Open Office 2007 Files w/ Older Versions

A while ago, I noticed that Office 2007 had a new format to smack in my face. It was .docx, .pptx, etc. This was nice, instead of the files being around 80kb they were about 20kb, perfect for me since I tend to make about 6000 documents per month.

The only super retarded drawback to this was that I couldn’t use my schools computers for the files because they all had WinXP and OfficeXP. So I went searching and found that Microsoft had decided to come out with a little crappy mcgibbit that adds the ability to open these nifty little formats in previous versions of office. It can be found here. Remember to do all Windows Updates before installing

Message to Developers!

Hi there

I’m not much into the whole developing stuff for other people, but for those who are, my friend has a site called HelpDeveloper which has some nice tutorials and community that you should check out.

http://help-developer.com/

Civilization Revolution – Review :)

Gotta love those Romans Imgscr: Gamespot

The only possible ways for you not to have heard about the Civilization series if you are encredibly stupid or have been living under a rock. And even if you have been, it’s perfect for you cave dwellers since it plays like a nice introduction of basic history in a nice, pretty, cartoonish way. Which is great, as long as you can tolerate your military advisor babbling on about “Hogogoboga” for 15 seconds every time you get attacked. Honestly, the advisors can be so utterly hilarious yet so disturbingly annoying. It’s like Bill O’Reilly on Paris Hilton. Sorry, lost my train of thought.

So, enough rambling about that, let’s get dirty into the game! While I’m still waiting for Gamefly to finally send me a god damned copy of the game, I downloaded the demo for a quick game of pwnage. The result was a resounding meh. It could have been great, but there were just too many design flaws.

For example, in the demo I would often use the left analog stick to move around the screen, whilst the game told me to use the one on the right. Ignoring that, it seemed to work fine, but it wouldn’t let me use any of the buttons unless I used the right analog stick, causing my gory first person shooter addict hands to mindlessly slap the controller.

Also, I have no idea how to zoom in and out. Maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention to the tutorial, but it seems like the right analog stick sort of kind of does that. But it rarely zoomed out and when it did it wouldn’t zoom back in.

The button controls are fine, when they aren’t teabagging your corpse with the text “Use the right analog stick you twat.” The graphics are great, but they’ve moved from semi-realistic graphics to hilariously funky cartoons. And the battles look like something out of your average SSBB clusterfuck.

If I remember correctly, Civ4 would let me build buildings and people at the same time. As far as I can tell that doesn’t happen in Civ: Rev but I didn’t get to play it for a very long time.

But, overall, Civilization Revolution is perfect for mediocre fans of the series and newbies, but it’s hard to recommend it to hardcore fans of the series that love micromanaging every little worker, but at least the majority of strategy fans will like it.

Blackberry OS 4.5

Yes, I know that this isn’t realesed, yes I know that it’s illegal, in a retarded sort of war. But let’s not dwell on that. Let’s get down to all the sexy movie players for all of your porn business party recorders and whatnot

So, you have a RIM Blackberry, well congratulation! You probably have the older operating system version (older to me anyways) 4.3 or 4.2. Those are fine for most of you daily work and stuff, but for those people that have phone fetishes like myself demand that we get our fair share of features in our phones. Like the ability to actually create half decent Word docs on the go and such. So RIM put all of those new features into the phone, including a free version of Documents To Go.

RIM also buffed up the whole media experience by introducing some new interesting features, like voice recording.. and video playback that doesn’t freeze on you.. etc. While those things are on most phones, it’s much nicer on the Blackberry when your trying to stay up all night, or recording your cat’s first word. Whatever.

While I understand that holding software from your paying customers can render some good supply and demand, it’s just really annoying for us when a company doesn’t release it’s ready to use software that’s free anyway. But, it does have so minor issues that aren’t really troublesome for the whole experience.

1) What the fuck happened to my MyFaves?

2) Why does the addresses that I have stored all have about 6 spaces at the end ofthem?

3) You can’t get any software from mobile.blackberry.com, because it reads the OS as BBOS 0.0.0.00

But, if you can give those difficulties a backhand slap then you can probably find a prerelease version of BlackBerry OS 4.5 on Warez-BB or whatnot

Call of Duty 5 – WTF?

When I first played Call of Duty 4 for the PC, I loved it. A fairly good series got a major overhall, they added weapon upgrades and mods unlike any Call of Duty game before. Also, it was in the modern day so the guns were no longer piles of recoil and load noises. It was fun, too. For an fpsrpg anyway. It became the most popular game for the xbox 360 and one of the favorite PC fps’s.

Now, Infinity Ward took all of those pluses and threw them up their own asses. Moving the stage back to that god damned World War II era, added what seems to be a superweapon (flamethrowing cheaply ripped from TF2) and moved the enviorment to the Pacific.

I’ve never really understood game producers’ infinite desire to milk World War II to it’s last bleeding pulp, but some of them were actually fun. Call of Duty 3 for the WII was pretty damn good, but that doesn’t mean that you should make the same game with a different set of characters doing the same task in the same era over and over, so at least Infinity Ward decided to move it to the Pacific. But it does seem like a step backward from FN P90’s and RPG’s to BAR’s and Bazooka’s.

But, at least there is the flamethrower, which should make the game more accessibile to people who like shoving nails into their skulls.

Assassin’s Creed

Yes, I know. I’m a bit late to be jumping on Altair’s suprisingly flexible back, with the pending release of Assassin’s Creed in 2009 if I am correct. And to dwell on that for a moment, I honestly doubt that running around with knives and swords is going to be much help to Desmond/Altair against 2012’s weapons of uber pwnage.

Now, back on track for the actual review. For anyone who hasn’t already checked this game out, you should. Remember to get it for the XBOX 360 because the PS3 version has many pointless aspects I’d rather leave at the dump.

So, I started to like it from the start, a crazed assassin followed by 2 annoying cumudgin’s trying to stop me from killing blind old people. So those guys are twats but at least I can kill random people. Now, after that is where the game starts to soil itself. I walk into a room and I announced that I’m there for the Templar’s to come and slice my nipples off, but I can live with that. Now, let’s jump to nearer the end. Just to clarify, this game is about a guy in the future forced to relive genetic memories of his ancestor, Altair. Now, this is where the game dropped piles of turds in my face.

Ancient mystical object. When those words give or take mystical and object, I start to get a little mad. We are simply playing our little ‘kill everyone’ game, when all of a sudden (don’t read if you don’t want to spoil the game, even though it does that itself) there is a crazy old man, using God-like powers to control a couple thousand people in your home town of Masyaf, and then his evil plan to take over everyone with his little mind control device and blah blah blah. It goes on and on and on. It doesn’t help that I was excited until the fifthteenth way of the combined forces of Richard the Lionhart and Saladin. Oh yeah, the fighting system is meant for demos and gameplay videos. When it comes down to fighting, it can takes hours to kill a decent amount of foes.

So, Assassin’s Creed is a fair game covered with a mediocre storyline and a whole lot of realistic blood splatters.

Summary:

Gameplay 4/5

Sound 5/5

Music 5/5 (You will love the battle music )

Price: $20 used, $25-$30 new

Zenbe

The Zenbe email reader screen

Zenbe is a new email service that popped up out of no where a few month’s back, and it’s pretty good. Full of bright colors and shiny objects, such as the ability to receive mail from POP3 email addresses. But wait, you say, can’t every email client from here to Azjerbijan do that? The short answer is yes, the long answer is ‘yes but’. See, Zenbe is like a wedding cake. It presents itself well, it’s simple yet complex, it even has a calendar so you won’t forget your wedding date.

So, now you’ve just applied for membership at www.zenbe.com, and now you want to know what your supposed to do with all that crap. It’s quite simple, really. You have your mail screen, that suprisingly enough shows you your email. You have your standard draft, starred, sent, etc folders. Then you have your email tags, not much to talk about but it’s nice. Next up, is the ZenPages.

According to Zenbe’s own information page, ZenPages are “With ZenPages, you can easily share calendars, task lists, files, even email, with whomever you choose — whether they use Zenbe or not. ZenPages are customizable — you can add a map, a slideshow, a video, an RSS feed, nearly any kind of embeddable widget.” So, in other words, ZenPages are little sites that you can create on the fly for almost any purpose. You can share your email, that business report, anything you like with whomever you like! Well, I guess if your a friendless misanthrope i.e almost everyone at my school you won’t have much of a use for Zenbe’s ZenPages, but, if you live with the people who don’t stab pitchforks in their eyes for kicks it’s a great service you could try out

Summary:

Homepage: www.zenbe.com

Price: Free

Rating: 4/5