Went to my first Mensa meeting this weekend. Overall, it was pretty decent. The host seemed to have some abiding hatred for families with small children. Well, he didn’t actually say that, but he didn’t want them living next door to him. Made me think of old movies or stories with the term “those people” used liberally.
Another oddity: one of the guests, who had brought store-bought fried chicken to a potluck dinner (not even KFC), wanted everyone to keep her disposable plates and plasticware, so she could wash and re-use them. Apparently she has a difficult time finding plates that fit in her wicker plate-holder baskets, and the red and blue plasticware is so hard to find, except at the beginning of July.
Just proves that smart people are not always very normal.
current_mood: tired
So, the fine intelligent IS professionals that work for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) have finally gotten around to installing Office 2000. Now we’re only one generation behind, woohoo. Simultaneously, they upgraded the browser to IE 5.5 (not SP1 yet but at least within a year of the current version) but with their security enhancements turned on. More accurately, many features turned off, such as Java (no loss), Javascript (kind of important), and VBScript (thank goodness). The loss of Javascript means that many of the sites that we are required to go to to complete our normal daily jobs are inaccessible or broken when using Internet Explorer.
The DISA “solution”? Use Netscape 4.7, which is still the official DISA browser. Good to see that the Information Systems masters are so completely out of touch with modern realities.
Firstly, if they wanted to enhance security by turning off Javascript, why leave it enabled in Netscape? Secondly, although I’m hardly a Microsoft fan, it’s absurd to pretend that all sites will work with Netscape. Does the term Embrace and Extend ring any bells at DISA, I wonder.
And these are the folks that the Department of Defense entrust with their most prized IS tools. Your tax dollars at work.
current_mood: amused
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