I have a very nasty migraine today. It feels like someone is squeezing my brain while mixing in shards of glass, or something. Ouch. Every few weeks, I have a day where I wake up with one of these, and it generally hangs around for the entire day. Surprisingly, the sensations disappear almost completely when I close my eyes.

Some reflections on OpenOffice 1.1. For those of you who don't know of it, it's a free office suite for Windows and Linux (there's also a MacOSX version that's a bit behind, versionwise). I used 1.0 some time back, and found it to be completely horrible -- 1.0 was really slow, had inconsistant menus, and always felt like it was going to crash, with odd pauses in the interface all the time.. Actually, that's the primary factor, I think, behind a 'sixth sense' geeks get about computers -- when a piece of software has its pauses in certain patterns, it's a good sign that it's about to SYS3175, or dump core, or BSOD, or summon Dr Watson, or bomb, or whatever is appropriate for the OS at hand. Hmm... it's funny though, since Apple's gone to OSX, I haven't seen anything similar to the old bombs and stuff that MacOS used to get. But I digress.. doubly... OpenOffice 1.1 is much improved. It no longer is slow (although it's by no means fast), and it has some really neat new features (save to PDF is my favourite). It's rare that I need office tools, but for a paper, someone wanted it in a particular font with particular layout rules, and so writing it in HTML wasn't really an option. In those circumstances, I tend to use AbiWord, a much smaller opensource word processor, but in this case, I was curious about the new openoffice...

There was what promised to be a really interesting talk yesterday on how Google lays out its shared filesystem.. I missed it to go to class. So much cool stuff on campus, so little time. And it all does seem to conflict with either classes (which I take care not to miss too much of) or work (which is generally more flexible).

Ugh, stupid migraine. I should probably be at home, in bed, with an ice pack on my head (for comfort, mainly). Oh well.