Will skype be another paypal?

When I heard that eBay was buying skype a while back, my stomach went plunk. I remembered when eBay bought paypal, which made plenty of sense, but still caused much outrage with the fees and such induced. eBay is out there to make money. I don't really care, frankly, how this move will benefit eBay, as I'm sure it will. I just know that I liked Skype. It was a good little company, out there for the good of its users. Sure it wanted to make money, but I didn't get the feel that that was their overbearing, only purpose. But $4.1 billion is quite a hunk of cash, and I can understand why they would sell out. Principles of software and helping users only go so far. I should have liked to see someone like Google buy it out, like they did something called Blogger. Google just has the spirit of things like Blogger and Skype. I like Google (there are reasons I use Blogger). But I don't like eBay, I don't trust eBay in what they'll do to Skype. Who knows, they may keep the spirit of skype and free service and personal, homey feel. But I'm not holding my breath.

Ooh! Ooo two!

I was planning on posting about this a few days ago, but I finally got around to it today. OpenOffice.org is an open-source (see a pattern here?) alternative to Microsoft Office. Version 1.1.4 was comprable to Office 97. Not real great. So I tried 2.0 beta. It was drastically improved, and made leaps and bounds towards Office 2000/XP. Much better-looking, has a better feeling to it, and is just plain better. But it was buggy. Since it was a beta, that was expected, but it still made me sad. Now, finally, Ooo 2.0 is released. Same thing, less bugs. Try open office out - click the button down there on the right. I'm beginning to like Sun Microsystems more now.

Blender + Wikipedia = Awesome

First of all, to the guy (or gal) who looked at my blog with linux, congrats for using the best OS out there. But on the topic of the day, I've been playing around with Blender some more. And I'm still impressed. I've been finding all kinds of awesome tricks, much thanks to the tutorial on Wikibooks. I've been having so much fun, in fact, that I've ventured deeper into the world of Wikipedia. Wikipedia, run by the same people as Wikibooks, is the open-source encyclopedia. Despite the fact that its open nature makes vandalism easy, it's not much of a problem thanks to the many administrators who watch out for issues and fix them. I've been a member of wikipedia for a while, and I've edited a few articles and cleaned some up. But recently, I found the requested illustration. Hooray, I thought, I can help. So I found a request for a picture of a burette. "I can do that," I thought, "we've got those at school." So I took a picture, and now you can see them in the article. That made me happy. But then I found the image recreation requests page. I was elated! Wow, I can really do this! So I set out to illustrate and recreate. I found a request for a nucleosome. Looking at the previous illustration, I realized it would be a perfect thing to do in, guess what, Blender. So that's what I'm working on now.
I'm glad to be able to contribute to the greatness of wikipedia, and I'm really glad that I found Blender (and GIMP) to help. Isn't open-source the greatest? Anyway, y'all should check out the wikipedia and see how you can help. Look at the Community Portal for ideas. Or you can just go and throw rocks at stuff. Just make sure it's not alive, and measure how far it goes.