Say no to greedy assholes: Microsoft Free in '06

My sole New Year's resolution: stop picking my ears? Bike 100 miles a month? Stop eating crap? Figure out how to be a better father and/or husband?

Those are all too difficult. I am a realist. I am going 100% Microsoft free by June 1, 2006 (or 100%  minus the amount that Microsoft makes from the sale of Apple hardware). This shouldn't take six months, should it? I mean the open source tools have been out there for a while now, and I use a Mac anyway. . . I would like to do this without buying Keynote, too, I should add.

It's a transition that will take a little time. I've already downloaded and started using Neo Office. The text application is a piece of cake. Very MS-wordy interface. Exports to everything imaginable. Reads my word docs, even complex ones with funky characters and endnotes. But I need to get used to the quirks and differences. No sweat there. I produce like, 2 spreadsheets a year, and very basic ones at that; so the neo-office xl clone should do fine. It's ppt. that is the curse. I confess to using it in teaching. Students have come to expect it; it's a decent aid to memory when I'm trying to lecture, and they can be distributed electronically as a sort of lecture outline. (I'm also going to start podcasting my classes, but that's another fiasco waiting to happen). Neo Office has a presentation thing that works just like ppt, but doesn't export to ppt, only to image formats, PDF, and for some reason, .swf. So I may have to bite the bullet and keynote.
[All of this begs the question of whether or not to switch to openoffice.org, which requires X11 windows for OSX -- which I'm not at all sure how it works]

Why bitch, when, since I work in higher ed, I get all the MS office stuff for "free" (to me at least). I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with one of the aspects of the eightfold path: Right Livelihood. Act as though it matters that you withdraw your sanction from a monopolist corporation that has stifled innovation, and used its market dominance to foist the worst operating system ever invented on 98% of the PC market. And if I'm going to boycott the Dead, why stop there?