Voting

Despite convincing myself that I would continue with the early starts, I thought I deserved a rest this morning so I had a little lie in. Okay, quite a lot of lie in - something I'm now regretting seeing as I feel even more tired than I did the previous day. To even further hamper any thought of getting some work done, I have been playing with Command and Conquer at least two or three times a day since installing it and I have today installed Microsoft's Ribbon Hero game, which tests your knowledge of the new ribbon interface in office 2007+. As suspected, I'm pretty good with most things although there are some nifty presentation elements to excel that I wasn't aware of which takes the conditional formatting to a whole new level.

I suppose with the free online and desktop equivalents from Google and OpenOffice, they have to put that little bit extra into their product to give them the edge over the competitors. After all, you simply cannot compete with free.

A scary though at the moment is that I'm losing the ability to spell. I've come to write down the simplest of words in the past couple of days and simply frozen half way through, unable to think of what letter comes next. It's a little bit unnerving really and is probably a side effect of being too reliant on a spell checker for practically anything I type. If I'm not using MS Word then I'll be typing this blog and I have Firefox's invaluable spell checker add on which means that when I'm using a text box on a webpage I get little red squiggly lines all over the place. It's not anywhere near as comprehensive as the MS version and can't even recognise its own name apparently and is missing rather a lot of net lingo for an online checker. Still, it does a good enough job but probably means that I will continue to spell words incorrectly and rely on the spell checker to correct them. Perhaps I should try going without it for a few days and hold a competition to see who can spot the most errors in the blog. I'm sure I've left a fair few behind already and that's with the spell checker on.

As a last point, I finally got round to watching first time voters question time which was shown on BBC Three a couple of weeks ago now. Despite being hosted by Dermot O'Leary, it was a pretty insightful show and in fact to give him credit, Dermot was a pretty good host and certainly surpassed my expectation of what he was going to be like as a presenter on a show like this. I can't say he wasn't a little bit biased towards his own options but I guess it is quite difficult to maintain impartiality when people are obviously talking politician speak. I especially liked the question from the chav at the front who almost needed a translator for the panellists to understand what it was he was trying to ask. I totally agree with the purpose of the show though and the only reason I have a slight interest in politics is because I think it's important to use the vote we have been given. A democratic society is worthless if the public don't use their vote and I think that they should perhaps bring back the advert from the last general election that reminded everyone that politics affects everyone and that if you don't use your vote then you aren't really entitled to complain about anything.