I wouldn’t be a danger to the public at all.

Microsoft makes most of its money from Windows and Office, and are under increasing pressure from competitors. Not for the OS: Linux is nowhere close to prime-time¹, but there are plenty of Office competitors out there. Offline there’s OpenOffice.org, which emulates many of Word and Excel’s major features, while online are the simpler but incredibly easy-to-use Google Docs / Zoho, which are far superior to their offline counterparts when it comes to sharing, portability and backup.

So, Microsoft today announced its move: a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Works. By the end of the year.

Works. You remember. The crappy word processor and spreadsheet that people use until they find that Word / Excel can’t actually read Works’ default file type. With adverts. Adverts. Who bought Works anyway? It was always bundled with new PCs, and any salesman worth his salary would flog an upgrade to Office.

I think the web 2.0 reaction is: weaaaaak. How about an online version of Word, with all the extra functionality it offers over Google Docs etc., that people pay £5 a month for? Or a cut-down version of Word itself? Or an ad-supported version of Office, for non-commercial use? Anything but Works.

1. most recent problem: no networking, which turned out to be because I’d gone to the network dialog box via the menu system instead of the system tray icon. The same dialog box. Fixing it required editing text files. I rest my case [↩]

Inspired by Photojojo’s Project 365, I’m trying to take a photo every day of my 25th year. Here’s how they describe it:

• Imagine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned… (Often we find it hard to remember what we did just yesterday or even last night, let alone a whole year ago!)
• Your year-long photo album will be an amazing way to document your travels and accomplishments, your haircuts and relationships. Time moves surprisingly fast.
• Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day.

I thought it sounded like fun, so I started on my birthday - May 19th. I confess to not blogging it for a while in case my memory was too appalling to keep up, but it’s going well as of 2nd August. I’ve had a couple of close calls in which I forgot, but happened to have taken something anyway. Hence the peas. Anyway, I’ll try my best, and should I ever fail will replace the image with Mork, shown right. Hopefully you’ll only see Mork this once.

The sidebar will always display the latest image from the Flickr set, which I’ll update as often as possible.

Beginning with the likely scenario of Bucky O’Hare vs. Captain Hook:

All made using a sonic screwdriver. It’s something to do Better if you rope somebody into helping, and actually have some drawing ability - then you can get fantastic results like this, and this.

Woah, Heroes got better! I thought it was ok before, if you ignored the dialogue and tried not to see what was coming, but I was mildly disappointed. I knew it to be too universally loved by Firefly / Lost fans to be lightly written off, though, and I was prepared to stick with it. The overall idea was interesting, and hey - New York and superheroes are two of my favourite things! Happily, it didn’t take long.

Even before the credits the third episode was snappier, with much more interesting dialogue, and it turned out to be have been written by comics giant Jeph Loeb. He tore through the characters, making me actually care about them, while fixing plot lines and fleshing out the background. Much better. I think the ubiquitous comparisons with Lost are a bit dodgy - yes, it follows a disparate group of characters, but it’s far less subtle and enigmatic. Which isn’t a criticism; I like the mixture of drama and comic-book verve¹. Great stuff, I’ll look forward to this one.

Anyone else think the congressional candidate is a young Scott Bakula? It’s uncanny!

1. the men are a mixture of geek and buff-but-quiet-guys, while the women are all unequivocal goddesses - just like comics! [↩]

I’m sure many are aware that Facebook can be diverting. It’s tempting to log on every hour and see what people are up to, but I try to resist until the evening, and am usually successful. Its applications have added to the timewasting potential, but nothing, nothing, comes close to the addiction that is Scrabulous. It’s ridiculous. I’m sure I could have been playing online Scrabble for years if I’d wanted, but I’ve never had the urge. Now I can’t stop. Facebook friends challenge me to a game, and I simply must play. I had to drag myself away from it this afternoon. I haven’t even won a game yet. I wish to complain that the dictionary doesn’t contain ‘alm’. This is all your fault, Nod.