Huge shout out to Peter Glovicki, who pointed me to OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice is a free, open-source alternative to the damnable Microsoft Office suite. Bill Gates is charging $300 just to upgrade to Office 2007, which is flashy and annoying, and tries to save files as .docx so you can’t open them with anything but Word 2007. If I realized there was a convenient way to break his monopoly, I’d have switched years ago. OpenOffice can do everything MS Office can, including opening all the same files, but you don’t have to feel dirty using it.

But even more — someone was asking about making PDFs. OpenOffice converts word documents into PDFs! No need for Acrobat or a powerful desktop publishing package — just lay out your text in a standard document and save it as a PDF. How cool is that?