Arghs and such.

Tried to install my trusty-dusty "Bookshelf '95" CD just now... you know, the one with the entire American Heritage Dictionary, and Atlas, and Roget's Thesaurus, et alia... only to discover that this machine doesn't have the Ariel TrueType Font installed, so half of the words in the dictionary entries don't show up at all.

I go to check out the fonts folder, and discover that there are very few TrueType fonts, at all... they're all something called OpenType. And frankly, I can't see the advantage.

:::Sigh::: Bookshelf '95 was my security blanket CD...

So I go to check out naarmamo, to double check that I uploaded all the art I did during the week I was out to their proper days, and look at the pretties that other people were making, and the pages for "Read replies/Post a comment" won't load at all -- without any error message, either! Is anyone else having this problem? Or is it just my machine?

At least, I get to use my Frustrated mood icon. I think I did well with that one.

[ETA: Never mind, don't botter to answer that last question, 'cause I won't be able to see what it is. I get the same thing happening when I try to make or check replies on this lj, too. So something is up, and it's not just naarmamo. I hope whatever it is gets cleared up soon... I'll go right stir crazy if I can't get or make replies...]

Still trying to decide which software to download to this machine...

So -- here's what I know so far: the OpenOffice suite of programs is much like the Microsoft Office Suite, which is what I'm wanting to replace. It has a word processor, a database and spreadsheet (neither of which I see myself using, but I might miss both, somewhere down the road, if I did not have them), a math editor (Which I will use when cows sprout wings, and we get milky rainstorms and icecream hail), a "Powerpoint" clone (which I'll probably find a use for when we get chocolate fudge floods), and something called "Draw."

From the description, this "Draw" sounds like the shiniest componant of all, helping one make illustrations and link them seamlessly with your document; but for the screen capture, they had rather boring looking flow chart -- not the kind of illustration you'd put into a children's story; I'm thinking Draw is probably like Corel Draw, right?

Is anyone here familiar with Corel Draw (or any of its clones)? How easy is it to use, really? And how artistic can you get with it? Would it be worth the load on my hard drive from the other componants of OpenOffice, if it gave me something like Corel Draw to play with? How playful is it?

Oh, and you may have noticed: I've been playing around with my lj's color scheme so it's a closer match to my icon.... not quite there, but close.