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Did a lot of running today - ran 2 kms in 12 minutes on the treadmill as a warm up and then about another 4-5km or so in jogging interspersed with short sprints. (more sprinting than jogging!) Corey was tough on us but its all good!

Jude and I watched The Terminal tonight - really funny movie. I was crying with laughter at the romantic dinner scene.

Amit has posted about Microsoft's new Office 2007 viewers.

Microsoft has recently introduced a free Word 2007 viewer that lets you view docx Word documents, even if you don't have any version of Word installed. This does away with the need to download the Office 12 Compatibility Pack or manually convert .docx to .doc format using any of the online conversion services to open a Word 2007 document. To use the viewer you will still need to install the Office Compatibility Pack.
Microsoft has also provided a Powerpoint 2007 viewer for pptx presentations. There is currently no Excel 2007 viewer however you can convert xlsx to xls using Zamzar and then view the converted spreadsheet in Google Docs.

Check out the links below to download the Viewers
Word 2007 Viewer
Powerpoint 2007 Viewer

Its all fun and games with insurance here.

In the last couple of weeks we have had 3 separate insurance issues to deal with.

First, we had a computer breakdown. We have a policy that covers this specifically, so we had emergency repairs to do and then wait for the cheque to come. that took 3 weeks and we were out of pocket $3500 while we were waiting.

Then we had the car that we had sold but not swapped over (short by two days) hit by hail and a lot of damage to panels. The car yard no longer wants to give us our agreed trade price and the insurers assessor has assessed the damage as repairs only. However there is a secondary cost and that is to the market value of the vehicle. The car yard have declared even if it is repaired they wont give us the same price, and without repairs the trade in is way less than what the insurance would pay out. I am in "negotiations" with the insurance company to honour their commitment to repair to original market value.

Open source software has a lot to offer the business world. Not only are they generally free, many open source programs are more secure, reliable and customizable than their proprietary counterparts. Now days many of the big companies like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo run their servers with Linux rather than Windows. Christina has put together a list of 50 apps that can help your business switch to open source.