failing like never before

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.