OpenOffice 3.0 beta

OpenOffice 3.0 beta has been released.

The new OS X version eliminates the need to run OpenOffice through the X11 environment. Sun, which oversees OpenOffice, announced some time ago that native OS X support was high on its priority list and Mac users should be happy to hear the company is delivering on that promise.

Unfortunately the new OS X version was noticeably slower than NeoOffice, a Mac-specific OpenOffice offshoot, and most of the extensions I tried to install wouldn’t work. OpenOffice still has a way to go before it’s ready for everyday use on a Mac. For the time being NeoOffice remains the better choice for Mac OS X users, but at least OpenOffice is available now.

Wired

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

From a great talk Clay Shirky gave at the recent Web 2.0 Expo. (You can watch the video here.)

I had a similar experience recently. After watching some videos on my iPod touch, my 4-year-old put it down and tried controlling the TV similarly, tapping the screen, dragging her finger across the screen. I imagine it was quite disappointing to her. Here she thought she had just learned a secret to controlling videos, all you have to do is tap the screen and away you go. Alas, it's not that way most of the time. Maybe when she has kids.

Silverlight @ Democratic Convention

Microsoft has also bought Silverlight's way into the Democratic Convention.  Is this something like a parent finding friends for its child instead of the child making its own?

Silverlight Olympics

You'll need Silverlight to watch the Olympics on the internet? Blah. I guess it's good Adobe's Flash has some competition, but I don't like the idea of installing yet-another-plugin to do exactly the same thing as another.

Robert Kennedy on Martin Luther King, Indianapolis

Download MP3

Restaurants miss moms

Attention working moms: The restaurant industry needs you. According to an article in today’s Journal, restaurants “are waking up to a worrisome long-term trend: The number of harried working moms isn’t growing like it used to.”

The article says that the steady increase of working women over the last several decades has been a boon to restaurants, as “the combination of women having less time to cook and households having a second income caused families to eat at restaurants more frequently.” However, since 1999 that five-decade increase has leveled off, “with the percentage of women in the work force down slightly at 59.2% as of January,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Why the number of working women is flattening out isn’t entirely clear. NPD Group analyst Harry Balzer suggests it has to do with more young moms opting to watch their children instead of work.

WSJ

Bush to endorse John McCain

A bold move on Bush's part, I tell ya. Those pundits who thought he'd take the safe road and endorse Clinton or Obama were wrong, wrong, wrong.

OpenDNS content filtering

I've used OpenDNS for a while to speed up my web surfing at home. DNS is what's used to look up domain names. When you type in "google.com", your DNS server (usually supplied by your internet provider) translates that into an IP address that is used to load the page. If your DNS server is slow, your web experience will be slow. OpenDNS promises to speed things up with faster servers.

What I just discovered the other day is that they also provide free content filtering. By default it will filter out phishing sites as they are discovered. The also have a mess of other categories that you can filter.


And it's free.

Note that filters are not 100% accurate. Web sites can only be blocked as they are discovered by whatever service is tracking them. But filters are a good first line of defense in keeping unwanted material out of your home.

Chocolate during Lent

It's fun to sometimes check out the search terms that bring people to my blog. A couple days ago, someone entered into Google "did the lord say it's ok to eat chocolate for lent on weekends" and somehow ended up here.

To answer the question: no. :)

And that reminds me. Since I have a couple days until Lent begins for us Eastern Orthodox, I've got some chocolate eating to do.

Mazda 2

If VW never brings the Polo to the US, I could be consoled with a Mazda 2.

And with diesel? Sweet!