More Googliness

Google continues to take over the world, but in a good, non-evil way. With the coming of Google Spreadsheets you can now do pretty much everything an Office package lets you do, but for free via the Web. There's Writely for your word processing, Google Spreadsheets for your.. er.. spreadsheets, Google Calendar for your diary and project planning, and GMail for your email. There are also lots of other Google services of course, including free voice calls over GTalk and Notebook, and fantastically useful bookmarking thing. Lots more at Google Labs.

I'm no fan of corporations but this can only be a good thing for us all. Thanks to Google there will be no need to ever 'upgrade' Windows again, or even use Windows. You can use anything with a web browser to do all of this stuff, be it a PC, Mac, TV or whatever. There will be no more having to buy Microsoft Office or having to get annoyed, as I do, when someone sends you a Word document assuming 'everyone must have Word'. It's the beginning of the end of a period of monopolies in computing. Once people get their heads around working with Web applications no single company can monopolise your 'office' requirements again. Don't like Google's offerings? There will be dozens other other Web-based apps to choose from since they can't lock you in. It's good news indeed.

The weather was fantastic over the weekend. This was a shame because I was inside for most of it finishing-off an assignment for my OU course. What a pain! Still, at least I got it in on time. What is it that they say about 'all work and no play' though? I don't think it's about getting rich, unfortunately.

Still, I have a new toy - a 20" iMac. It's one of the new Intel ones and it's pretty groovy. It's almost silent, so that's good news for using Logic with it - the PowerMac G5 was a bit of a beast and you could sometimes hear the fan through the microphone when recording. No more problems there though. Anyway, it's sexy and you really should buy one.

I forgot to mention my 'GamerTag' when I talked about my XBox 360. If you're on XBox live then my tag is 'DominicUK' - have a look and challenge me at something. At the moment it would have to be one of the downloadable demos - something like Ghost Recon or Battlefield 2 (I'm too tight to pay 50 quid for a game), or maybe the one game I do own, Oblivion, has multiplayer? I don't know, and I haven't really had time to care too much. I do wonder why almost everyone on XBox Live seems to be either French or Americans swearing at them and telling them to speak English. Very bizarre. Still, it adds some amusement to hear them shouting at each other over the headset thing.