I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately using OpenOffice Writer. I want to like it. And, y’know, it has a lot of positive attributes (most notably, that it doesn’t cost anything). But it is utterly infuriating to use over a long period of time, or for writing anything that’s likely to be drafted more than a couple of times. At the end of the day, I find myself longing for Microsoft Word, in spite of the fact that I know full well Word is far from perfect itself.

My main gripe, I guess, is that OpenOffice’s word count is inaccurate, sometimes wildly so. It’ll give different answers depending on what day of the week it is, even if the document remains unchanged. (Okay, so it’s not THAT bad, but if you run a word count, then close the document, then open it and do another word count, you’re likely to get a radically different number. Not ideal, when you’re working with strictly word-counted articles.)

And the next issue? There’s no thesaurus. I never realised how often I use the thesaurus in Word, usually when I want to check that a word I’m using really means what I think it means. When my Internet connection is actually in existence, I can always check online, but it’s nowhere near as convenient. Come to think of it, I can use web-based word counters when the Internet’s working, too, but that again is just not as efficient as using a word processor that gets it right in the first place.

So, humbug. Anyone got any suggestions for other word processors that won’t drive me up the wall? Or should I just accept that the devil I know is, at least, the devil I know, and go back to Word?

Fake Steve Jobs picked up this week’s Micro Mart cover - a replay of our cover last year which asked if Vista was 2007’s most pointless upgrade - and answered our question, saying that Vista isn’t pointless: “It’s the best marketing tool we’ve ever had.”

Well, there we go, then.

So, that was Christmas - we’re now officially back at work, the holidays seem like a distant memory, and next Christmas is too far off to even contemplate. Did you have fun? I did. I ate lots, drank moderately, read lots of books, played lots of games, watched some truly dire telly, completely forgot all about the Doctor Who Christmas special, and sang various Christmas songs. Loudly, and not particularly well. It was fun.

One of the more notable aspects of the fun was the introduction into my life of an Xbox 360. I had been lagging sadly behind in the games console stakes, still playing PlayStation 2 games (I even got my very own copy of Fahrenheit for the PS2 as a present this Christmas, which is awesome!) but over the Christmas holidays, a whole new world of gaming opened up to me.

Of the games which came bundled with the console, I quickly learned that Forza Motorsports 2 is not for me. I can’t drive and I know sod all about cars; my favourite racing game is Burnout, because it rewards you for driving like a maniac, forcing other people off the road and exploding your car, so a game that required me to tinker about and then drive impressively was never going to win my affections. I’m sure it’s very good, if you like that sort of thing. Viva Pi