Modern annoyances

Here's a few things I have been saving up to complain about:

* It seems impossible to buy a simple set of plain Lego blocks anymore. (Duplo, yes, but not older kids' basic Lego.) As anyone with children is probably aware, Lego seemingly went totally "themed" many years ago, as if a corporate decision was made that all kids' imaginations must come prepackaged. I'm sure I read somewhere in the last year or two how the Lego company was not doing well. Here's a tip: stop paying for movie tie-in's and overly specialised fiddly pieces and start selling basic sets again. I could live with the little figures (although they do sully the "purity" of the Lego of my childhood,) if basic kits could be found again.

* A pharmacy I was in recently was selling "Hopi ear candles". If I ruled the world, there would be some minimum standard of vague utility for what a pharmacy could sell, and Hopi ear candles would never reach that threshold.

* The twee obsession that ABC Radio National listeners have with fonts irritates me. The Saturday morning show recently did a segment on Microsoft changing the font for (I think) Outlook, and sure enough the following week the host noted how much response that segment received. Oh for God's sake. If you are 95 and live alone on a mountain, maybe an undue interest in default fonts is half justifiable. If you are under 50 and you are worrying about default fonts, you really, really need another interest in life.

* Talking about fonts reminds me: I still occasionally find people who still think Wordperfect stopped at DOS version 5.1. In fact, the Windows based versions are up to X3, which is what they named version 13 in order to avoid the unlucky number. Ironically (if that is the correct use of the word for this example), this latest version lets you run it in DOS 5.1 emulation.

It drives me crazy when I have to sometimes use Word instead of WP. My long held belief that formatting anything in WP is always easier than in Word (which continually tries to guess my intention and 9 times out of 10 gets it wrong) seemed to have been confirmed this week when I showed a Word only user how to do indents and edit codes in WP. He seemed genuinely surprised, and I am sure this could be true of many Word users if only they had exposure to WP.

By the way, I do not own shares in Corel.