Kerry Allen

The only kind of celebrity news you’re likely to find me passing around.

Actress Christina Applegate is being treated for breast cancer. She’s 36.

Please, please, please have your doctor show you how to correctly perform a breast self-exam and discuss the best time in your menstrual cycle to do it. (Hormonal fluctuations can cause totally benign lumpiness and needless panic, so some times are better than others.) You are NOT too young to worry about it, and your yearly checkup is NOT often enough to catch a malignancy in its earliest stage, when treatment has the greatest chance of success.

Personal vigilance is your health’s absolute best defense. Do it for yourself. Do it for the people who love you. Do it for a 5-gallon bucket of green M&Ms, for all I care, but DO IT.

So… another issue that has arisen with the dead computer situation…

In Office 2007 Microsoft introduced a new file format called the Microsoft Open Office XML Format (.docx). This format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word or with alternative operating systems like Linux or Mac OS X. Nor is it compatible with other word processing applications like OpenOffice, Lotus 123, or NeoOffice.

I discovered this cute little feature months ago (”Sorry, we can’t open your submission”), had a nice rant (”Why the eff would they make a program INCOMPATIBLE WITH ITSELF? Oh, I suppose they didn’t want poor Word to feel inferior to Vista, which is INCOMPATIBLE WITH EFFING EVERYTHING!!!1!”), and didn’t think much else of it because I had that computer to deal with the .docx files if I absolutely had to.

So… yesterday I had need of one of my rescued files and, much to my everlasting joy, got heiroglyphics when I tried to open it on the laptop because the geniuses at Microsoft have made Word INCOMPATIBLE WITH ITSELF! Perusing the names of some of the .docx files I have (since, obviously, I couldn’t peek inside the files themselves), I realized this could be a rather serious problem.

All hail the mighty internet.

Docx-converter.com offers a portable solution for your compatability needs. It will convert a Microsoft Office .docx file into a simple html file. It strips out some of the formatting, but now supports bold, italic, and underlined text. Left, right, center, and justified alignment. Unicode characters. Tables. And more!

Voila! Worked like a charm on a plain old text document. My precious text is saved.

Now, to be fair, Microsoft has a “compatibility pack” you can install into your old, obsolete version of Word. If you trust Microsoft. If you want another piece of Microsoft garbage on your computer. If you don’t think Microsoft’s “hold the world’s data hostage to force them to UPGRADE—ka-ching!— to our buggy new products” policies are a disgrace.

But you can find that yourself, since I’m not sending traffic to those scumbags.

It’s that time of the year again.

Thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you are entitled to your absolutely free, no-strings-attached credit report from The Big Three credit bureaus once a year. It is very important that you check these for errors (everything from closed accounts that are still marked as open to $50,000 in outstanding QVC debt that you didn’t rack up) because these reports affect everything from bank loan applications to job opportunities.

The only official government-authorized site for this deal is http://www.annualcreditreport.com/.

All those “free credit report” sites you see advertised on TV? You have to enroll in a $25-a-month “credit protection program” to get your “free” credit report. Avoid these like the plague.

The official site (http://www.annualcreditreport.com/) will take you to Transunion, Experian, and Equifax in turns. Transunion, Experian, and Equifax will each offer you the fabulous opportunity to purchase your credit score (usually $5.95, and I always buy one just out of curiosity) and enroll in their credit protection program, but you are under no obligation to do so. You get your credit report without spending a cent, which is the whole point of this exercise.

PLEASE NOTE: If you’re one of the dozens trying to comment with a list of all the fabulous third-party sites that don’t charge you to pull your credit report, Akismet identifies you as spam. Since I really can’t recommend providing a third party access to your credit report and all the beautiful opportunities for identity theft therein, especially when I’ve just provided a secure, no-cost, direct-to-the-credit-bureaus link sanctioned by the very Fair Credit Reporting Act that makes it all possible, I’m not motivated to pull your comment out of the filter.

Saturday, May 10, is the annual Letter Carriers Food Drive. Please consider leaving a nonperishable or two out by your mailbox to be collected and delivered to shelters and food banks in your area. The holiday windfall is long gone by now. It’s especially important that these community resources be well supplied heading into summer, since the school breakfast and lunch programs that many low-income families rely upon will soon be unavailable.

Please, won’t you think of the starving American children?