Blog » 2005 » November

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But thinking of OpenOffice.org’s dilema made me realise just how much intellectual capital the human race has invested in learning the interface of Microsoft Office-type software. There are hundreds of millions, or maybe billions, of people who have had to learn the idiosyncrasies of the menu layout; what the little icons mean; or which of the boxes on the ruler correspond to margins and which to indents in just the first line of paragraphs.

For the sake of argument, lets do some back-of-the-envel…. uh, -blogpost calculations. A quick online search suggests a conservative cost of around $200 for a basic Office training course. Advanced courses can go WAY beyond this cost. Many people are of course self-taught — but I’ve certainly spent much more than $200-worth of my time learning Office’s tricks (and lost years of my life in stress, but let’s forget about that for the moment). Companies routinely send people on Office courses, so this cost is really a basic, required investment in personnel intellectual capital.

Now Office 12 claims to be revolutionary — doing away with menus and completely redoing the toolbar. So easily half of our hard-won knowledge will be written off as soon as we upgrade — $100 value per person. Assuming around 500 million Office or Office-clone users in the world, that means that Microsoft’s release of Office 12 will immediately write off $50 billion in knowledge capital around the world — compared to Microsoft’s total annual sales of about $40 billion.

So yes, change and even improvement does have a cost. But anything is better than Word as it currently is.

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Red Rocks is a conservation area immediately bordering Las Vegas. It has lots of excellent sandstone climbing. It is also absolutely stunning, with some of the most interesting rock colourings I’ve seen outside of Death Valley. There’s enough climbing for a lifetime, and we were only able to work through some of the routes on five of the walls at only the first two “pullouts” (parking areas). Unfortunately, though there are a number of multi-pitch routes, they all seemed to need traditional climbing gear (ie. did not have bolts in the rock all the way up), so we stuck to single-pitch climbs.

We spent four days climbing. This, along with how close we were to Las Vegas, convinced us that a hotel was the way to go. So each day consisted of Holiday Inn Express’s breakfast (including their rather mediocre “world famous” cinnamon rolls), then climbing for as long as daylight lasted. From there it was back to the jacuzzi at the hotel, then the Strip for dinner and for laughing at the casinos and their inhabitants.

As you can see from Michelle’s blog, she has been climbing fairly frequently. Lukasz also gets quite a lot of practice, so I definitely the junior member of the trio. But my gym efforts seem to have paid off, as I got up some (for me) quite tricky routes. I also did some good 5.9 leads. A lot of the climbs we did were sustained and crimpy, on vertical or slightly slabby walls. This suits me well, as I like being able to think and feel around on the rock without getting overly tired just holding position.

Now, being Halloween weekend, we couldn’t leave the occasion uncelebrated. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get into any of the Halloween parties on the Strip (partially due to being, well, really tired) — and we forgot the camera, so have no proof of our claims of seeing Elvis everywhere.

But Monday was our own Halloween event — climbing in costume. Michelle found a huge moose antler headthing; Lukasz had a long flowing black dress and hair, all of which made climbing equipment interesting; and I was Zorro. On a rock face. With sword. It was awesome.

All told, it was a fantastic trip, and a good release of stress I didn’t even know I was holding. Once my fingers recovered, my climbing has also been better — I managed to lead a 5.10b at the gym last week, which is the hardest grade I’ve ever climbed. I’m looking forward to the next trip!

See all the pictures here!

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