A year without blogging… I thought I would never succeed! Don’t get me wrong I do write quite a lot online, I have too, and my blog really gets some thing once everything else is written.

So without further ado I will show you a beautiful photo of the balloons we are sending for HFD (taken by Pockey and licensed under CC-BY to HFD):
Now why did the HFD swag leave only today (instead of Saturday as they should have)? Well I think I suck at LibreOffice: once a year I am used to take my “latest” copy of LibreOffice and remember how to print labels for all the teams in the world. SFD is of course a lot bigger than HFD but it’s been going on since 2004. Either way it kind of used to work, with a lot of glitches, but it was working. The last time I used LibreOffice I felt I had to complain to one of the main developer and so I found out that I was running a two year old release. This time after trying the latest available version under the latest Fedora and not being successful I went for an upgrade and am now running release 4.0.1! Yes, 4.0.1! Well let me tell you that not only the “optional” address line that some teams have and some don’t always print and there is no way to automatically do without it, but worth, even after selecting “database” as source (the other modes didn’t find the sheet whether under 3.6 or 4.0.1) I ended up with 11 pages of 8 labels for 53 teams. Yes you read me right… that is somewhere between 81 and 88 mailing addresses. What happens is that LibreOffice simply duplicates some of the addresses it takes from the database, and not next to one another, just randomly. So while the first 5 pages printed ok (oh yeah, they print only odd page numbers. So page 2 becomes 3, 3 becomes 5 and so on. I have no idea why but that’s the standard way) I started to find a second team from Japan. We only had one team in Japan, so I checked: same name, same address. Then next to it was the same team from India, then a new team, then a redundant team and so on, without any logic. After trying different “technique” to get only 53 teams in my labels, I had for only choice to finish the printing under a non-free office software running under a non-free operating system. This was a lot easier in many ways and I really pity the people who have no other choices. In fact I truly wonder how they manage.

Let me show you a beautiful second photo bearing the same license as the previous one, so you’ll be even more happy to have registered early:

All is not lost and I will join the few people who have complained about the feature being less than usable for office workers. Hopefully the new bug miscalculating the number of recipient will be easy to correct and the whole clarity of the function will start to take shape. I sometimes really wonder how people use free office software, not being a user myself. And often the five minutes a year I dive in end up taking me the whole week and not wanting to go back. Hopefully those five minutes will be more valuable this year!