InDesign is Evil

I've decided I hate InDesign. I've tried to like it. I told myself it can't be any worse than PageMaker. I was wrong. It is worse than PageMaker. It's useless for anything with text. It's overcomplicated and unfriendly. And the worst thing about it is the fact that I have to write a motherboard manual using it. The client gave me a template which I thought would make things easy, but the template opens with the announcement of a missing plug in, missing fonts, and about a squillion images linked badly. I'm not going to enjoy this project.

I have to work tomorrow. I really don't like weekend work. It has to be done though, and we get free lunch.

The Prince of Wales has made a fool of himself while posing for photos at Klosters. Unguarded comments caught on microphone seem to suggest that Charles has an intense dislike for Nick Whitchell, BBC royal reporter. The BBC has had a good time with the story however. They managed to make the prince look like a grumpy old buffoon.

I never got around to posting the above paragraphs yesterday (Friday) so what follows is a Saturday entry from work.

Two things occur to me about the pope's condition. First, I'm old enough to remember the death of the last two popes and I recall the same panic then as I am seeing now in the Catholic church; namely that there is no procedure in place to transfer authority to a representative while the pope himself is too sick to make any decisions. I don't understand this. Several centuries of Catholic Christianity have shown us that popes all die after a while. So why isn't there some system in place to deal with it? I also remember that last time the pope died there was confusion about picking a new one and what colour the smoke was. Is it just that the church can't bring themselves to believe that the current pope isn't immortal?

The second thing that occurs to me is more theoretical. At what point does the Cathlic church admit that the pope is in fact dead? That is to say, the Catholic church can't allow the machines keeping him alive to be turned off. What if the pope becomes effectively dead, only breathing with the aid of machines? Will they replace the Holy father, or will the pope's body contiue to lie in a vegetative state until the end of time, devoid of brain activity? That would surely be something of a crisis for the church wouldn't it? Who would take the hot seat at the vatican then?

I read today that there are apparently about 1,000 people in Britain in a persistant vegetative state.