Week 8 #19

I was skeptical about these web-based applications at first. Of course, it is in our nature to be uncomfortable with things we are not familiar with. I took Zoho for a test drive and found it to be much smoother and user-friendly than Microsoft Word. The toolbars were effective in containing shortcuts to options that I actually use. Being a math and science geek, I was very impressed with the subscript/superscript buttons. I remember the good old days when I would be writing a paper for algebra or chemistry and would have to use the character map application in conjunction with Microsoft Word to write chemical equations, exponents, and degrees.

I noticed that Zoho documents are read-only if you are offline and that they will be fixing this soon to allow offline editing. For now, you can view and print your documents offline and they will be saved in a central location. This means I no longer have to go through the motions of emailing myself a document as an attachment in order to be able to work on it at any computer. This saves me from having to carry around a flash drive or a floppy (isn't it strange that we used to call those huge 5 inch disks floppies because they were...floppy...but now that we have compact disks, we refer to the little 3.5 inch disks as floppies...even though they are about as floppy as a brick wall).


Oh and my favorite part about all of this: no more conversions. When I was in college, my idiot father-in-law put Corel WordPerfect (WHO USES THAT?!?!) on my computer and I didn't have a printer for a while. So I would have to convert it to Word every time I wanted to put it on another computer to print because everyone else had MS Word. Sometimes during the conversions the file would get corrupted and I would be S.O.L. Those days are over! Zoho is a wonder processor! It slices, it dices, oh, and its free! Looks like Microsoft will no longer be able to charge a whopping $300 for their Office programs. Nyah-nyah Bill Gates.

Its nice to know that while some things (losing weight) are getting harder to do, word processing and accessing information are getting easier.

Week 8 #18

I've had a MySpace page for 2 1/2 years now. It is my preferred social networking site because all of my friends use it. I honestly don't think any of my friends use any other social networking site except MySpace. I tried out Friendster a few years ago because one of my good friends John had an account. It turned out he was the only one of my friends with an account on Friendster. He got boring quickly and frankly I was already comfortable with the MySpace setup.

If you don't have any friends that are on the social networking sites, you can always make friends. But that's easier said than done. Being an internet socialite for the past 12 years (HALF OF MY LIFE OMG!!!), I have learned how to recognize the weirdos by sharpening my screening skills. I have met people off the internet and although it is very risky, I still prefer this method to going out to a bar (I don't drink). I actually have some friends on my MySpace that I have talked to since I was just a 12 year old newbie on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and have kept in touch with them through various internet social mediums such as MySpace and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). One of these old friends is from Canada, and although we had been talking to each other since we were both 12 years old, we didn't meet until July of 2006!

I just think it is incredible that because of the internet, two people whose paths may never cross in real life can have a friendship, converse daily, and influence each others' lives.