Formatting Rant

Why is it so hard to format things? When I wrote my Master's thesis, it seemed like I fought with Bill everyday, trying to get Word to do this or that. I didn't want to learn LaTex so I could avoid Word, but sometimes I wonder why a PC is even worth it sometimes rather than a Mac, which everyone says works right the first time and is sooooo great (I'm a little skeptical that there aren't a whole set of other problems and you still have to deal with Bill if you use Office for Mac [and the rest of the world, especially in engineering, who use PCs]).

Why is it that Blogger (I recognize that Blogger is associated with Google and not Bill) can't keep the format that you tell it to have? I mean, when I import a picture, do I really need an extra enter between every paragraph? And when I import 10 pictures, do I really need 10 extra lines? I didn't tell you to do that, so cut it out. Sometimes when you delete some of the extra enters, it decides that a picture was linked to that one and the picture goes bye-bye. Then you have to import the picture again and you're back to square one of reformatting.

Don't get me started on what happends if you import a picture with the left or right setting. I usually use the none settting, but then you can't text wrap. Sometimes, depending on how you import the picture, the spacing between lines is different, so you have one paragraph with like -0.5 spacing and the next paragraph at 1.5 spacing. Wow, that looks great! Next year I get to go to 3rd grade.

After you think you have everything right, you publish the post and it changes everything again. It doesn't look like it did when you composed it. It doesn't look like the preview, so you have to go through this editing iteration. Sometimes the changes will take but sometimes if you are lucky, it will obviously be smarter than you and change it to how it wants. Well, I changed it so that it didn't look like crap! Just keep it how I made it look!

Now, I know some will say, "hey, it's free, so back off" or "why don't you use wordpress" or "you could write your own code so you can have a sparkly turtle background". I took a computer science class back in 1998 when I was a freshman and can get by enough to mess with already written html code, but I have no idea what I'm doing. I can change the background picture to my own and change the width of the text boxes, but that's about it (and it takes a while to get it right).

My rant is - why can't things just work how I want them to. Why can't computers just read our minds already? Sometimes I just want to ctrl-f someone in charge and ctrl-x or ctrl-alt-delete them, or at least edit them. Darn it, all I got was the task manager! Reboot! Reboot!