It’s such a shame that a bad day includes details inappropriate for publishing online.

Books for America - a small non-profit used bookstore. So cheap. Most things $3 or under. Only saw one thing priced for over $3 and that was $5 for an art book. Their mission (from their website): “promote literacy, life-long learning and understanding by distributing donated new and used books of all types and other forms of educational media to organizations serving disadvantaged communities and individuals.” Books for America - a Bookstore with a Purpose

View Larger Map1417 22nd Street, NW Washington, DC 20037
HOURS: Mon, Fri & Sat 10-6; Tues -Thurs 10-9; Sunday 11-5

Other things…

Reading this book: Buried Deep (Retrieval Artist Novels, No. 4) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Found the Washington Observer 《华盛顿观察》 has an office across the street from work. It’s a Chinese-language newspaper in DC.

Chinese lessons starting soon also (oddly) only a few blocks away at the International Language Institute. A little pricey ($320 tuition, $89 for books) and they don’t list the instructors for their courses.

Hopefully will go to the Dupont Drawing Group tomorrow evening. Last week I went to a Monday night group elsewhere that was a lot of fun. Found both of these groups through the Figure Models Guild website that lists all the open drawing groups in the area. How exciting!

My parents surprised me with a super cool birthday gift — a Bamboo Tablet from Wacom, so now I can draw on my computer. What an amazing thing!

Not exclusively for activists and grassroots organizers, but this site offers a ton of free photos. Requires registration and login to download large images. Nicely categorized and the search engine works well. The specific licensing is pretty clearly stated for each image. When using these images remember to credit the photographer!

Photo credit: Steve Woods

Photo credit: Paul Le Comte

• Writer (Word)
• Calc (Excel)
• Impress (Powerpoint)
• Draw (Publisher)
• Base (Access)

But still only has limited compatibility with Microsoft file formats.

Anyway, it’s getting easier and easier to live without Microsoft.

Download and Install StarOffice (for free)

Oddly enough, if you’d like to buy it, you can also purchase the same software on Sun’s website for $69.95.

Hint: Sometimes their image library has some problems displaying all of the images. You can also view their images using Google image search. Go to http://images.google.com and search for “site:riniart.org” (without the quotes). All of their site’s images will be displayed.

You can’t surf the web without protection. Try this free software.

Download and Install Avast Home Edition

My Web Browser

I view websites with Mozilla Firefox. It’s more reliable than Microsoft Internet Explorer, crashes less and better security features. It’s free.
Download and Install Mozilla Firefox

My Email

I can send and receive email from all of my email accounts using a single gmail account. Manage contacts and everything’s totally searchable. And it’s free.
Get a Gmail Account

OpenOffice.org is free software. It is open source. It is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats… most of the time.

All of the places I’ve worked have used Microsoft Office software. That suite of software products is familiar to most people who have ever worked in an administrative position: Word, Powerpoint, Publisher, Excel, and Access. These file formats dominate our world. The file extensions (the last letters after the “.” in the file name) are everywhere:

Word: filename.doc
Powerpoint: filename.ppt
Publisher: filename.pub
Excel: filename.xls
Access: filename.mdb

I have met very few people that use anything beyond Word documents and the occasional Excel document. If this is you, OpenOffice is a great fit and will serve you well. You can open existing Word and Excel files, as well as save in these file formats using OpenOffice.

Download OpenOffice 2.2.1

However, if you use Publisher and Access extensively, you might have some problems with compatibility.

Microsoft Office’s Publisher, its layout software, has all kinds of problems of it’s own. It is a terrible program, unwieldy and prone to crashing and creating humongous files. Publisher files are not compatible between versions, so you will also have problems opening a Publisher file in Windows XP if that file was originally created in Windows 2000. OpenOffice offers an alternative layout program, but cannot open Publisher files (filename.pub).

Microsoft Office’s database software, Access, is very powerful. As much as I’ve tried, I cannot get the OpenOffice equivalent, Base, to work very well. If you need to use Access, OpenOffice cannot help you.

Read more about OpenOffice.org on Wikipedia