An interesting problem has resurfaced in Microsoft Word for me today. That is, smooshed characters. Now how exactly is one supposed to describe the smooshiness in the of text in Word to the Microsoft Knowledge base.

Basically the problem is that the characters are not being spaced and each subsequent character appears on top of the one before it. Changing the font size fixes the problem, but you are unable to use that font/size combination for the remainder of the Word session. If you close and reopen Word, the problem goes away.

I am assuming the problem occurs when something wacky happens to the font in Word’s memory, butt one would hove thought this bug would be fixed by now. (Using Word XP) The problem has occurred on multiple PCs.

If you have any theories as to what might be causing the problem or how to fix it, let me know by making a comment to this post.

The results for the 2005 i-think Awards are in and a fun night was had by all last Sunday. Photos to be uploaded shortly. For a full list of all the vote totals, check out the Excel File. A full page of the winners will be up shortly, but at the moment I am focussing on the planning phase of the new i-think Awards website which whilst not as integrated with i-think Twenty-Two as I had originally planned, will serve to provide a great platform from which to run the awards. Once the new site goes live (I’m hoping within a month) I will be sending out the awards to those winners across the world and hope to receive some feedback to publish on the site.

The new awards site will also serve as a platform for the development of the official rules of the i-think Awards that will finally state the necessary procedures in particular with resolving grievances. If you have any suggestions for how the site can best be improved, let me know. A fair chunk of the backend will stay, but it will be rejigged as necessary to enforce the newly published rules better.

Deciding to simplify the job of certificate printing this year I used a mail merge. I only had to reprint the majority of the certificates after the grammatical failings became clear…

And guess how many I had to reprint?

Twenty-Two

Well, I’ve had a bit of fun with exams lately. The exam on Wednesday morning last week gave me the opportunity to leave my mobile phone in the exam room. The stupid thing is that you need to put them on the floor because of the ringing. My phone doesn’t ring, even if I wanted it too. Actually it only occasionally vibrates too. It’s a wonder I can have a conversation on it.

Anyway, I had another exam this morning, this time an essay-based exam, which is always fun. I was going fairly well, and about one third of the way through my second essay the ink began to get a little dull. This was odd as I had checked the ink level (which was sufficient) before the exam started. By the last paragraph of the last essay the pen had given up entirely and lost its ball, literally. The tiny ball was rolling around the desk. It would have been fun to play with if it wasn’t for the fact that I wanted to get the hell out of the exam (and finish the last smashing paragraph). Fortunately I was able to borrow a pen from one of the lovely exam ladies. She was quite confused at my plight.

What was most interesting about the ball coming out of the pen was the tiny pacer led type piece of metal that was clearly spring loaded and pushing the ball towards the outside. And amazingly, no ink actually fell out of the pen, which was a relief. I will try and get a photo of the pen up soon.

And now I’ve found that my phone doesn’t want to display my mobile phone carrier on the screen (or the cell info display that tells me where I am).

Yes, I know this is an old article, but I found it fascinating (Tom’s Hardware).

Basically it shows just what can happen when a heatsink is suddenly removed. I was very impressed with the Pentium 4 performance. Presumably, AMD has improved in this area. (One would hope).

http://www12.tomshardware.com/images/thg_video_1_cpu_cooling.zip