June 2006 Archives

I may be a Protestant but I’m very happy at this news:

Scientists who carry out embryonic stem cell research and politicians who pass laws permitting the practice will be excommunicated, the Vatican said yesterday.

“Destroying human embryos is equivalent to an abortion. It is the same thing,” said Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family.

“Excommunication will be applied to the women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos [and to the] politicians that approve the law,” he said in an interview with Famiglia Christiana, an official Vatican magazine.

Excommunication forbids Catholics from receiving communion, assisting in any Church duties, and sometimes from having a Church burial.

Dare I hope that the Kennedy’s will be excommunicated?

I doubt that there are many fetal stem cell researchers who are evangelicals, and I don’t have much hope for the old-line Protestant denominations, but non-Catholic churches ought to follow the Catholics and announce that they, too, will exclude from communion or use church discipline on abortionists, fetal stem-cell researchers, and their politician friends. This is certainly one issue that all Christians should agree on.

Take Microsoft Office 2007 for an online test drive. You need IE 6 or higher and a Citrix plugin that will automatically be installed.

I had seen photos of the new ribbon user interface but wasn’t sure that I liked it. After using it, I find that I like it very much. If you’re a power user, using the ribbon rather than the old icon and menu interface isn’t going to make much of a difference. However, if you’re new to computers and find the current menu and icon interface intimidating, you’re going to really like the ribbons. It’s going to finally allow my mother to easily create Word and even Excel documents.

According to Microsoft, the ribbon does not take up any more space than does the current system of menus and taskbars. Further, the ribbon keeps you from digging down 17 levels (yes, a slight exaggeration) of menus to do something like a mail merge, which I don’t do very often but need to be able to do it fast when I have to do it. Further, the ribbons can be easily collapsed. Here’s a picture of Excel 2007 with the ribbon turned on followed by a picture of Excel 2007 with the ribbons turned off.

Another thing that I like is the new SmartArt feature (more examples here). It makes it easy to create professional-looking looking objects within your documents. Not only that, but if you change document themes, the SmartArt object will change to match your new theme. Here’s a SmartArt object from the Microsoft website followed by a SmartArt object that I created in about 30 seconds (including playing with switching themes.

The only problem is that I fear that we will begin to see SmartArt everywhere. It’s a very useful tool but I fear that it will become overused.

Finally, I’m encouraged by the support of Word 2007 for blogging purposes. Word 2007 will produce clean HTML output that can be posted to a number of blog engines, including, I hope, Movable Type. I don’t know yet whether Movable Type 3.3 has a WYSIWYG interface but I do know that implementing one in Movable Type 3.2 was a pain.

Overall, I think that Microsoft Office 2007 will be a roaring success and, in 5 years, we’ll be looking back wondering how we ever got anything done with all those menu drilldowns and icons.