Don's Weblog

I have never watched an entire showing of the Academy Awards. Really, who cares about actors patting themselves on the back for their job performance? There is absolutely no sense to it. The only real measure of a film's success is how much money dos it bring in at the box office. Now, I like a good movie. I watch a bunch on my computer including most of these Academy Award nominees. 3:10 To Yuma... A good Western. No Country For Old Men... I didn't understand the ending.. Juno... An award for a movie about a pregnant teenager??? Gotta wonder... Did that movie "Duplex" a couple of years ago win anything?? I have no idea but it was really funny. And I see there will be a new Indiana Jones movie. Now that is something to look forward to. Academy Awards are Bullshit. Videos are the Internet rage. Anyone with a camcorder or webcam can be a producer! You know, some of these are pretty good. Who sent me the video of the stripper doing a magic act?? That was a real gem. Did...

You will all want to read the March issue of PC magazine. It has two excellent articles. The first is on currently available (and top rated) freeware. Why I think this listing is better than others is that the software descriptions include the platform(s) it runs on. PC's are no longer just Windows boxes. I have always believed that good freeware is comparable to (and sometimes better) than commercial software. The classic example is OpenOffice. Why pay Microsoft over $100 when you can have the same capabilities for free? And of course, the Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer, struggles to keep up with the Mozilla browser, Firefox, which has been free from the start. The second article that deserves attention is "The Battle For Your Desktop." It gives a good comparison of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS (Leopard), and Ubuntu Linux (7.10). Despite what Kim Komando will tell you on Saturday morning, Windows XP comes out ahead of Windows Vista. My experience with Vista on...

Six more weeks of Winter!! That's fine for me. Winter is pretty nice in Florida. Oh yes, there are a few cool days when you wear a sweater and sleep under a blanket but it soon warms up again. I promised a "2007 State of the Don" message for the holidays but obviously I didn't make it. 2007 was not a good year. At this time last year I was starting to suffer depression and complained to my friends that "I had little to do and too much time to do it in.!" Life went downhill from there. By April I was in severe depression. I tied up with a young doctor who gave me very bad advice and incorrectly prescribed a high dose of Prozac. I got profoundly ill until I figured out on my own that it was the Prozac making me sick!! I did a lot of praying during this period and I will not discount the role of God in keeping me alive. After cutting out the Prozac recovery took about two months and by September I was pretty much back to normal. My hobbies filled my time (and s...