Cup of black tea with breakfast (~5:45am). 20 oz (drip) coffee lasts from 7am to about 10:30am. I used to be able to stretch that until noon. Cup of green or oolong once the coffee runs out. Lunch (12:30-1:30) - diet iced green tea that has a negligible amount of caffeine. Cup of black tea after lunch, usually Earl Grey or Irish breakfast. Cup of tea or coffee @ 3pm depending on how I'm feeling. When it's my week to drive for the carpool (once every four weeks) I've started bringing a cup of tea in the car (1 hour commute). During the weekend I bring it down substantially, usually just a few cups of tea throughout the day.

I think you have that backwards. Everybody else is in horrible shape --worse than they realize-- because they weren't forced to pre-pay retirement funds. They will be discovering this shortly.

At my workplace, a state government agency, they just redeployed Windows XP on brand new core-i5 machines. I got the excuse of legacy/custom software needs. I'm expecting Win7 some time shortly after the rapture.

I graduated from the University of Rochester (NY), and you needed to have a "cluster" of 12 credits (usually 3 classes, as most are 4 credits) in the two general areas that are not your major. So a CS degree would be a math/science major, so you'd need a Humanities cluster and a Social Science cluster, plus the freshman writing course, which is the only single required class. You can make your clusters pretty much whatever you want, and they don't have to be contained to any one department. For instance, my math/science cluster was two semesters of calc and one of stats. Philosophy (at least analytical philosophy) might not be as useless to a CS degree as you think (--there are symbolic logic courses in the Philosophy dept), so that might be your humanities cluster. Throw in an Econ cluster and you're set. 24 credits of clusters plus 4 of freshman English writing and you can spend the rest of your time taking every CS course you can schedule. I didn't have to take a single laboratory science class, nor any English lit, nor phys ed,...

Why, as an end-user, switch? Libre is first out with a final release for version 3.3. Oracle is on Release Candidate 10 of their 3.3 suite. However, I tested my word-doc resume (which is heavily formatted) in OOo 3.2 versus Libre 3.3 (final) (on Ubuntu, under Virtualbox), and Libre butchered the rendering. OOo 3.2 did fine. I haven't tested the OOo Release candidates.

I haven't updated my FB info because the last FB "upgrade" nuked a lot of it.

Abiword does not have true .doc export, nor do they plan to. The .doc export function is just renaming an rtf as doc, which will certainly look doc-ish and will open in Word, but complex documents are going to be mangled. In my experience, OOo exports a reasonably good .doc , which I always verify with the free Word Viewer from MS before sending out. In the rare event of mangled formatting, I fire up my ancient installation of Office97 as a last resort.

First, there's a preference to turn off automatic updates in FF. Second, even automatic updates only get executed if you're running as an admin account. Why somebody would routinely run a web browser (even FF or Opera) as a privileged user is beyond my comprehension. That is a security break waiting to happen.

Argue with a Mormon using the Book of Mormon and they'll either argue back or refer you to a higher-up. Argue w/ CoS about Xenu and they'll sue you for copyright infringement.