In the ongoing adventure that running my office with open source code has become, I've set aside Samba, SSH and PGP questions for the time being to consider a more philosophical question.

The question is whether its better to use wyswyg word processing or to consider using only raw text.

A little over five years ago, I became interested in open source while managing a Legal Services Corporation-funded office that primarily served low-income survivors of partner violence across eight rural counties in Montana.

I saw that the money in my scant budget expended for software licenses and technical support of products offered by companies that refused to share source code could be used instead to serve clients.

This book by Shelley Powers, Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly and Mike Loukides is a well written balance of historically grounded concept articles and straight forward how-to information.

I'm using the book to assist me in my ongoing (started as a hobby) project of migrating my small law office to full open source code. Now that I no longer boot Windows on my office desktop, my need for and interest in command-line syntax has sharply increased.

It turns out that its easier and more effective to use the spreadsheet from Open Office to handle office finances. Gnucash is not ready.

I created one spreadsheet each for accounts payable, accounts receivable, trust balances and timekeeping.

The timekeeping spreadsheet tracks my time and expenses on one sheet and describes my activities on another sheet. The sheets are grouped by financial quarter.

Linux is working out well on my desktop machine in my law office. I haven't had to boot my XP partition for about two weeks now. The system does everything my former XP system used to do except run Quickbooks. Gnucash imports from Quickbooks so that problem ends this week.

I've been wanting to do this for a long time: My office machine now runs Linux on its desktop. Its a Mandriva Linux installation. All of the apps are open source too.

The network has only two machines on it and two printers. The machine in the reception area is an XP Pro operating system and runs Quickbooks because I haven't found a viable open source substitute yet.

Hard to know where to start or what to say. The Onion ran the headline, Nation's Poor Elects Nation's Rich. That summed up for me. The mind boggles.

It was gratifying to hear this morning that former Pres. Clinton joined Sen. Kerry for a rally in Pennsylvania. I still think that VP Gore could have won . . . by a larger margin . . . if he had requested help from Pres. Clinton. Now if Sen. Kerry heads for Florida with the campaign crew he's assembled and sets up camp, he'll win.

These are two of my favorite words to see linked together. I like logic in connection with polis becaue it reminds me that I don't think that logic is the tool for doing the work of a city. That work is conceived differently by different people, but I think of it as the work of giving substance to the social contract, i.e. tuning the economy to feed, clothe, shelter, heal and educate.

Having just watched debate no. 3 (held in Tempe, Arizona), I have grown tired of trying to anticipate whether other viewers will or will not evaluate issues on whether the candidates seemed "likable."

I'm getting exercised by the media failure to challenge Bush's denial of income from what factcheck.org called a "timber growing enterprise."

When Kerry pointed out that the definition Bush used during the debate of "small business owner" included anyone who reported even a dollar of income on their Fed. Income Return, Schedule C, Bush mocked Kerry for suggesting that he had a timber company.

This is to note the arrival of the new, new science fiction.

The new science fiction was new in the sense that stories focused on human rather than technical changes in a futuristic context of humans interfacing with electronics.

Okay debate no. 2 from St. Louis ended a couple of hours ago. My vote for best line was (surprise) Kerry's about generals winning the war and presidents having to win the peace. Its mind-boggling to me that anyone can take the current administration seriously on any issue. That said, I think Kerry won the exchange on two points. The first was the Canadian drug import question. Kerry said he was for it, and Bush tried to say he wanted to make sure the drugs were safe first. The second and d

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a great story on debate no. 2 called Darth Cheney meets Luke Edwards. I think Luke Skywalker is a poor fictional avatar for John Edwards. Darth is fine for the VP though. It can substitute my former favorite nickname, Dick I-hate-puppies Cheney. I will be glued to the set!

The Washington Post carried an editorial confirming my firm impression that Kerry decisively won the first debate this past week. Newsweek also published poll results showing that Kerry has pulled ahead of Bush in the overall race.

Bush may have slipped into a risky rhetorical stance by attacking Kerry as a flip-flopper, etc. As pointed out in the Post editorial, if the electorate decides the situation on the ground in Iraq is worsening, Bush has left no room for changing directions.