I am sorry that I have not been writing lately. Honestly, I have not been doing much. I took the weekend off. I am still recovering from having my mom here and some days I wonder what the heck I am doing here. For example, I have to find Fíthal in stories or other stuff to have the raw material to build a thesis. I have a list of tales (in fact, I would highly recommend it if you need to find certain Irish tales), which I must go through to find this guy. It is boring and tedious work. I get a headache after about two hours of doing this. The sheer concentration needed to pick a needle out of a haystack is formidable. This is especially true when I have classes on top of it.

I also wanted to point out something to any academics who might come across this. Even though I have access to the Microsoft Company store through friends, I only use Microsoft Office when I absolutely must. Instead, I use Open Office. It is a free office suite which is compatible with MS Office so you do not need to worry about switching and not being able to send stuff around to other people. This will also save you the $300+ on buying MS Office.

The only thing keeping people from adopting this is fear. I had an interesting discussion with a woman in my class. She absolutely refused to try it even though she had a pirated copy of Office because she did not want to change. This is called FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). Unfortunately, people are so afraid of change (even if it is free) that they will continue to pay MS even if there is a better alternative available. It is actually quite sad. It is like a monkey that keeps shocking itself by pressing a button because it fears a new button that it does not know what the new button does.

Anyway, Open Office is just about to release a new version of its suite (2.0). I would caution people to wait until then. The software is just too different at this point for most people to understand. With 2.0, Open Office will look much more like a normal program for your operating system (for most of you Windows) rather than some unfamiliar hybrid, which may put some of you off. The more adventurous of you should go ahead and give it a try.

posted by Chris  #10:51 AM | 0 comments |