A World Without Love

*I started this on the 04.14.13, and the title has absolutely nothing to do with Monday's event.

No, I'm not going all soft and stuff here. Or oldest son works at Sam's Club, and he asked me for a ride home after work today (Sunday). As Sam's is pretty close, I agreed, and we did a bit of shopping together. As we were getting close to the end of our shopping, we stopped to look at the Blu Ray selections. A number of James Bond movies were on the shelf- older 60's and 70's titles, and for some strange reason the Paul McCartney-penned "World Without Love" which was recorded by the British duo of Peter & Gordon popped into my mind and just would no leave. Getting a song stuck in my head is no big deal, but this song had absolutely no association with any of the James Bond films, as far as I know.

On to html, which is looking more and more like rocket science every day. This is partly my fault, as I've been trying to make progress, but using three different computers with three different operating systems, I don't know all- I do know for certain is that the progress has been slow.

I need to turn briefly to Windows 8. At this point, I'm neither a fanboy (and the likelihood of that happening is small) nor a hater. I actually had to look up the correct spelling of likelihood as my first spelling earned me a red squiggly underscore. Who knew that a spelling error would lead to the following-

"In statistics, a likelihood function (often simply the likelihood) is a function of the parameters of a statistical model, defined as follows: the likelihood of a set of parameter values, θ, given some observed outcomes, x, is equal to the probability of those observed outcomes given those parameter values." Thanks, wikipedia.

Who knew? Well, I suppose any statisticians that may be reading this blog. But, other than those?  I digress... back to Windows 8. There are some things I really do like about it, like the really fast launch and shutdown. It's also pretty easy to move between applications, similar to Windows 7. Applications also launch pretty quickly, and I'm okay with using the touchpad like a smartphone screen. One thing Microsoft missed the mark on is the display, though. If it's designed to work as a touch interface, but most PCs don't have a touch interface, why not just enable the mouse to emulate touch?

Now for the unpleasantness. Everything is hidden. I'm not going to get into the whole "Start" button debate, but I had this experience: I was doing something a few days ago and wanted to make a quick calculation. Normally, the sequence of events would be something like Start>Programs>Accessories>Calculator. In Windows 8, the sequence is something like this: look for the calculator. Fail. Search the entire HDD. Ah- there it is! Now, what did I need the calculator for?

I just now tried to locate it again, and again had to go through the same search the whole HDD procedure. I give up- I put a shortcut on the real desktop. On the plus side, it's  really nice calculator.

I think that, with that, I'm going to put this post to bed (figuratively speaking, of course, as it's ~1230 and the sun is being cheerful. Too bloody cheerful for my faux sour mood).

Have a joy joy day. Me? I'm off to look at pictures of kittens on Facebook, although I'm not certain that even kittens can bring me out of my faux funk.