Neff Zone Coulmn -- March 15, 2008

Print Edition: March 15, 2008

Three items of possible interest

I have three items to offer for your consideration today. They are random in that any one of the items does not relate and any of the other items. All just spilled willy-nilly out of my brain, a condition first recognized by the nuns at Flint St. Luke’s, although they would deny hitting me on the noggin with rosary beads had in any way contributed to the malady.

Item 1: GOT GAS? I just returned from a week in Breckenridge, Colorado. What this proves is that some people are so stupid they actually leave the frigid climes of a Michigan winter and pay money to go somewhere colder. Duh!

Anyway, Breckenridge is a classic tourist town. If there is any possible way to separate a visitor from his money, Breck will find it. It’s the home of the $8 bowl of chicken noodle soup (which is a nice lunch companion to the $10 filet of wallet sandwich). You can get a "free" gondola ride up the ski mountain if you pay $10 to park your car. There’s even a 9% snack tax levied by the city on every bag of chips and every jar of salsa. They have this tourism gig down to a science.

There are two gas stations in Breckenridge. Now, in order to get gasoline to these pumps the precious liquid has to be trucked in. This involves a truck traveling on I-70 over several Rocky Mountain passes, most of the time in winter with snow chains on their tires. From I-70 a truck must then wind 12 miles on a two-lane mountain road straight uphill to Breck, which rests at 9000 feet above sea level. It’s a dangerous and arduous operation, to say the least.

If there was ever a place where you would think the price for gasoline would be sky high this is it. I mean, you almost wouldn’t begrudge being gouged at the pump given the captive audience and the realities of the situation.

When I left Breckenridge last Saturday the price for a gallon of gas was $2.99. When I got back to Cadillac on the same day the price here was $3.36. Sort of a head scratcher, eh?

Item 2: OPEN OFFICE. With gas costing so much it’s nice to know you can save some dollars elsewhere. If you’ve recently purchased a computer or are reworking an old one, you know that a huge expense is the Microsoft Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint…). New computers used to have MS Office pre-installed, but now that’s not often the case. Now they give you a lesser program, like the dreadful Microsoft Works. If you want MS Office, it will cost you an extra $399 for the Standard edition up to $675 for the Ultimate edition.

Here’s a way to get virtually the same thing as MS Office for free; go to www.openoffice.org and download the free Open Office suite. Open Office is easy to install and is so close to MS Office you’ll hardly be able to tell the two suites apart. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet, database maker, presentation maker (like PowerPoint), and more. While in Open Office, you can opt to save your documents in the .odt (Open Office) format or several other formats, including the .doc format of Microsoft Word.

Open Office is free because it’s an open source project. This means the source code (programming language) is open for people all over the world to tweek and customize. In essence, it’s a community project to create a free alternative to commercially expensive software. The popular Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail program are applications of this type and have been free for twenty years or more.

I wrote this column using the Open Office Writer. I’m trying to figure out why I would ever pay for Microsoft Office again.

Item 3: ROBO CALLS. It looks like the Democratic Party, in its unending quest to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, will be inflicting some sore of repeat presidential primary upon the citizens of Michigan. This will inevitably trigger a cascade of robo calls, those infuriating automated phone messages that always seem to arrive just when you’re eating dinner.

Here’s a way to fend off such calls. The company that makes the calls on behalf of the Democrats is Democratic Dialing. They claim that they don’t want to waste their time calling you if all it will do is make you hostile and angry. So, you can go to their website at www.democraticdialing.com and click on the "do not call list" at the top of the page. Then, submit your phone number and supposedly you will be taken off their call lists.

I did this. I figure if I don’t get called I’ll be happy. If I do get called, I will know that I’ve been lied to and so I won’t vote for the candidate on whose behalf the call was made, so again I’ll be happy. If I get called on behalf of both candidates I’ll vote for neither and, you guessed it, I’ll be happy. I win all the way around.

Jim Neff is a local columnist. Comments to neffzone@gmail.com. Read Neff Zone columns online at www.neffzone.com/cadillacnews.