It's interesting to see the lingo in Rocky, a Swedish comic that's now getting attention in the USA. The comic contains a lot of English to begin with, as Rocky basically is a wigger, e.g. check this typical example out. On the other hand that strip is quite on the spot in a very satirical way. A lot of people - and trust me, I'm not excluding myself - like to think they're one of the black stereotypes. That's all because a lot of us whiteys in Sweden love hip-hop, and most of the guys making that music are black, and there's a certain twist to the hip-hop vocabulary, even though I think it's the most versatile language in any genre that's come out in the last years. Hip-hop is spoken word, poetry and "the black man's CNN" (as Chuck D somewhat generally once called it). Hence, there's a huge difference between lingual hip-hop skills and, say, 50 Cent's vocabulary, which is why I suppose it's more fun to make fun of the prejudiced over-the-top lyrics and life of Fiddy than of A Tribe Called Quest or The Jungle Brothers. That Rocky strip says it all. Anyway, it's zany to see Rocky being all English, as opposed to reading it mostly in Swedish with a few everyday English lines thrown in. I hope it's going to do good in the US. It's quite a feministic comic as well, and how usual is that? Street-smart, people.

Office 12 beta 1 is kinda nice. Here are some new screen-shots from CNet, showing stuff like how Outlook now incorporates more data in one screen (without making it look muddled) and how the File-menu now looks; you know how it contains a list of recently used files? Now, things are different. Next to every file-name there's a push-pin. If you click it, that file name will stay in the list until you pull that pin up. Sweet, huh? I'm a real nerd about this, I know.

I've managed to do all types of stuff using beta 1, in very little time, where I previously required a lot of time and effort to get cracking. Microsoft (or rather, the MS Office team) has spent a lot of time thinking about how people really use the suite, done their research, and hence I've managed to pull off some really nice things in Office 12 beta 1 quickly, e.g. using conditional formatting to see the top 10% numbers out of an array in Excel, or I can start "upsizing" an Access database to an MS SQL Server platform in just one click or make a graph beveled with shadows, a multitude of colours and transparency in just a few seconds. I'm very eager to see how MS is going to incorporate Groove, the semi-newly-acquired company that Ray Ozzie founded, before he went over to the dark side Microsoft, into MS Office. It seems companies will be able to run their own Groove-server, which I think may be the great step for many companies to use to manage online projects and carry online meetings through. Sweet.

Here's a pretty graph (entirely made in Excel) showing how many new functions are incorporated in Office 12, so far. Very impressive. And if you're into Excel, or just would like a quick step into how Office 12 can be used, check out this site, filled with pictures and real-life examples on how you can use Excel with server-side calculations done in real-time, web services being utilised in magnificent ways and how to make great-looking graphs. I'm actually really excited about the coming version of MS Excel!