Mitch Gann’s

OpenOffice has always been a decent replacement for MS-Office, especially given that OpenOffice costs so much less. Like, for example, nothing. (Yes, I do love the free software!) Development continues on OpenOffice, and a new beta has just been released. It promises to address that annoying problem of “.docx”:

OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).

Here’s the complete list of features in the OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta.

The beta download itself is available at http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/.

Bill Gates says that Vista is selling rapidly and doing fine, but personally I am sticking with XP. I don’t know of anything I want to do on a computer that I could do with Vista but can’t do with XP. So why bother to switch? It’s nice for Bill that he has sold 140 million units of Vista; I really mean that because the guy does great things with his money. But I can live without Vista, especially since there will be this new “Windows 7″ out in a year or two.

I am also playing around with Ubuntu Linux. If I have Ubuntu on my laptop and an old desktop computer, and the only snag I’ve hit is that I can’t get the laptop install to connect with my wireless network. It detects the network, but can’t log in. I can connect it with a cable, but who wants to have to do that for a laptop when wireless is available? I’d be using it right now to make this post if I could get over that glitch. That’s always been the story of me and Linux — one little thing it can’t do that I need it to do. Or to be fair, something that I need it to do but can’t figure out how to make it do.

Naturally, what I like most about Linux is that it is free.

I love new tech. By that I mean, tech that is new to me. So I am playing around now with Windows Live Writer, which allows you to write and publish blog posts from your desktop. It has a slick interface. Took longer to install, though, than a 5 MB download ought to and tried to get me to install several other programs with it. But it didn’t try too hard. (Here’s the WikiPedia article on WLW.)

Did I mention that WLW is free? That’s the new tech I most love, the free stuff. When I was a kid, way before Al Gore invented the Internet, you didn’t have a lot of companies giving away technology. It’s a helluva business model.

The thing I most want to test is uploading an image. Let’s see, what picture should I include here? Something from another decade, I think. How about the 1980s?

When we were young.