And Dave, I’m glad to hear OpenOffice is making the rounds among the Seattlites. Personally, as a guy who uses QuarkXPress as a word processor* because I simply can’t work in any of the conventional word processing environments, I think Word 2000 and OpenOffice 2.0 are pretty much equivalent in features, bloat, and look. I love that you can un-jar an OO doc and edit the contents, too (and automate that process), but that’s really a deeply geeky thing that average users don’t care about. So really, for most people, they’re basically equivalent. One is free with no support, and one is not but has support. Not a bad set of choices (both have merit), in my opinion. And OOo’s PDFs seem more stable, too.

Granted, the upcoming Office 2007 is a pretty significant departure from all of this, and I must say that I’m quite impressed. The OOo people are going to go nuts trying to mimic it! And in my own very unscientific testing with the betas of both, it seems to run like lightning under Vista.

* actually, even sillier is that I do my writing in a text editor (typically Crimson Editor in Windows, Kate on Linux, or jEdit on the Mac), and then dump it into Quark and format it. I’m sure if I took an afternoon to learn Word more completely, I could save about twenty steps. But this makes more sense to me. Go figure.

We’re off to play Mount Si today, more later …

Never tried a hybrid. I’m not sure if those would work out when the ball is not in the fairway. Of course you would not know since you are *ALWAYS* in the fairway.

I’ve tried following the OpenXML/OpenDoc thing and I am still very confused. If I had to pick one and run with it I would go screaming into the night.

Tom, I do run OpenOffice especially at home since I have to send stuff to family/friends that do not have MS Office. The builtin export as PDF feature is a godsend for that.

I enjoyed this post Doug and hope you do it every Saturday.

As for the new hybrid, I’m in love. Had a spectacular round this afternoon — even par through the first six holes, then the driver got hot on the back nine. More later. This one deserves a post all its own.

I’ve noticed a big increase in traffic to my site AND my blog since I started the blog itself. Since search engines and services can see the blog entries, I can only assume that if you COULD spam the dickens out of a blog it would get you some sales. And hopefully arrested and run through with a stake, the bloodsuckers.

As for the Green Zone link, that’s fascinating. I haven’t really looked hard for any of the online entries by soldiers on the ground there - I’m not generally in a mood to get even madder at my government, and I think what I’ve heard about the chaos and confusion over there (being called “peaceful transition” by our federal dingbats) would only make me anxious.

And as for the ODF stuff, there’s a long way to go, from what I’ve read. Everyone’s willing, but their motives are so varied that it’ll be hard for them to focus, I think. Some want to get into the deep details of ODF, some want to wipe out Microsoft, some want to wipe out Sun, some are scared of what SCO will claim ownership of next, some die if exposed to sunlight, and so on. In theory, it’s a great idea, and I’m glad people at Microsoft are paying attention to it, too.

Actually, since you started working there, I’ve started paying a bit more attention to MS again, and I must say, there has been a very obvious change in attitude coming from Redmond. It feels like something shifted - Apple took a bit of a bite AND threw some curveballs (iPod), Linux attracted a few (and made some news), Firefox has about 10% of the market, and OpenOffice has put forth a concept (if not a competitor) that is beginning to get some media attention. And it seems like MS is responding by trying to meld with some of these things instead of wipe them out like in the old days. I do wish Office 2007 allowed me to open OpenOffice documents, but I suspect that will come as OpenOffice gets more press and users.

How’d the hybrid work out for you? Hey, learn to golf right-handed, wouldja? You keep getting these cool clubs that I’d like to try, but I can’t swing them without biting my tongue and falling down. In all fairness, though, when I was a smoker I smoked menthols. I did so because I liked them, but it was originally because no one would bum a menthol from me. Then I moved to Rogers Park and stopped going to Lincoln Park Trustifarian bars, and my theory crashed down around me. All the local smoke-bummers on my block knew me as the Newport Man. One even tried to get me to switch to Kools because he liked them more.

But I digress. All I’m saying is that I guess it’s nice to know that no one else in a foursome can give you the puppy eyes for one of your clubs.