Saw Randy on Sunday | Gmail over Floppies | free vs. Commerical Word Processors | Satellite ISP vs. WiMax ISP

I invited Randy over to my house after a month of no visits. Randy’s my friend. I showed him 15 new games he hasn’t seen before…piled all of it on his lap. Randy sold his old Cadillac so that he could buy a used Saab 9-5 which looked nice. Saab is Swiss. It had a leather interior and a Turbo V6 and costs him $50 a month more than his other car. Randy also owns a pickup. Then down in my room we played ESPN NHL 2K5 on Xbox. The Minnesota Wild suck so I didn’t play them cause they’re almost the worst team in the National Hockey League. He was the Buffalo Sabres against me the Denver Avalanche. Randy found out how to score on me in the first half, but I gained 3 goals by the 3rd half and the game was over. He was into racing so we played Forza Motorsport. Randy hasn’t heard of this game yet. Its Xbox’s best racing game I told him. He sort of liked it…forcing him to like it. Cars involved were from Class B, Class S, and Class R race cars. I remember racing Ferraris (Class S) and Le Mans (Class R) race cars in the game. We each won 2. Afterwards, we played Gran Turismo 4. I couldn’t decide which was better. In my opinion, Forza Motorsport was better, but he thought GT4 was better. He owns a PS2 so his opinion stands to reason.

I drove randy to the new Best Buy in Woodbury. It’s no longer connected to Game Stop. On the way there we listened to Kansas, Ride on Bald Mountain, Steppenwolf, Black Sabbath, Rolling Stones and country including Garth Brooks – The Dance. Best Buy wasn’t open. Game Stop wasn’t open either. Wonder if business is too tight on Sundays?

I registered for fall classes online. One is Cisco 1 while the other is Visual Basic 1. Failing isn’t an option either. If I do fail I’ll have to take this stupid class over again. *Prays to God to pass both* What makes me mad is there is only one choice in industrial networking. There was suppose to be a math course enlisted. I wish school wasn’t so hard, and I am going to work hard to pass both! Last year/semester Cisco was one of my classes. I kept walking out because somebody made me mad otherwise I would’ve passed. I choose the same instructor as before, Joyce. Jeff was an assistant instructor explaining networking, but he teaches his own Cisco class now. I don’t like him as much if I remember correctly.

My next entry should cover the installation of broadband in my house. I’ll take pictures of everything. The Tigerdirect package should arrive tomorrow at the latest.

Gmail is #1 floppy replacement.

Floppies have been used since the 80s and are becoming extinct. I used them for quite a bit before the cd-burner. Game Saves, JPEG, ROMs, DOCs, website files. Heck I was using WINZIP since 1996. It shocked me when I first used writeable CDs, they're not as user-friendly as floppies, but held much more data. Floppy disks are as easy to use as hard disks or usb drives, but CDs had to be burned onto /w Windows Explorer. Some people learned to backup their information to their Email or FTP server given to by their ISP. I know it's possible with 2 Email accounts, but can you self send emails using 1 account? Gmail has 2.3 GB and Yahoo has 1 GB of free space & serve as the ideal 21st century floppy replacement. As we come to age with battery powered 40 GB & 80 GB hard drives (AKA MP3 players). Will these lithium ion powered HDD replace the pocket sized USB thumb drive? Probably. I own two already and have used them for data other than music before.

Not to mention the increased on unneeded CPU power from PC. You really don’t need much more than 2 GHz CPU to do daily computing tasks. The final point is that such a machine probably wouldn’t be cheaper than a normal PC anyway. Economies of scale kick in here, such cut down machines could be popular but their inflexible nature would mean that businesses wouldn’t touch them and many home users wouldn’t trust them either. So you end up with a machine that’s not too dissimilar to a low spec current model that still has to have a profit margin on top and that’s marketed as a "not so full featured" machine as the XP box next to it.

Open source vs. Commercial Word Processor dilemma

Abiword is pretty good. Spellcheckers not as nice, but average which is perfectly suitable for most people. I have three office suites on my computer MS-Office 2003, Openoffice.org 1.9.118 and Abiword 2.2.9. Abiword is 5 MB. Two are free and one isn’t.

List of programs in Openoffice.org Office Suite

1. OpenOffice.org Calc is a spreadsheet application that you can use to calculate, analyze, and manage your data. You can also import and modify Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

OpenOffice.org Calc provides you with functions, including statistical and banking functions, that you can use to create formulas to perform complex calculations on your data.

2.) In OpenOffice.org Base, you can access data that is stored in a wide variety of database file formats. OpenOffice.org Base natively supports some flat file database formats, such as the dBase format. You can also use OpenOffice.org Base to connect to external relational databases, such as databases from MySQL or Oracle.

3.) OpenOffice.org Impress lets you create professional slide shows that can include charts, drawing objects, text, multimedia and a variety of other items. If you want, you can even import and modify Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

4.) OpenOffice.org Math provides numerous operators, functions and formatting assistants to help you create formulas. These are all listed in a selection window, in which you can click the required element with the mouse to insert the object into your work.

5.) OpenOffice.org Writer is the word processor. The setup is similar to Coral Word Perfect.

My Conclusion – Download Openoffice.org immediately and use it when you want too.

WiMax (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ 802.16d)

WiMax is a wireless MAN standard. It won’t be available in my area for some time so instead of WiMax ISP rural citizens are buying satellite equipment for Wild Blue’s ISP in Colorado. WiMax is cheaper because TCP/IP travels via digital waves instead of microwaves, but some WiMax subcontractor wouldn’t come to our town and build a WiMax broadcast tower outside of town for at least another 4 years! Rural folks could benefit from cheaper internet, but the truth is the county sponsored Wild Blue first.

WiMax better have a lot of guts to come out here and convince us to switch ISPs. That’s all I have to say about it. Australia seems to be more into WiMax than Wisconsinites. It won’t reach my house in 2 days!