Presidential Campaign Under Way

I'm glad that the presidential campaign finally got under way yesterday.

Makes me wonder what the fuss of the last six months' "pré-campanha" was all about...

Mário Soares Advertising

While most of the presidential campaign posters are wasted space, the worst have to be Mário Soares' "Sempre Presente" and "MP3" posters. Neither of them say anything positive about the candidate, implying that persistence is a quality required of a president. The latter is particularly sad, trying to appeal to voters too young to have voted for him 15 years ago.

Let's just hope there is a clear winner in the first round of voting, to get the presidential circus out of the way as quickly as possible.

Office 2003 Irritation

Latest irritation from Microsoft:

• when opening Word attachments in Outlook 2003, Word 2003 shows a preview style which is complete rubbish, showing nonsense in all documents opened over the last 2 months. I have to switch views to be able to read the documents and can't find a way of turning this option off!

Thanks Bill!

Merry Christmas

Just to wish a Merry Christmas to all (all right, both) my regular readers - Jorge and Beverly - to the less regular visitors - Miguel, Eme and Lumife - and to the other lurkers who come back from time to time without leaving comments, especially Sunnyvale, CA and Lancaster, UK.

Windows Support

Got a new piece of brilliance from Windows today in the office. Windows XP Professional is very good at dealing with most things you throw at it. Give it a corporate network and it will recognise it automatically. Today it decided to no longer recognise a network card. Help said try uninstalling - it wouldn't allow that: "required for boot-up". Then Help said "update drivers from the internet" - bloody brilliant considering that the PC "knows" that internet access is via the corporate network and that there is no network card installed. Doh!

This is just another in a long series of great messages. Try: "USB device error - click here to continue", when the only USB device is the mouse. And how about the MS-DOS classic when booting a PC with no keyboard: "Keyboard Error - Press F1 to continue".

There are some brilliant guys at Microsoft. It's a shame the ones who write the error messages have never manned a help desk.

Alternative Presidential Candidate

In my opinion, the best performance in the Presidential election debates so far has been from Miguel Sousa Tavares. It's a shame he's not standing...

Bush says he fought the war on "wrong" intelligence

Well that's a surprise!

Presidential Campaign gets Up Close and Personal

Just what Soares needed: a personal attack to make voters sorry for him. I don't think the phrase "Atrasado Mental" was the best judged reaction however. (Try putting that into Google's translator!)

If it comes to a fist fight, my money's on Jeronimo.

Sporting lose to Red Star Amadora

• Not quite Red Star Belgrade is it?
• Estrela de Amadora don't usually play in red, unless my memory fails me (again).

While the title is just to annoy one of my few known readers, trying to decide how to phrase it led me on to one of my pet hates - Eurosport's references to "Sporting Lisbon".

Would that be "Sport Lisbon and Benfica" or "Sporting Club Portugal"?

Fortunately I haven't had to suffer that pet hate much this season...

Durão - the Tough Guy

"Barroso warns Blair not to act like Sheriff of Nottingham" - Financial Times











Arioplano would have done it better...