Today Sun announced that it joined the OpenOffice.org porting project for Mac Aqua. Cool. That's good news. I am a determined non-user of any and all Microsoft products and so I always use Appleworks or NeoOffice or  - very occasionally - OO.

But OO has never been a good solution for me before because it required an X-window (an annoyance) and the interface was old fashioned and cut and paste had issues, etc.   Why, I would ask, does OO not simply use the NeoOffice look?  Well, now it looks as though OO will get that look. Eventually. Of course what this means for NeoOffice, not sure. I am a devoted user of NO, so I hope the best for them. I understand the reasoning behind Sun's support of OO and not NO (it's all about a single community and licensing model) but still, the NO folks have kept the light burning for us in the darkness of MS world and I really appreciate that.

Book of the Week -

The Terror by Dan Simmons. Takes a true tale - the Franklin Expedition in 1847  - and makes  great speculative fiction out of it.  The Franklin Expedition  was seeking the Northwest Passage  (soon it will exist for real, but that's another story). Consisted of two ships, "Terror" and "Erebus". Headed out into the ice seas west of Greenland and was never seen again. A couple of graves were found in the 1980's (maybe you saw the Nova special)  and some artifacts showed up with the local indigenous tribes, but final fate of the ships and crew remained a mystery. Big thick book, great characters, you really feel the misery of being stuck in ice-bound ships for 2 years while slowly starving, freezing, going mad and ...oh yeah...being attacked by a mysterious supernatural white creature  - "The Terror". Great read.