I’ve been a Mac user and writer since the previous century. Now I work in Healthcare Technology, have two kids and live in Kansas City Missouri.

Due to the above listed responsibilities, I’m not able to keep this site current enough to call it a blog. Previous entries on technology, business and the Mac are all here in the archives for your perusal.

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What was the site? Yahoo! Answers. I had a gas answering, reading and answering questions. There has been lots of talk about how Yahoo! is putting the human back in the Internet, and I can see it working. I answered a few questions about software I was familiar with and got a question answered about some auto maintenance. Try it out, it’s a fabulous example of the value of a “live”, interactive web. The only question you won’t find the answer to is, “where did my afternoon go?”

Most of the attention offered the next step in web evolution is focued on websites. And rightly (or should I say Writely) so. New browser-based services are moving us from our PC’s to our Browsers. But that is only the top layer of the new Web 2.0 OS.

Services may come from the web, but User Scripts, via Grease Monkey, allow these services and their function to be customized at the user level. This provides a personalized web application experience.

Going down one more level, you reach the browser. For a complete Web 2.0 experience, your browser must be more than a window to the web, it must become your secure repository for account information and quick interaction with your services (think Firefox Gmail notifier).

One bunch that gets this is Flock, a new browser - based on Firefox - that integrates del.icio.us, Flickr and blog posting right into the browser. Check it out

But, after all my research I still came back hungry. And, after going over my expectations, I found out that maybe what I want isn’t a task list at all.

As I expect most of you do, I use my email inbox as a type of pending task list. When something comes in that requires action, I let it sit until I complete the task, then (as a Gmail user) I archive it. This works great for short-term tasks, but you can imagine if you sent your entire task list to your email, and let it clutter your inbox for weeks it would be quite a mess.

The solution? A “task boomerang” service. Here’s what I want to do: I have a task, say to write next week’s Freeloader Friday. But I don’t want to stare at it all week. So I send an email to the service, with a line specifying when I’d like the email sent back. So, then Thursday rolls around and I have completely forgotten to write my article, and email arrives in my inbox just in time to remind me.

Now, you could write a great web-based interface for managing all kinds of reminders - and Remember the Milk does this. BUT I don’t want to have to remember to go to a separate site to manage my tasks. I don’t want to take the time. Tasks happen in my inbox, so that’s where I want to stay.

Another must for a system like this is snooze. I want to get an email saying “Take out the Trash” from the system, but have a link in it that I can click to snooze it for 3 days. Given my sloppy knowledge of PHP and MySQL, I could hack something together, but I’d much rather a better programmer get it right without me having to butcher any code.

Its not that I don’t like the nice interfaces that come with these new task managers, its just that I’d rather be getting things done that enjoying slick AJAX.

OpenOffice.org is finally interesting. The Mac version is actually almost on-par with the Windows and Linux versions. The suites interface and features are standard on all three, provided you’re not afraid to use a developers’ release of version 2.0.

With speed improvements and near feature-parity with Office, there has never been an easier time to ditch MS for an Open alternative. While this Office replacement has a traditional approach, OpenOffice isn’t the only one making MS Office irrelevant.

ThinkFree has introduced a very interesting web-based alternative that is surprisingly feature-complete. Universal access, and no locally installed software make this a very interesting idea. ThinkFree’s imagination didn’t stop there either - you can embed fully editable office documents in your blog.

And lets not forget the AJAX crowd. While ThinkFree’s online office is Java-based, and requires some loading time new contenders like Writely and NumSum have word processing and spreadsheets (respectively) at your fingertips in fast AJAX.

Whatever your flavor or alternative, its becoming obvious that Microsoft Office is no more of a must buy than a giant pizza costume. And, with the office suite finally seeing some innovation, expect the replacements to be around for a while.