Technically Speaking

Yesterday I posted about some cool software that you should be aware of–namely Firefox and OpenOffice.org. Today I want to let you know about a couple of other cool software programs and web sites.

The Gimp

First, I was alerted to a graphics program called the Gimp. It is part of the aforementioned open source movement. Gimp (www.gimp.org) is a replacement program for Adobe Photoshop. I downloaded it yesterday and in the limited testing I did, I found it to be (1) feature rich, and (2) different from Photoshop. It doesn’t have the same interface or tools, but when I took a few minutes to experiment, I figured out that it does pretty much everything that Photoshop does that I know how to do. Which isn’t to say it does everthing that Photoshop does. But I could use it as a Photoshop replacement.

LaunchCast

Second, my brother Rick alerted me to LaunchCast, a personalized raido station you create at music.yahoo.com. When I say “personalized” what I mean is it lets you rate music, then it plays music specific to your ratings. I really like it. I actually upgraded to LaunchCast Plus, because I reached my limit on 600 songs in one calendar month on my personalized station. For the most part, the program is pretty good at recommending new music. I have rated over 1000 songs, so that probably helps. So props to Rick for letting me know about that. (If you want to add me as an influencer (if you upgrade to Plus), my Yahoo! ID is paulpehrson.)

Trillian

The third program I wanted to let you know about is called Trillian. It is a generic instant messenger that will log into AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger all at the same time. That way you only have one contact list for all your messenger accounts, and you only have one window open. I also like that there is no advertising in the main messenger window, and I like the tabbed conversation view.

Ok. That is all for today. I’m off to Provo where I will have dinner with Christina and Jonathan at Keith and Karen’s house. Karen is a relative on the Urie side, and she served in Korea. She offered to make Jonathan a Korean dinner. That should be really interesting. I’m looking forward to it.

If you pay any attention to the links section of my blog, you have probably noticed the links to Firefox and OpenOffice.org. These are two great products that I highly recommend. Let me tell you a little bit more about them

“Open Source” defined

Both of these software products are “open source,” (see definition in Wikipedia) meaning their source code is freely available to the public–both for development and use. People volunteer their time to help make the products better. The products are free to the public, and can be used without any compensation (though donations are appreciated).

Firefox

The first open source product I became familiar with is Firefox, which is a web browser replacement for Micro$oft’s Internet Explorer (MS IE). Firefox is lean (small in size), and is safer than MS IE because it doesn’t allow hackers to have as much access to perform actions on your computer.

Firefox is also highly customizable. You can download “themes” to make your browser’s button bars appear however you want, and you can download “extensions,” or small programs that add functionality to your browser. Here are some of the extensions I have installed in my version of Firefox:

Adblock. This extension lets you click on any image, and block it from your screen. You can use a * symbol as a wildcard to block all images from certain advertisers. For example, one entry in my block list is: http://*.advertising.com/* — so any images being sent to my computer from any server on the advertising.com domain will not be displayed in my browser. Ever. My web pages look a lot cleaner, now that I’m able to remove the ugly ads.

ForecastFox. This extension is a highly customizable Weather.com extension that shows the weather forecast for my zip code in the status bar of my Firefox browser. Right now I can see that it is currently Partly Cloudy in Midvale with a 60% chance of precipitation today.

ieview. Despite how wonderful Firefox truly is, there are some websites (like pages in my corporate portal) that only work using MS IE. This extension puts a link in my context menu (the menu I see when I right-click in blank space on a webpage) to open that page in MS IE. If I navigate to a page that Firefox can’t show, I can just right click to see the page in MS IE.

I have more, but this is just the beginning. I highly recommend that you install and use Firefox.

OpenOffice.org

I first heard about OpenOffice.org from a colleague at work. He was talking about how it is the only office software that he uses. Basically, OpenOffice.org is a replacement for not just your word processing software, but the whole office suite. OpenOffice.org includes a word processor (comparable in features to Micro$oft Word), a spreadsheet program (comparable in features to MS Excel), and HTML editor, a presentation program (comparable in features to MS PowerPoint), and other bonus programs. This software costs you nothing!

One of the great things about OpenOffice.org is that it is able to read and write to MS formats. So while you are using a free software package, you are able to send and read files from all your friends who are paying hundreds of dollars for their software. The beta release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 includes WordPerfect filters, so you can read/save WordPerfect files as well.

I’ve been using the 1.0 release for a couple of months, and I really like it. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it really is a good program. I installed the beta version of 2.0 last week, and I really like it. This release aims to make it even more compatible with advanced MS features so it is able to import MS files better than before.

If you aren’t ready to switch to OpenOffice yet, at least keep your eye on it. Next time you buy a new computer, there really is no reason to pay extra for word processing software, when you can get compatible software that is just as powerful for free.

I was invited to give a presentation to BYU STC members on getting a job in today’s technical writing workplace. The presentation was yesterday, and I think it went pretty well. I’ve posted the presentation online at paulpehrson.com/stc if you are interested in taking a look at it.

I hope that some of the students who were there found something useful to them. Dave told me that he thought the part on portfolios was really useful. I’m not sure that in college we emphasize the importance of a good portfolio.

One of the students came up afterwards and said that he was interested in chemistry, but had never considered that there were technical writers in the pharmaceutical industry, and wanted to know what I knew about that. Not much, I told him, but I said he should logon to Techwr-L listserv and ask the writers on that list about technical writing in that industry.

So, in the end, I hope that the students benefited from it. If nothing else, they got pizza and soda. Hopefully, they will eventually be able to provide their own pizza and soda, having gained full-time employment!!

I spent quite a while yesterday working on getting a price quote for the Taurus window that was broken at the TRAX station on Monday.

Eventually I found this joint in a — shall we say — less economically advantaged part of town. It was kind of a shady operation, which I didn’t know until I had sent my mom and sister there to drop off the car.

Wendy and Mom dropped the car off in the afternoon, and the car was done before the end of the day. So I went with my parents to go pick it up.

My parents graciously (very graciously, thanks Mom and Dad) offered to pay for the window. My mom decided that she didn’t want to leave her credit card number or a personal check with with the “so-called” company, so we paid in cash.

I went into the place and talked to the guy behind the counter. He entered the information into the computer, and asked me how much he had quoted me. I told him ninety dollars, and he entered that into the computer. I paid my $90.00 cash, which he put it into his coat pocket and out of the other pocket, he pulled the car keys. It was just weird. Hey, but it was cheap.

I wonder if this guy knows my regular mechanic. Then again, probably not. The window got fixed to quickly.