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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: AtoZ_ PDF is a nice list of various issues and fixes for Windows XP. Make a donation to get the PDF. he also has a some good software tools on his site.

USA: Yahoo! News - Flight 93 Passengers Saved Lives on 9/11: As much as I enjoy reading alternative history and what-if stories, reading this page from the 9-11 report made me physically ill. “America would have been even more devastated that sunny late-summer morning — the Capitol aflame or the White House destroyed — if not for a few dozen strangers on an airplane who took the kind of quick, decisive action their government was incapable of on Sept. 11.”

Tech: InfoWorld: You know you’ve got a browser problem when �?�: July 09, 2004: By Oliver Rist : NETWORKING : SECURITY: “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, otherwise known as Dancing with Big Brother, tells the world to stop using the Web browser you fought long and hard to tie into your operating system. That’s what happened to beleaguered Microsoft when the department’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recently recommended users switch to alternate browser platforms to avoid the security holes in IE caused largely by ActiveX. And Microsoft isn’t objecting. icrosoft’s own Slate even posted an article advocating Firefox, a Mozilla offshoot, in favor of IE until Microsoft gets its security act together. Naturally, those alternate browser platforms have leaped on this opportunity with enthusiasm. Apple, Mozilla, and Opera jointly announced their development of an extension to their plug-in API that will handle ActiveX scripts differently — and apparently more securely — than IE does. All this work is being done in conjunction with Adobe, Macromedia, and Sun Microsystems, specifically to allow support for the companies’ plug-in versions of PDF, Flash, and Java.”