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Sports: In Hawai’i, it’s possible to watch some of the events live. However, the prime time events are still shown in prime time, 10 or more hours after they happened. How do US Web sites handle the time difference when reporting Olympic news? Some sites keep the news off of the home page. Well, at least I can wear any kind of shoes, eat a pizza and drink Pepsi while I’m watching.

Tech: Taiwanese manufacturers are marketing relatively inexpensive Tablet PCs, just in time for the fall buying season. The Averatec C3500 has 802.11g wireless and a 12 inch screen. PC Magazine seemed to like it.

Tech: Dvorak devotes another column to his hatred of Microsoft Word. I rarely use the program myself, and agree with him that Word should be scrapped and completely rewritten. Frankly, I get nervous just installing MS Office on a computer these days. The process takes too long, when I include all of the service packs and patches that should be applied to fix Microsoft’s security holes.

What to do? I miss WordPerfect, but I don’t keep it installed. I prefer OpenOffice. It’s free and easy to install. OO does most of what Word can do, and includes a PDF converter. But I do encounter documents that require Microsoft Word for proper formatting, so I keep the free Microsoft Word viewer installed and ready for those misfits. It can print, so I can convert a DOC into PDF format no matter what.

OpenOffice doesn’t have anything like Access, unfortunately. So I go to another machine when I need to use a Microsoft database, which isn’t often. Instead of Outlook, I use Thunderbird, another fast and free wonder that handles e-mail. I’m still looking for a decent event and contact manager, though. When my cell phone contract is up in December, I may get a PDA phone.

Tech: John Dvorak continues his lists. Let’s look at the 10 worst PC programs. I remember all of these. Microsoft gets four entries: the truly pathetic Windows 1.0, the original Access (a telecom program!), Bob and OS/2 1.0.

Another column lists the top 10 software packages: MS Basic, Sendmail, Pagemaker, dBase II, Photoshop, MacOS, Mosaic, Apache, WordStar and VisiCalc. I would include AutoCAD and WinZIP.

USA: I don’t often think about Texas. But I do miss the Alamo Drafthouse, one of the better things about Austin. Now that the drafthouse is franchising it’s anyone’s guess what will happen. Hope they don’t go under like Schlotzsky’s did earlier in the week.