Day: 31 March 2008

… our exam, that is. On Saturday morning we had our Moore Course exam on “Old Testament 1”. And it’s all over! High fives all round, I think. It seemed to go quite well – I was expecting the exam to be awful, but in the end it turned out to be moderately OK. I managed to answer all the questions to a reasonable degree at least, which is usually a good sign! Of course, how many marks I will get is a completely different kettle of fish but I’m fairly confident I at least got a pass mark – and I don’t really care if that means just scraping through!

The exam was on Saturday morning, and afterwards we went for lunch at the Sun Inn in Dedham with a few other people who were also sitting the exam. It was a very nice morning / early afternoon! In the evening I made a start on the Wasgij we’re borrowing from my parents – didn’t get very far, it’s quite a difficult one: the picture on the box is only a clue as to the picture you actually make. The picture you actually make is of the same scene, but 70 years later! Quite a clever idea though, and they’re good fun.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, came back for lunch, and then spent the afternoon doing some cleaning and getting ready for the evening — we had a whole bunch of people come round for pizza and to watch a film! When I say ‘whole bunch of’, I mean Alex, Elisa, Anne-Marie, Tom, Dan, Alison, Steve, Karen, Phil, Jenny, Matthew, Ellie, and me and Phil. It was probably the most packed out front room has been since we moved in! But it was a very good evening. We watched ‘Stardust’, which I haven’t seen before, and I rather enjoyed it.

Oh, there’s one more thing I have to say: I want my hour back! I’m still catching up on sleep after missing an hour on Saturday night. Still, at least losing an hour now means gaining an hour in October, so it’s not all bad!

I haven’t really blogged much about this, but Microsoft’s OOXML format is currently on its way to becoming an international standard (i.e., it’s been submitted to the ISO and they have been voting on it recently).

For those of you who’ve never heard of OOXML, it’s basically a file format for documents — i.e., when you save a Microsoft Word document it will get saved to OOXML. There are a number of problems with the specification, though, which have been pointed out at length elsewhere. There is another format called Open Document Format (ODF) that has far fewer problems, and it was voted in as a standard last year.

Unfortunately, it looks like OOXML is set to become adopted as a standard in the face of all these technical difficulties as well as a perfectly acceptable standard already existing. There have been a number of controversies in the voting, for example:

March 28th: Meeting in the Norwegian Standards Institute (Standard Norge).

Purpose: To decide the final vote for Norway on whether the document format OOXML should become an international standard.

The meeting: 27 people in the room, 4 of which were administrative staff from Standard Norge.

The outcome: Of the 24 members attending, 19 disapproved, 5 approved.

The result: The administrative staff decided that Norway wants to approve OOXML as an ISO standard.

I think the ISO are well on their way to becoming totally irrelevant. If ‘standards’ can be set by methods such as these, they’re not really standards.