Every once in a while you read a blog post that you not only enjoy, it edifies your very being. I’m talking about Dustbury’s post Demotional rescue. Now you need to know that Chaz, who runs the joint, has been online close to 20 years, and he’s approximately 314.15 times savvier, technologically, than I will ever be. And I’m OK with that.
Still, Chaz installed OpenOffice 4.0.0, only to discover “feature bloat and unnecessarily complicated toolbars …
then it started to crash on a regular basis. I figure any spreadsheet software that fails on an effort to insert four lousy lines — no formulas or anything — into a 16k single-sheet document needs to die, and pronto. I banished the offending version and went back to 3.3.0, which I still had in a directory somewhere.”
Then: “DivX, a nice little package of codecs and converters and whatnot, has been pestering me for updates for some time now, and when I gave in, they threw up a whole new splash screen telling me how wonderful this new toolbar was. Now I look upon toolbars approximately the way I look upon cold-air intakes: they might have been useful twenty years ago, but they’re not getting near my engine. I duly unchecked the box, which also threatened me with a whole new search engine, and a new splash screen came up with the option greyed out — but still, technically, checked. Out you go, DivX, and never darken my drives again.”
When I load software, after reading the manual, thank you very much, I always assumed it was my inability to grasp the technology. (Some dopey tech people didn’t help in this regard. Don’t they know English?)
It seems, though, that at least SOME of the time, that update makes things worse, not better. What was instinctive is now incomprehensible. Hey, I’m still a technophobe, but at least I know I have a good cause! As Chaz wrote: “Remember: it’s update, not upgrade.”