1917 Berkeley symposium on Don Bosco
austraLasia #1917

Postscript to a symposium - and dealing with docx!

ROME: 2nd August 2007 -- It seems appropriate to interrupt the steady flow of material now coming from Hua Hin with a throwback item - throwback, that is, to two previous austraLasias.

    The Berkeley Symposium: well, at least we know people read austraLasia!  Several made contact after that news item to say, entirely correctly, 'we were there but you didn't mention us'.  Of course.  The news information came via a European source who was chiefly writing for his readership, and naming one set of nations and not the other.  It simply underlines the value of people in our region dropping a line with 'their' info about events that involve our region, even if it means getting double or triple versions.  That can be sorted out at the editorial end.
    It is worth mentioning, then, that from the EAO region, the fill lineup of participants was as follows:
    Province of St Paul, Thailand - Fr John Lissandrin and Br Thanad Anan
    Province of Mary Help of Christians China: Fr Savio Hon
    Province of St Philip New Rochelle: Fr Dominic Tran (mentioning him because he originates from our region).
    Province of St Francis Xavier Japan: Fr Shinjiro Urata
    Province of Mary Help of Christians Australia: Fr Ian Murdoch, Fr Peter Rankin, Fr Mosese Vitolio Tui
    Province of Mary Help of Christians Cebu: Fr Fidel Orendain
    Just mentioning people from EAO region - there were others present of course.

    DOCX files.  Here is a tip, since some people already have Windows Vista and Word 7 at work.  If so you will have realised that the native storage format for Word files is .docx extension instead of .doc.  This is one of Microsoft's better decisions (you'll benefit from reading Digital Virtues in that case :-) because it means they have 'seen the light' and realised they have to create an open document format. Pity they didn't adopt the OpenDocument format that led the way but that's another matter.  So actually you DO NOT have to go out and buy an updated Microsoft Office and windows Vista in order to read a .docx file, but MS are not about to tell you that!  Instead, at least to know  and be able to read the contents of your file do the following:
(a) right click the file and change the extension from .docx to .zip - in other words, make the file readable by your zip program. 
(b) Open it in your zip program and you'll find ten or so files in there, one of which is called contents.xml and that's the one you open in NotePad or any text editor you like.
    There is more you could do, but at the moment all you want to do is to be able to read that file, right?  Hope this helps.
    One final issue - BoscoWiki 'comment' section was vandalised yesterday - nobody from our regular readership, and this sort of thing occurs once or twice a year, from experience.  It's back again (the value of a Wiki), but even though I check it daily, if someone picks up an interference, could they please let us know immediately?  Thanks.

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