Dreamer Easy

Mastercook 6 has suddenly stopped working. I made the mistake of shelling out the twenty bucks for Mastercook 9 from ValuSoft. All it does is malfunction in every possible way. Do not.

Leaked documents confirm resident's fear of foul pulp mill: "The chemicals in pulp mill odours are some of the most objectionable smelling compounds known to science. The worst is methyl mercaptan, which smells like stale sewage. When we got out of the minibus in the car park [at a Swedish "world's best practice" pulp mill, Resource, Planning and Development Commission head] Julian Green very quickly became distressed - he couldn't breathe. I found the odour intensely objectionable, and within a matter of minutes, Julian Green was gasping and saying: 'For God's sake get me out of here.'" (The environment and neighbouring businesses aside - people are supposed to *work* in that?)

Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors: when authors' names are removed from scientific papers being considered for publication, more women end up being published. (Thanks, dameruth!)

Can Psychiatrists Really "Cure" Homosexuality? "Masters and Johnson claimed to convert gays to heterosexuality in a 1979 book. But did they?" (In related news, Z and Vielpunkt are now proud gay parents.)

The first forty seconds of Zero Punctuation's review of a video game called "Too Human" outlines the case for the inherent superiority of polytheism. *smug*

In the name of the father - MPs flock to Jesus: "A new study shows federal MPs are invoking Christian beliefs with increasing frequency to justify their policies and articulate their personal values and visions for the nation." I question the researcher's apparent conclusion that 9/11 resulted in "erosion of the traditional view that political decision-making should be based on rational arguments rather than on religious faith or doctrine", though, as these are not mutually exclusive. I'll try to get hold of the journal article to get more specifics. In the meantime here's a sort of summary thing by the researcher.

Find My iPhone works, and it is awesome. A guy and his friends use GPS to recover his iPhone from a thief.

I've lost hours today to (*%)*%^ malware. Normally the programs I have installed take care of it, but this is a new one, calling itself "Antivirus 360" (though of course it's not the Norton program). Bastard thing keeps opening popups and dialogues. I've got Malwarebytes Anti-Maleware program chewing through my hard drive right now, while I dawdle, updating my survey of COC in Doctor Who and doing the washing up. It's particularly maddening because I really wanted to finish The Sign today. Gevalt.

Just ran into my first snag with OpenOffice.org: no "live" word count, ie, no little floating dialogue that you can update for a running total. You can leave the Properties > Statistics dialogue open, but it takes up something like a third of the screen. I've just spent over an hour screwing around cluelessly with macros. What a pain in the butt.