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From the Editor's Desk
And since Microsoft Office was the 500 lb. Gorilla of office software, just about everybody used it and happily emailed along their .doc files to other folks. Even if you didn't have Microsoft Office, there has eventually been enough development in computer world that you could pick up any number of other programs that could read and write those .doc files. Apparently not in Microsoft's eyes. Recently, we here at the newspaper have been getting things from other folks and the .doc file has turned into a .docx file. And guess what, our computers can't read them. In fact, from what I can tell, only other people with the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Word can read them. This new file is the next generation of Microsoft's .doc file. The x stands for xml, but it might as well stand for excruciatingly frustrating. I'm sure there's all kinds of features in this new file format that the company is extolling, and maybe 2 percent of the folks who write things on the computer will use them. So surely that's reason enough to go making it the default for saving files in the program and making life miserable for everyone who has to figure out what these things are and spending time trying to find ways to open them or talking to the folks who unknowingly used an indecipherable file format and getting something usable. Thanks Microsoft! Email hoaxes Just call me a skeptic, but I generally don't believe anything in an email that's been forwarded 50 million times. I know, kinda takes some of the fun out of life, doesn't it? I get a lot of email every day. I mean, a lot of it. I think some PR companies must be paid based on how many email addresses they send things to. I get emails from kooks writing "opinion" pieces from all around the country, press releases for British Grand Prix racers, and all kinds of other stuff. Amongst the deluge, I'll get a forwarded email or two. They can be anything from funny pictures to the cyber version of chain letters. Then there's the wild rumor/hoax emails. Most of the time they seem to be intended to strike fear or stir up outrage. There's the one about the new U.S. Dollar coin not having "In God We Trust" on it, or the fake computer virus emails, or emails with long diatribes attributed to famous people who never wrote them, or stories of people dying in so many unusual ways the shear creativity of which must give Steven King pause. About 99.999 percent of them are false, but it's interesting to see how they get passed along from one person to another. Sometimes when I get them, I'll go to site called snopes.com, a site that has the sole purpose of debunking such email myths. Sometimes there's a small kernel of truth that served as the seed for wildly exaggerated claims made in the emails, and sometimes it's an interesting back story, but by the time the email gets going, whatever truth there was to the original incident has been completely submerged. You'd be surprised just how many email myths are out there if you check the site out.
Of course, I'd be happy if all I got were a few forwards of dubious email stories if I could just stop the flood of all the fluff that will never make it into print in any newspaper within a hundred-mile radius much less this one.
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