Another Week Gone By Too Fast

Sunday morning, and trying to play catch-up. Just got some of the pictures I took at our last trip to Cox Arboretum ready on FLICKR if you want to click here and check them out. Click on the photo here to enlarge it, it's one of my favorites.

First, I would like to express my condolences to Jim Kloss at Whole Wheat Radio on the recent loss of his mother. We are here for you Jim, and hope you are doing well during this difficult time.

We met with my dad, Lori & Rick and Patty & Charles at Marion's Pizza in Englewood Friday night for dinner. If you have never had a Marion's Pizza, you don't know what you're missing. Makes me hungry for one right now just thinking of it.

Saturday was spent running errands and getting things done that can only be accomplished on the week-end. I'm going to spend part of the day today getting the yard mowed and helping Dana get some plants in the ground that we bought last week-end and haven't been able to plant due to all the rain we have had.

I'm sitting here looking at a stack of books that I have to read and just haven't had the time. I need a 30 hour day!

Pretty Much Says It All...

OpenOffice 3 Beta New

Got this today from the good people at OpenOffice.org. If you haven't switched to OpenOffice, you need to try this totally free Offfice Suite. Stop paying the Bill! I switched to OpenOffice several years ago and love it. Mac users, this version promises to work with Aqua, so I'm not sure if this is the NeoOffice version or not. Also, if you can afford to send a few bucks to support this organization, please do. It's a rock solid package.

The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce that the public beta
release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now available. This beta release is
made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next
major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production
use at this stage.

If you are a regular user of OpenOffice.org, here's a great opportunity
to help us make the next release the best ever.


What's new in OpenOffice.org 3.0?

The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new
"Start Centre", new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the
status bar. A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features.
Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for
spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to
1024 columns per sheet. Writer has an improved notes feature and
displays of multiple pages while editing. There are numerous Chart
enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress.

Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming
OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files
created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx,
.xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for
the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).

OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be the first version to run on Mac OS X without
X11, with the look and feel of any other Aqua application. It introduces
partial VBA support to this platform. In addition, OpenOffice.org 3.0
integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers
better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications.

A more detailed guide to the features can be found at
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/featurelistbeta.html

Beta Availability

OpenOffice.org 3 beta is immediately available in US English for
MS-Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and OpenSolaris platforms from
http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta. This page also contains details
of where to find localized builds and language packs as they become
available. For more details, please consult the appropriate native
language project - see http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html


Help us gathering bugs in May!

In order to help us release OpenOffice.org 3.0 on schedule in September,
users of the beta release are encouraged to report any bugs, issues or
errors at http://qa.openoffice.org.

If you would like to test just the new features, there is a list of test
cases by component at
http://qa.openoffice.org/ooQAReloaded/TestcaseSpecifications/OpenOffice.org_3.0

If you are nervous about reporting bugs through the formal bug reporting
system, you can simply email details to the user support mailing lists
http://www.openoffice.org/mail_list.html

The developers look forward to receiving your feedback on this beta
release of OpenOffice.org!

"2008 - the year of 3"

Judas Priest Shreds

Man, these guys ROCK! I think they were playing in Guitar Center the last time we were in there.

Eric Clapton - An Off Night

Just goes to show you that even Eric Clapton can have an off night. Oh well, maybe there's hope for my career as a guitarist after all.

I Thought It Was More Than This

68%How Addicted to Apple Are You?
I took this online quiz and thought I was seriously more addicted to Apple Computer products than I thought. I guess I would have tested higher if I owned the iPhone instead of the iPod touch.

Here's a photo with one of Kyles latest Lego creations. I used to build cars and trucks, he builds inter-stellar cruising ships (click to enlarge).