Birthdays, Black Fridays, and the Cracker Motif

To get this out of the way first, I'd like to admit that today is my quarter-century day of celebration. While more than ten years ago, I had hoped that perhaps one of these birthdays would set forth a milestone within an unearthed prophecy, and unlock the infinite power and wisdom of the cosmos to my fingertips. Maybe next year. The Universe probably doesn't function in yearly cycles anyway.

I imagine everyone survived the dreaded Black Friday - I noticed the sirens stopped eventually. I hear the big items of the last holiday are nearly just as big this time around. Of course, I am speaking of the Wii and the PS3. Not so much the PS3 of course, but the price drop does make it somewhat more attractive. I still hear tales of woe concerning the hardships people are going through finding a Wii. Upstate NY seems to be holding out just fine, but I assume that I played a hand in that, due to hundreds of phone calls and live visits nearly a year ago. If you stayed away from the physical stores and shopping centers, you would undoubtedly have much better luck, you see, rumor has it that yesterday, Wiis were going for $80 on Amazon.

Separate from the fantastic world of economics and marketing, although perhaps nemesis to it, I'd like to speak briefly about open source. This is a topic I plan to cover somewhat frequently, as it interests me greatly. Open source to most people means free software. It goes beyond that, and the actual definition labels it a culture. I won't touch on that too much, but the rundown is the concept of constantly being able to advance the world by promoting access to designs and goods.

Open Office is an indeed simple example. For those of you who haven't used Open Office, I suggest you try it. Open Office is essentially a free, open-source set of applications that mimic the functionality of Microsoft Office. You can download it for free and do all of your word processing create databases and much more. It is not as pretty as Microsoft Office. It does not contain a talking paperclip. A few options may be in different places among the menus. For these reasons, I have heard people completely bash Open Office. I hear similar stories for other alternative software. Perhaps it is just the people I overhear that is the problem. There have been times where I have surrounded myself in some pretty unknowledgeable groups and/or individuals who complain about free things. I'm not here to claim that Microsoft is shoving standards down our throats, and in fact, I am a big fan of where Microsoft is slowly trying to go, and it is clear that the standard user has no clue about it. None the less, without open source, innovation is decided for the user. If anyone is able to alter and redistribute applications, it applies a whole new concept of software evolution. Or, I suppose, you can complain about where the Paragraph formatting menu is and get nowhere. For more information about open source, check out Wikipedia.