3780 Stumbling, but still moving.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

"[T]he West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion

but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often

forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

--Samuel Huntingdon--

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Played with the new laptop some more today.

I installed IrfanView, so now I can find, edit, and play with all my photos.

I installed WOT (Web of Trust), so now I know at a glance whether a website is considered safe or not.

I installed Flash, so now I can watch YouTube videos.

I verified that the Microsoft virus detector is on and automatically updating.

I bookmarked my most frequently used sites on the tool bar.

So far, so good.

But I have a few major problems:

I can't seem to use the regular Firefox bookmarks list.  I found it, but it's not bookmarking anything but the ones for which I used drag-and-drop to put on the tool bar.  "Bookmark this page" doesn't seem to do anything.  After Google killed their bookmark support a few years ago, I moved to GMarks, and that was working fine for me on the old system.  I downloaded GMarks, and the instructions said to open the installation thingy under Firefox, but I can't figure out how to do that.  This one I may be able to figure out if I play with it some more.

The one that freaks me out totally:
I have a few hundred documents on the hard disk, and almost all of them are Microsoft Works format (.wps and .wdb).  I don't have Microsoft Works on the new machine, and nothing else will open those files!  Let alone edit them.  I really really really don't want to have to buy Microsoft Word (although I guess I'm going to have to), and I absolutely don't want the whole Office package.

I wandered around a bit, and it gets pretty confusing.  One Microsoft site says $109.99 for Word (is that a one-time payment?), and another says $99.99/year for the full suite (home edition)(Holy Crap!  Do people really pay that?).  Word is supposed to be able to open and edit Works files, and there are several free converters out there (although if Word can read Works, why would you need a converter from Works to Word anyway?).  So I guess I'm going to have to devote some time tomorrow to figuring that all out.

Suggestions or explanations of packages gratefully accepted.   Are there any other word processors out there besides what Microsoft has?

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In other business, two days ago my cold seemed to be gone.  Over.  Done.  I had one day of bliss, and then it came back, exactly the same way it had started the first time through.  I am unhappy.)
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