Long before everyone had a web site, the two ways you read the news on-line was Usenet newsgroups or mailing lists. The newsgroups were, and still are, pull media. Mailing lists are push. If you are reading this, you are using pull media. That is, you had to come here and ask for what you wanted to read.

Generally, pull is what I want. That is, I want to go out and get what I am looking for rather than having it rammed down my throat. But I have had people telling me that they want push.

I have been playing with OSQA for a while and am finally happy it works. It is up at http://qa.a-zLiving.com. So, what is it, you ask?

It's "question and answer" software. OSQA is one of an assortment of implementations. It happens to be written using Django. Someday, my hope is that it can become part of a web site about living that does a lot more.

The discussion started on NicaLiving about using Windoze vs. Linux. It is the usual uninformed caca. But, we have moved on to applications software. My question, which I want to present here, is why is anyone still using Microsoft Office?

OpenOffice(.org) is an office suite which will look very familiar to users of Microsoft Office but have some significant benefits including:

• Support a true open format as well as Microsoft's proprietary format and quasi-open formats
  

This issue came up for a couple of reasons one being the disaster related to http://statecraft21.com over the last few days. I created the site on a server (http://www.servage.net) where I have an account. The account includes an amazing amount of storage and of bandwidth. But, apparently, a database-heavy application was just not going to fly there.