This will be my second blog. I used MSN Spaces for a while, but I believe I will probably be ending that association soon. I mainly started there out of curiousity, since I already have an MSN account (hard to avoid it in many cases).

While I have never harbored any animosity towards Microsoft, I have sometimes disapproved of their business practices. I don't believe in harboring a grudge agains any entity. It doesn't do me any good to show such anger, and Microsoft is certainly used to the hatred from many of the more tech-savvy.

I have been moving away from Microsoft products for some time now, generally due to the pricey nature of many of them, but also due to their often lack of good features and/or thier security flaws.

Some examples of my replacements: OpenOffice instead of MS Office, Firefox (highly recommended) instead of Internet Explorer, and Thunderbird instead of Outlook. I've also begun to test out Linux as a second operating system on my computer. I've been using the Mepis distribution for now, but have been looking into others. For those that haven't tried these, they are worth looking into. All of them are open-source, meaning that they cost little or nothing to get ahold of, so you don't have much to lose by downloading and testing them.