First, beloved actress Lauren Bacall died at the age of 89. Because of the internet, we also know that she represented the last living person named in Madonna's song, Vogue. She was a class act who will most certainly be missed.
Moving on, my recent complaint about my lack of MS Office resulted in a tweet from the Office Twitter account. And from there, I started browsing the many options for getting a legal copy of MS Office. Admittedly the package that they've put together for Office 365 for home users is pretty tempting including the main MS Office apps that most folks need, an additional 1TB of cloud storage, and the almost random benefit of 60 minutes of Skype minutes a month. I feel kinda bad for Skype - that makes them like the free gift card you get with purchase or something. For PHP 349.99 (versus $99.99 for the annual subscription for US users) I can install Office on 5 different computers plus 5 additional tablets (what a weird family). So I can actually take some family members with me on this road towards computer legality.
I've yet to pull the trigger on the effort, but admittedly I'm bound to bite sooner or later. It's a nice option and it ensures that I'll remain productive, especially when I'm out of town and may possibly need to work remotely. I may not work from home all the time, but every time I do it's so awkward. I've finally killed OpenOffice on my computer and I'm doing my best to manage with Google Drive for now but that still means uploading my work documents to the cloud before I can work on them. I may just sign up for the free month of Office first to see how that goes.
Signing up with Office may also lead to me ditching Evernote for OneNote. Evernote was really just an obligatory replacement for Springpad, which is now dead. Evernote is decent, but there are certain functions like checklists where it fails terribly. I'm not sure if OneNote is any better in this department, but if I'm going to consolidate my efforts, I might as well go for it, right?
On a related note, I'm seriously killing most of my music collection in favor of Spotify. I know I originally I wrote about how I didn't see much value in the app, but I reconsidered things when I started to tinker with the desktop app more plus the fact that I didn't consider how most of my music is actually pirated. I'm not exactly a hardcore music fan and I am more likely to care about music that we play in the car than on my mobile phone when I'm commuting to and from work due to paranoia of getting mugged.
I only have about 33GB of music on my computer today (not counting the video game soundtracks from various Humble Bundles saved on an external HD) that I could free up for those few times that I listen to music while blogging or whatever. My music listening becomes more legal in nature and I only pull up songs I actually want to listen to. As much as it failed in one of my original goals of streaming music past the office firewall, it still gives me good music options on my home computer. And in some ways, the music quality here feels better than what I get with some of my downloaded files.
I'm still on the free 6 months of Spotify Premium that I got through Globe, so I have some time to think about this a bit more.
I swear to you, ease of access to content through digital solutions goes a long way towards addressing piracy. I guarantee it.
Moving on, my recent complaint about my lack of MS Office resulted in a tweet from the Office Twitter account. And from there, I started browsing the many options for getting a legal copy of MS Office. Admittedly the package that they've put together for Office 365 for home users is pretty tempting including the main MS Office apps that most folks need, an additional 1TB of cloud storage, and the almost random benefit of 60 minutes of Skype minutes a month. I feel kinda bad for Skype - that makes them like the free gift card you get with purchase or something. For PHP 349.99 (versus $99.99 for the annual subscription for US users) I can install Office on 5 different computers plus 5 additional tablets (what a weird family). So I can actually take some family members with me on this road towards computer legality.
I've yet to pull the trigger on the effort, but admittedly I'm bound to bite sooner or later. It's a nice option and it ensures that I'll remain productive, especially when I'm out of town and may possibly need to work remotely. I may not work from home all the time, but every time I do it's so awkward. I've finally killed OpenOffice on my computer and I'm doing my best to manage with Google Drive for now but that still means uploading my work documents to the cloud before I can work on them. I may just sign up for the free month of Office first to see how that goes.
Signing up with Office may also lead to me ditching Evernote for OneNote. Evernote was really just an obligatory replacement for Springpad, which is now dead. Evernote is decent, but there are certain functions like checklists where it fails terribly. I'm not sure if OneNote is any better in this department, but if I'm going to consolidate my efforts, I might as well go for it, right?
On a related note, I'm seriously killing most of my music collection in favor of Spotify. I know I originally I wrote about how I didn't see much value in the app, but I reconsidered things when I started to tinker with the desktop app more plus the fact that I didn't consider how most of my music is actually pirated. I'm not exactly a hardcore music fan and I am more likely to care about music that we play in the car than on my mobile phone when I'm commuting to and from work due to paranoia of getting mugged.
I only have about 33GB of music on my computer today (not counting the video game soundtracks from various Humble Bundles saved on an external HD) that I could free up for those few times that I listen to music while blogging or whatever. My music listening becomes more legal in nature and I only pull up songs I actually want to listen to. As much as it failed in one of my original goals of streaming music past the office firewall, it still gives me good music options on my home computer. And in some ways, the music quality here feels better than what I get with some of my downloaded files.
I'm still on the free 6 months of Spotify Premium that I got through Globe, so I have some time to think about this a bit more.
I swear to you, ease of access to content through digital solutions goes a long way towards addressing piracy. I guarantee it.
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