6pm, sitting here watching Peter Jennings (I’m an ABC News devotee) read early returns from the east-coast states. Sharaun and I are waiting until the after-work 5pm crowds die down a bit before heading to the polls. I’m totally wrapped up in the news coverage, it’s kind of like watching a horse race… in slow motion… but there’s some of that same excitement. And… the passing of a paragraph marks the passing of a couple hours, we’re back from the polls… votes cast. Good stuff.
You guys can tune out for a while, I’m about to get super nerdy here.
I finally uninstalled Microsoft Office. One more program that I can now do without thanks to quality freeware. I’ll admit, I like Office. But, faced with really functional free alternatives like OpenOffice.org, it’s hard to justify the expense. I had held onto Office so long for a couple reasons: I love Outlook for e-mail, and I had designed a large Access database to track my music collection. OpenOffice had no good Access equivalent, and I had never found another e-mail app I was satisfied with. Both of those things recently changed.
Since migrating my webpages to a new, FreeBSD-based, host – I’ve taken the time to convert my music collection database from MS Access to MySQL. Having the database in MySQL removed my reliance on Access, so I decided to once again take a look at alternative e-mail clients. I re-tried Mozilla Thunderbird, which I had given up on before because it lacked a decent calendar feature like Outlook. However, with the addition of the Mozilla Calendar plugin, and a slick-looking theme – Thunderbird is all I’ll ever need in an Outlook replacement. So, thanks to MySQL and Mozilla – I was able to completely ditch MS Office for a completely free alternative. And, I can still use all my old Office docs and Outlook mails, because they’re all compatible. Now the only thing that costs money on my machine is Windows XP itself… which I’ll happily pay for. Rad.
It’s late, I’m tired… it all signs point to another four years o’ Bush. Sorry for the crappy entry, Dave out.
Also written on this day...
- shopping for me - 2010
- on abundance - 2009
- halloween bash '08 in pictures - 2008
- and all i can think about is the music - 2008
- i got blood on my shirt - 2005
- mizouse in the hizouse - 2003