Multilitteratus Incognitus

Another semester is done! I completed my final and handed it in for grading (I think I did well). With Linguistics (Apling 601) under my belt, I feel confident that things will make more sense from now on ;-) In any case, in retrospect this semester was not bad. I only had one class which I did well in. I did spend a boatload of time working on GIDA (graduate instructional design alumni association) with both the online and face to face component of the organization - and I have to say that it is a lot of work. Our social network, sadly, does not yet support RSS, so people can't get a friendfeed in their RSS reader to see what's going on. Hopefully this will be fixed with future versions of the service. We do have a large number of member (137 as of this writing), but it's hard reaching out to alumni since we don't know who they are. The weird thing is that students are also reluctant to join unless you give them a presentation and explain the benefits. It's not eas...

Now, don't get me wrong. At work I use Microsoft Office for the Mac and for Windows on a daily basis. It's a necessary evil. People just send me attachments in the all too familiar doc, xls and ppt formats. When the clock strikes 5 and I get off work, that's where MS Office and I part ways. As a student it just doesn't make sense to pay $150 for the student edition of Microsoft Office! If you're a non-student this price balloons to $317 if you want all the trimmings. I still have papers to write, presentations to prepare and spreadsheets to crunch. What is a student to do? Well, In the past year I've found the perfect solution to my office troubles. This solution is a combination of free and for-pay tools. OpenOffice - this is completely free. It has programs that do essentially what Microsoft office does, for free! And, it's quite compatible with Microsoft Office files, so you don't have to worry (much) about opening files that your friends and colleag...