Posts by David Hood
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So, if I may speak on behalf of the Herald, there are GANGS of ROAMING students TARGETING the WEAK and HELPLESS.
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Steve- Having your mailbox trashed in Christchurch is "Looters", but his is in Dunedin, so it's "Rioting Students"
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I thought there were very much two narratives at work. The "The post-apocalyptic WASTELAND" and the "That's pretty dratting inconvenient".
Even National Radio, which at least had good coverage of neighbours checking on each other and the orderly assessment of services, succumbed on occasion (such as when the geologist was asked if he could give the force of the earthquake in nuclear weapon equivalents (as it happens he couldn't and was a little baffled by the question)).
I think part of this was that reporters were actually the first hand witnesses in the case, rather than interviewing other people who were directly involved. Because the reporters were caught up in the dramatics of what had changed, it was a different filtering role for the further back editorial staff. Some rose to the challenge better than others. -
Lucy- as regards the Christchurch School of Medicine
"All University of Otago - Christchurch buildings will be closed until further notice due to the loss of water and waste water services caused by the earthquake this morning.
The situation will be reviewed Sunday evening."
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In Dunedin we were standing around in doorframes. I gather National Radio (through people texting in) was around as fast at working out it was the Christchurch region as Twitter.
Once the shaking stopped, my immediate thought was "Am I going to need a bathtub reservoir", so jumped online. That I could get online meant the basic internet links the length of the country was intact, so it wasn't the Wellington big one. Looking at the GNS drums I could tell it was southerly, but not west coast. Once I found out it was Christchurch, I stayed up until I found a working traffic conditions webcam (at the nzta ) to visually reassure myself. -
What, someone dissing Word 6.0? Don't you like installation disks (I seem to recall about 20 or so).
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recordari- It isn't just shifting docs from one App to another, different versions of the same App can also completely screw up formatting if you are trying to use a word processor as a page layout program.
The differences between same named fonts on different systems, and slightly different page and text handling defaults can completely throw out a document. -
Sacha- with TOC it is that you cannot be particular selective about how you use the headings levels to generate the table of contents- I create a lot of documents where I would, to match the style, like to be able to suppress the level 2 and lower heading page numbers but keep the level 1 heading page numbers. I have used a lot of programs that can do this, and with Word's field codes it is a pain to edit by hand (and because I use Word in a mixed platform environment Macros are out). Everything else with the TOC can be controlled by modifying the equivalent TOC style to the Heading style.
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I set up my mother, who needs to write long manuscripts with relatively few non-text additions on the Macintosh, with Mellel. She uses Open Office for when she needs Word/Excel compatibility.
For my job, I have to use Word, and so face things like the different line spacing depending on if the document was opened on a Mac or Windows machine (as frustrating as the 1904 quirk with Excel).
On the Macintosh I have a personal fondness for iText Express, the unknown gem of free word processing programs (for all its homepage looks like a geocities one). -
Word is what you have to use in general academia (or business) if you are sharing draft documents between people. If you are a lone wolf academic, you can use a better program.
The things that, as someone who teaches academics how to make best use of Word, frustrate me about the program are:
-Its instability when faced with more than a couple of embed additions.
-No keyboard shortcut for returning from a footnote to the main document
-Lack of configurability of Table of Contents.
Because I have used less well known programs that do things better.
My general rule of thumb for using Word well is you have to, have to understand styles, as they underlie everything from the Document Map (which Word has a basic version of) to Cross Referencing and Captioning.