All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

Maryam Scoble wrote some advice for Patrick as he starts his new blog. Good things to think about, and maybe even post somewhere so you don’t forget it. I hope I didn’t break any of these rules.

Engadget wrote a how-to on mapping a drive to your FTP server in Windows Explorer. I’ll have to try it out sometime myself and post some thoughts on it. If it works smoothly, maybe I won’t need FileZilla. (Golf clap: TipMonkies)

I read George Ou’s “Performance analysis of OpenOffice and MS Office“. In a nutshell, OpenOffice is bloated and Microsoft Office isn’t. You get what you pay for.

Being a student, I don’t work on huge spreadsheets and documents. It’s working for me perfectly fine. (I’m running Windows XP SP2, AMD Athlon XP 1600+, 512MB SDRAM.) Try it out, and if it doesn’t suit your needs, then Microsoft Office probably should.

I can’t replicate the tests George made, so I won’t make any rebuttles - that’d be stupid. I don’t even have Microsoft Office 2003. I do know that I hate it when someone goes out of their way to make me look like an idiot.

Now to be fair, OpenOffice.org is free and is cross platform, but does this really matter to the 90% of the users in the world who only use Windows? Does this change the fact that OpenOffice.org is a CPU and Memory hog? Microsoft Office Professional on the other hand costs about $240 when bundled with hardware or if you look for OEM pricing. I’ll leave it up to you the reader to determine if your money is worth more than your time.

Um, is he putting me down?

What I learned from my supervisor is that you don’t talk down to your clients - for me, my clients are the internal staff members’ computers that I support at work. They may be totally wrong, but I need to make sure that I don’t humiliate them.

Then again, what do I know? I barely have experience, compared to George. I definitely didn’t read all the talkbacks he received, either - there’s a lot of flak in there.

flagrantdisregard Flickr toys are so cool!

ScanR was mentioned in Scobleizer. I haven’t heard of it before, but it looks way cool. “Scan documents or send faxes, anywhere, anytime, using only your camera phone.” Whoa.

I got home last night, and my mom wanted to make a long distance phone call to the Philippines or something. She takes the cordless phone and goes into the room - only to become frustrated trying to find the phone card she thought she had bought. She couldn’t find it. The looked through lots of unopened (or rather, opened and unprocessed) envelopes, weekly ad papers, and coupons, to no avail. (more…)

LaunchCast isn’t showing the song info - why?

Angsuman explains how to get a free WordPress.com account without having to install Flock (or getting an invite). For Firefox users, it’s a matter of installing the User Agent Switcher Extension, pasting a User String, then selecting it as your User Agent as you browse to the WordPress.com Flock URL. Nifty!

I wonder if Matt will get upset at this. I’d like to hear his take on why he gives out invites like this.

I hope CCleaner developers build support for cleaning all user accounts on a computer. That would help system maintenence at work a lot! They don’t at the moment.

Want to know a secret? If you have Flock you can get on WordPress.com without an invite. Enjoy!

Thanks Matt!