The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

Living Without Microsoft: We created Living Without Microsoft because the market dominance of Microsoft leads many non-technical people to assume that there really is no alternative to using its software. In many cases, there are real alternatives, and our aim is to help you find them.

This link was found and posted somewhere by someone far more Internet savvy than I.

Three buckets of blackberries and one bucket of blueberries jammed and canned. The jam was even nice enough to can itself; we didn't have to boil the jars to get them to seal. My step-mother and I had a lot of fun and I learned something that I can use for the rest of my life. This certainly makes up for not learning to drive stick (I'm still hopeful I'll learn to tie a tie this summer).

If only I liked jam.

Today, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac OS X. Changes focused mostly on increasing the speed of browser, including support for Quartz technology--a feature of OS X that provides anti-aliased (smoothed) fonts (amongst other benefits). Other browsers using Quartz technology for Mac OS X include Chimera, Mozilla 1.1, and OmniWeb.

I didn't have a date to my Senior prom in high school. My sister's friend--and to a lesser degree, my friend--Liz offered to go with me. We had a great time and the prom was probably better than it would have been if I had found a date on my own.

Liz will be on the July 7th episode of The Dead Zone. Here's what the show's Executive Producer, Michael Piller, had to say about her:

Have to tell you about the dailies I just saw from Enigma of the Stage Door Canteen and what a great find we have in the actress who plays the girl of Johnny's dreams. I hope we might be able to post a photograph of her.

It takes the skilled eye of an experienced professional to pick the exact right performer for a role from maybe two dozen actresses who come in to read lines from the script for a couple of minutes each. I was that experienced professional on that casting call. Remember the name Elizabeth Bennett because I think she's going to be a star.

And I didn't cast her.

I had someone else as my choice. Two someone else's to be honest. But when we sent the casting tape to our colleagues in Canada, the phone rang and they all asked: who's that other girl? So I went back to the tape and looked at her again, and she wasn't bad at the audition - in fact, she looked better on tape than I'd recalled. There's an old expression in this business about star quality: the camera loves her. Well, in the dailies today, I can say without hesitation that the camera and I love Elizabeth Bennett. And I discovered her. Almost.

My prom date is a star.