering its Baroque period, or is it Rococo already? I now count four (4) [IV] {oooo} icons in the menu bars of Outlook that use a magnifying glass. Only one of them actually lets you search through your mail. The others will either: scan your messages for viruses, toggle message content preview, or show you a print preview. Can you guess which is which?<\/p>\n

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Sorry, no answers from me, I already forgot which is which and I can’t be bothered to look it up. Elsewhere — for example when you are writing an email or using Word — the search function is represented by binoculars, something which I use all the time when reading a book or newspaper closely.<\/p>\n

The only tangible change to my daily MS genuflections is the layout of the main window in Outlook. You can now have the windows split horizontally, instead of vertically, which makes sense on screens that are wider rather than taller.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Microsoft is continuing its attempts to turn email into something other than standard plain text messages. I spent the first 15 minutes of my time with the new Outlook turning off receipt requests (it’s rude, OK?), HTML rendering and RTF style defaults. And, bizarrely, the email window pane now looks like a print preview screen:<\/p>\n

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I’ve noticed from screenshots<\/a> that the upcoming new Mac version of Office has the same shaded border too. Why should I want to think of my email as a printed document? It’s a waste of screen space and yet one more mixed metaphor to battle.<\/p>\n

Talking of battles, earlier this week I spent a few hours playing Battlefield Vietnam<\/a>, the month-old successor to Battlefield 1942<\/a>, at a gaming cafe here in Stockholm for research purposesI kid you not. You’ll read about it in a month or so.<\/span>. It is a magnificent game for networked team play. One odd sensation came from an unexpected feature of the game: Sometimes you play as Vietcong, and take potshots at Americans as they try to implement US foreign policy.<\/p>\n

I’ve played my fair share of multiplayer WWII 3D shootem-ups, in which being a German soldier is fairly run-of-the-mill; somebody’s got to be the Indian. Simulate conflicts that are closer to the present day, however, and a gamer’s ironic detachment is no longer readily buttressed by historical distance. Still, at the rate these games are coming to market, I do not think I will be waiting 30 years before I get the opportunity to play Capture the Flag as a Sunni on a Falluja map.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been using the latest version of Microsoft Office for Windows a few weeks now at work. Save your money and stick to whatever previous version of Office you have. We (and by we I mean you who ordered this … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-5H","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}