I haven't gotten a copy of Office v.X from my "contact" yet, so I figured I'd try out OpenOffice. I followed the directions found on O'Reilly's MacDevCenter, but really, there isn't much to it. You download Apple's X11 and then the latest Darwin version of OpenOffice.org. You run the two installers, and you're almost there. The one problem is, if you use Apple's X11, there's no double clickable launcher for starting OpenOffice. Instead, the article on O'Reilly says to add it to the Application menu in X11, but for some reason, that didn't quite work out either. So at the end, I created a script as /usr/bin/office which contains three lines:

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.3/program/soffice \
    > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Setup the permissions and all I have to do is type office in the xterm window, and OpenOffice starts up.

As for the software it self, well, it works. It works pretty well all things considered, but it nonetheless is a XWindows app. MS Office X used a lot of native OS X technologies, and had a fairly sleek interface, although it did keep much of the irritating Microsoftness too. OpenOffice is free of Miscrosoftness, but it's... well, it has the usability of a UNIX app (which is almost an oxymoron). Now if someone were to create a Cocoa port of OpenOffice, I'd definitely consider paying for a copy... and I'm talking about real money too, maybe even like $15.

It's official. Men who do impressive things (e.g. make major scientific discoveries, go on killing sprees, etc) do it in their mid-30s to impress the ladies (via Tim Swanson).

I've been tellin' ya. The only reason I code so much is because I know that brilliant coders get the hot chicks. And the reason I haven't gotten hot chicks is because I'm not good enough of a coder... So leave me alone, I've got more coding to do.

One of the things I like about summers in Chico is the abundance of good low cost fuit (although some say it was even better at one time). But apparently there are some secrets in those little labels stuck on fruits that we should be aware of. According to this article:

For conventionally grown fruit, the PLU code on the sticker consists of four numbers. Organically grown fruit have a five-numeral PLU beginning with the number 9. Genetically engineered fruit has a five-numeral PLU beginning with the number 8.