The Surgery

Ikea has announced its intention to start selling cars.

(Because some things just wouldn’t work as TTR Odd Spots. )

Jodee Berry of Panama City, Fla., sits with her toy Yoda at her lawyer’s office Wednesday.

Berry, a former Hooters waitress, has sued the restaurant where she worked saying she was promised a new Toyota for winning a beer sales contest in April.

Berry, 26, believed that she had won a new car, but she was blindfolded, led to the parking lot and presented a toy Yoda, the little green guy from Star Wars.

Source: Associated Press

This has been driving me nuts for ages and I finally decided to do something about it.

I am running OpenOffice.org 2.0 on an Ubuntu 6.06 workstation. Spellcheck has never worked. Ever. If you click the Spellcheck button you just get a message saying “the spellcheck is complete” even though there are glaring spelling errors in the document.

Here’s how I fixed the problem. All I’m doing is changing the default language in effect, not installing a new dictionary. Hopefully this is useful to someone:

• Open a new document;
• Press F11 to see the Styles & Formatting menu;
• Right-click on Default and then click Modify;
• Select the Font tab and click in the Language combo box. The languages with dictionaries installed have a small ABC-tick icon to the left. In my case it was set to English (Australia), which had no dictionary, so I changed it to English (UK);
• Click OK and close the Styles & Formatting window;
• Select File / Templates / Save and give your new template a name, like “dr-ron-template”
• Close the document;
• Select File / Templates / Organize;
• Double-click My Templates, find the one you have just created, right-click and select “Set as default template”;
• Click close.

That’s it! Now whenever you create a new document, you should notice the (un)familiar red wiggly line below your spelling mistakes. Note that any document you created prior to this, in the old “default” template, will still be using the old language and will not have spell checking enabled.