Apathy Sketchpad

As part of the Electronics 2 module at university, as well as building an EMP bomb, we have to write a seven to eight thousand word report on said bomb. This involves using everyone’s favourite bloat-ware, Microsoft Word. Just as every time I play Worms World Party the mouse pointer shadow inexplicably turns itself off, every time I use Word I find a new feature, each more worthless than the last. For example, I wrote a thousand words yesterday and discovered that every time I clicked the table of contents the web toolbar appeared for no reason at all. Today I wrote another thousand words, and discovered a tool called “auto-summarize”. This pleased me, becuase it was spelled with a Z and also American, but mostly baffled me, because if I was going to get someone to read a document and select the most important parts, I would not trust a computer to do it. For example, here’s Microsoft Word’s auto-summary of the help file’s entry about that very same feature:

On the Tools menu, click AutoSummarize.To cancel a summary in progress, press ESC.

Under Type of summary, click the way you want to display the summary: Insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document or Create a new document and put the summary there.

Perhaps it got the main points across. Interestingly it finds a grammatical error in this. But it’s even less help with an electronics project. Its summary (which could have saved me writing the abstract, had it been any good) made no sense at all, failed to mention exactly what the project was, and was comprised largely of my fragmented section headers. Arguably, I’m expecting too much of the poor computer, but I am firmly of the opinion that if something isn’t going to work at all, you shouldn’t bother including it in the first place. The feature I really need is in any case the approximate opposite of the auto-summary. What I need is the auto-pad, which stretches my nice, easy-reading 2432-word account into a bloated, barely readable, eight thousand-word project report.

This involves using everyone’s favourite bloat-ware, Microsoft Word. For example, here’s Microsoft Word’s auto-summary of the help file’s entry about that very same feature:

On the Tools menu, click AutoSummarize.To cancel a summary in progress, press ESC.

Under Type of summary, click the way you want to display the summary: Insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document or Create a new document and put the summary there.

What I need is the auto-pad, which stretches my nice, easy-reading 2432-word account into a bloated, barely readable, eight thousand-word project report.