Siri = HAL 2013

I'm still discovering things my iPhone will do.

I was listening to Pandora from the phone through my Bluetooth-enabled car stereo this morning, when the volume dropped, I got a bong, and the music faded up again.  That's the indication of a new e-mail.

On a whim I fired up Siri (by holding down the home button for 2 seconds) then said, "Read new e-mail."  Sure enough, the phone muted the music and said, "You have one new email from Home Depot" and proceded to read it to me, over the car stereo.

I said "Delete."  The phone replied, "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" or actually "I am not authorized to delete emails for you."

It was pretty slick.

Okay, just discovered another one. Last night Stephen Colbert interviewed David Christian, whose new History Channel series iis called "Big History." It's similar I guess to James Burke's "Connections" if you're old enough to remember that great show. Anyway, I have missed several episodes and want to see what I missed. I thought maybe they might be on You Tube.

Comcast has a phone app I downloaded but never tried out because there's nothing I want to watch. So I did a search and bingo, Big History is available to view, on my phone, anytime for free. Whoopee.

When they make an iPhone with a 52-inch screen, maybe I'll take a try at watching programs on it. Oh, I guess I could go get new glasses, but then I wouldn't have anything to hassle you about.  

Meh, don't bother. I watched the first three episodes of Big History on Comcast On Demand last night and it is nowhere NEAR as intelligent as "Connections." It was bad science, repetitive graphics, obvious information and dubious theories presented as fact ("people are attracted to gold, because water sparkles in the sun" -- really?) The segment on dinosaurs "deciding to experiment with living on land" was just howlingly awful.

If you had a 52" iPhone, which pocket would you keep it in?

The big one, obviously.

Obviously

On the other hand, not all Apple apps play nicely.

A few years ago I tried out a Microsoft Office-compatible program for Mac called NeoOffice. I didn't much care for it (Apple's own Pages/Keynote/Numbers suite is infinitely superior) but I guess I never finished removing NeoOffice. Yesterday I opened a file with a .doc extension and if defaulted to NeoOffice. Once open I couldn't get the fucking thing to close again -- regular close didn't close it, Force Quit didn't force it to quit. I could not reboot my machine because "NeoOffice is open."

Finally in desparation I forcibly removed the files from my hard drive and rebooted. It seems to be gone.

Even the whiff of Microsoft is a disaster.

Have you tried Open Office? That's what I use. I do not have any Microsoft software on my computer which is not required for the operating system to run.

Open Office is free and does everything I could ask of this genre of software.

Look into it and let us know what you think.

I have used Open Office for a number of years, with no problems.

I'll have to try it someday.

[Edit -- downloaded. Someday is today.]

Let us know how you like it after giving it a try.

It opens and closes reliably.

Which puts it one big step ahead of many Microsoft programs.

NoCoPilot wrote:

 Someday is today.

"Deep Thoughts"  by: NoCo

Shouldn't that be "Deep Thoughts" by NoCo Handey?

Oops. Sorry.

The sleeves may be just Fashion!

Oops wrong thread.