The latest Crypto-Gram from well known security researcher Bruce Schneier expounds on why we sometimes feel secure when we are not, and why we sometimes feel less secure than we really are. It's a good read.

http://www.schneier.com/essay-155.html

REBELLING AGAINST MICROSOFT, "MY COMPUTER" AND EASY-TO-USE WIZARDS, AN ENGINEER REDISCOVERS THE JOYS OF DIFFICULT COMPUTING.

Ellen Ullman writes:

Last month I committed an act of technical rebellion: I bought one operating system instead of another. On the surface, this may not seem like much, since an operating system is something that can seem inevitable. It's there when you get your machine, some software from Microsoft, an ur-condition that can be upgraded but not undone. Yet the world is filled with operating systems, it turns out. And since I've always felt that a computer system is a significant statement about our relationship to the world -- how we organize our understanding of it, how we want to interact with what we know, how we wish to project the whole notion of intelligence -- I suddenly did not feel like giving in to the inevitable.

Read the article in Salon archives

This is a great book I found that should help you get all you can out of OpenOffice. It was very helpful when I was writing the user's manual in book form for my English 402 project.

Taming Open Office Writer (pdf)

This is an excellent reference book to the source control system that we use for LUG projects. If you plan on being involved with any coding here, you should become familiar with it.

Subversion Handbook