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LISA:
I would go out of my mind without my computers. Yes, plural, computerS. They are my lifeline, and an outlet.

Operating Systems:
Windoze: XP has risen from the dead! I have XP on my Asus F3KA laptop as well as my EeePC 100HEB. Much better than dealing with stupid Vista.

Linux: We finally found a couple versions of Linux that work with out computers. It still has its issues however, so I have a feeling Windows won't be out of my life any time soon.

Games:
World of Warcraft (aka World of Warcrack) is my addiction. The only reason I have Windows at all is to play WoW and some other minor games.

Office Software:
I have struggled and battled MS Office in many of its incarnations since getting my first computer in 1995. Wes (it's always his fault) convinced me to try Open Office and now - no way in hell am I ever going back to MicroSoft's crappy Office Suit. I actually am confident in Open Office's ability to NOT CRASH every 5 fricking minutes. It's a miracle!

Other Software:
I guess I have always been a little "cutting edge" when it came to alternate software - I used Netscape when it first came out, then Mozilla, and now am a diehard Firefox/Thunderbird fan. I also use GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and other random Linux/open source programs.

WES:
It is rather tough to live in today's world without being constantly exposed to computers.

I like to deal with computers on my own terms, as much as possible. No "Crackberries" for me. My time off of work is my time off of work. I do not feel the need to be constantly "in touch" with anybody who wants to call. I certainly do not feel the need to text a person sitting 5 feet away from me. I like computer games, and find e-mail to be a convenient way to keep in touch with people once in a while.

Operating Systems:
Windows: I have been keeping a copy of Windows active at home. It is getting less active as time goes on. I had a rather negative experience with Windows back in 2002. I managed to get a virus that was constantly pinging internet addresses. My internet access was cut off by my ISP until I could demonstrate the system was "clean". There was a problem: the virus was new. No pre-packaged anti-virus programs were able to clean the system. I could not download updates as I could not access the internet. But then: Windows to the Rescue!!! Windows, being windows had programs crash fairly frequently, especially on shut-down. By paying attention to the programs that were crashing, the obvious one that was not supposed to be on the system could be identified. By having the name of the program, a virus-cleaning tool could be downloaded for that virus and finally clear things up. That was when I decided to give Linux a try.

Linux: This OS tends to be more secure and stable by design. Yes, as it becomes more popular, it will have to become less secure so somebody who knows nothing about computers can hook up to whatever activity of questionable legality easily. Some distributions will have to go that route and have their default settings less secure. Others will remain secure. There are some frustrations. The main one is hardware. Few companies write Linux drivers for their software. When I first started playing with Linux, the challenge was to get the dial-up modem to work. Currently, the largest single challenge is to get a wireless network to work (get an Atheros chipset and use the madwifi drivers). It has been a while since I had hardware driver issues - the community is pretty good about figuring out how to get hardware to run, it is worked into the operating system and "just works".

Games:
I had been stuck with Windows for commercially available games until mid-2008. Wine 1.0 was released. It has fairly good compatibility with many Windows games. As the only Windows game I currently play is World of Warcraft, that is the only one I need to work. It is rather difficult to eyeball, but I think WoW actually runs faster on Linux running Wine than it does in Windows. As an added bonus, Darkstone will run in Wine. It has been years since it worked on Windows. Other games (Pool of Radiance, for example) will simply not run. DOSBox allowed me to run the original "Masters of Orion" for the first time since about 2002.

Office Software:
My early experiences were thing like QuatroPro, Lotus, then MicroSoft Office. I bought several copies over the years. The first document that it was important for me to be able to access long-term was my Master's Thesis. After the virus scare of '02, I went back through a lot of my files to ensure they were still there. That was when I discovered that MicroSoft Office would no longer open MicroSoft Office documents. Or at least not ones about 5 years old. All my statistics and raw data were unreadable by the company whose software I used to create them. Then I stumbled across the lifesaver of Open Source Software (OSS). Sun had sponsored a project called OpenOffice (they used it as the basis for StarOffice, their commercial release). It was able to open the old MS files. I actually had fewer conversion issues between OpenOffice and various releases of MS Office than I did within different release of MS Office. I have not bought a MS Office program since then. Added bonus: OpenOffice does not consider itself smarter than you - "Clippy" does pop up and say "let me destroy all of your work. I know what you really want." And getting MS Office to leave venturi as venturi, and not change it to venture is nigh unto impossible.

Other Software:
As much as possible, I prefer using Free and OpenSource Software (FOSS). A large portion of this is simply that what I need to do is not cutting edge - most of what I need to do has been done on computers for a decade. The rest of it is that I want to be able to access my documents in the future. FOSS will always be available even if there are no current releases. It may have to be recompiled, but it will always be available. No need to worry that important documents will no longer be readable with the new release of a company's software. It also allows for easy data exchange. It is kind of annoying to think that 2 people may have to spend several hundred dollars in software to exchange a spreadsheet.

Programs of use (all available on a number of operating systems unless otherwise noted):
Firefox an internet browser from the Mozilla project.
Thunderbird is an e-mail program from the Mozilla project.
OpenOffice is an office suite (spreadsheets, documents, presentations, drawings, and databases).
The GIMP is an image manipulation program.
NVU and KompoZer are web authoring software (web page creation software).

Linux distributions are fairly available. In the future I will provide some links to a variety of them.

Computer Stuff