open office « failing like never before

19Oct/090

Spell Check

For about the past year, ever since I got my current laptop, I have been living without spell check on my laptop. Or perhaps more correctly, I've been living without any dictionaries for my spell check engines to operate on. Some people on Facebook where surprised when I reveled that Arch's base Firefox and Open Office packages do not include dictionaries and that language dictionaries must be installed separately.

As an engineering student, I have had precious little reasons to write essays. Those papers that I did write, I generally just wrote up quickly in VIM, and then SFTPed them into my school account where I then printed them. And while I did write lab reports up in Open Office, nobody really checks the spelling and grammar of lab reports. But because I had a rather large paper to write last week, I finally broke down and installed some US English dictionaries.

Tagged as: open office, spell check, vim No Comments

26Nov/070

Stupid Way to Fail a Paper

This entry is about a paper I wrote for my history class. A paper which, I did not enjoy writing, was not proud of, and spent very little time on. Like always, I waited for my ideas to fully mature before I set fingers to keyboard and begin typing. That is to say, I didn't start writing until the day before and ended up spewing random phrases across the page in an entirely incoherent fashion, (or so I thought) and ended up finishing a seven page paper in exactly three or four hours.

I could say, that if the subject had been interesting I would have spent more time and put in more effort and pride. But that would be lying. I wrote the same way I always write: uncaring.

And just like always, I surprised myself. I got a B+ on the paper; the TA was approving of my style and thesis and only took points of because it was too short.