mishy

I think Apple and Lisa Loeb have conspired. I have one album from Lisa that I purchased after watching her show "Singled Out" and now all that iTunes wants to play in shuffle mode is 3 songs of varying artists then another Lisa Loeb song. I'm going to delete all but my starred songs from her album and that will solve that problem.

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For once I planned ahead and actually made a PowerPoint presentation a month ago for a training session I'm doing tomorrow. Yesterday I was reviewing the presentation before printing out the slides with notes (for note taking, because people seem to need to take notes when I talk :) and noticed a term I didn't remember adding so I went to follow the hyperlink and found that it was missing. Huh. I know that I added one, I just didn't remember to where. I started spot checking the other 29 links that I had already spent hours researching and adding to this presentation. They were all missing. I don't normally curse in front of my female co-worker because she's like a mom to me and my mom doesn't like it when I swear so I just transfer the courtesy to my female co-worker, but yesterday I did a lot of "f f f f f f f f f" exclaiming. At least I abbreviated it.

I read online from a Microsoft MVP that there was a known problem with my version of Office and hyperlinks vanishing. The suggested solutions were: update Office; remove Office completely, reinstall, and don't update. I've done both those things. My presentation's links are still missing. Looks like I'm redoing all my research. The thing that really chafes is that I could have sworn I saved every single link to a bookmarks folder in Safari back before my computer was sent in for service. I have all my bookmarks on the computer but I cannot locate any such folder. The backup version of my presentation works just fine, but I made significant changes to it so it's basically useless to me.

I know you're all gloating that bad things happen to IT people too. It's okay to do. Go ahead, get it out of your system. Just know that Murphy's Law applies to you too so make sure to plan ahead and have a backup (whether that be the data itself or a plan for how to accomplish your task if your technology fails you). This advice is rarely heeded.

Update: I finished editing alllll the links, saved the file, viewed the show, and the links are all “off”. For example, if I hover over a Microsoft link I get a link to a Wikipedia definition. The hyperlinks aren't blank, but they're totally useless when they don't point you to the right place. I'm redoing the entire presentation now to see if that fixes the problem. Effing A².

Update 2: That seems to have worked, although I've lost all confidence that the links will stay put. The worst that happens is that people have to play a memory game of matching appropriate links to appropriate keywords. If they don't like it they don't have to come to the presentation ever again. Works for me. :)

Update: 3: Yup, the links reverted to their preferred squirrelliness again. I am officially hating on a certain big company right now.

Update 4: It cannot be said that I am not persistent. I copied and pasted from PowerPoint to Keynote (Mac version of presentation software) then redid all the links then exported to PowerPoint. Magically, all is well now. Well, not magically. The only thing magical about this is that my computers are still on their desks rather than out the freakin' window.

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This doesn't deserve its own post. AI top 12 was the worst I've ever experienced. I would stop watching the show, but we really enjoy hearing the judges tell almost every contestant what a disaster their performance was. I think this season we need to vote off two at a time until we get to the top 6: Blake, Chris, Jordin, Stephanie, LaKisha, and ... Okay, never mind, top 5. (No, I don't like Melinda.)