Other Stuff

My wife and I were discussing Second Life yesterday (as I'm sure all geek couples do), and she noted that unless you have a certain level of programming ability there's not much you can do in SL besides walk around and chat. If you've visited Second Life you've probably experienced this, too. Second Life is a pretty intimidating (and boring) place when you don't know what's going on. When everyone around you knows how to manipulate the environment and you don't, you're at a significant functional disadvantage.

With Father's Day rapidly approaching, I decided to to put together a mini gift guide for those of us who want to show our appreciation for dad without breaking the bank. Each one of these gifts is under $60 and is user friendly, as we know sometimes parents just don't understand. The first gift is one I know for sure my own dad would like: 1. The Humminbird SmartCast RF30 Wireless Remote Fish Finder Retails for $59.99, designed as a wrist mount, this little gadget has a 75-foot remote operating range and 100-foot depth capability. It has a 1.25-inch high-visibility display with 48 x 32 pixels of resolution. It is obviously waterproof and has one touch menu navigation for ease of use.

I have been hearing rumblings around the office lately about OpenOffice, the multilingual, multiplatform, FREE office suite. One of my coworkers was a beta tester for Excel 2007, and had several complaints. He was telling me that everyone should be using OpenOffice anyway, including our company. I was suspicious of his enthusiasm and decided to do a little bit of research to find out the whole story. For those of you who are not familiar with OpenOffice, it is an office suite (like Microsoft Office) that utilizes open source code. Open source means that source code is made public so that any programmer or layperson who can write code can copy, fix or redistribute the open source material. The suite is comprised of Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (multimedia presentations), Draw (graphics), Base (database manipulator), and Math (formulas and equations with graphic user interface).