Welcome to 2008. My prediction: This year will not suck. If you think it will suck, then you’re spending too much time watching TV news. Turn. Off. The. TV. Thank-you!

Thanks to reader Troy, I now know about Vetusware. I’m thrilled!

Vetus is the Latin word for old, and vetusware.com is a web site that contains abandoned software — so-called abandonware. That’s software that was once copyrighted and sold for real money, but because the software is old or supports an older operating system (think DOS) it’s been dropped by the developer.

Visiting the vetusware site you’ll find all sorts of programs that you may have once owned, or possibly even lusted after. All of them are sitting there waiting download. For example, the old WordPerfect 5 for DOS, or Sim City 2000, or even Norton Ghost 2003. Providing that you have the ancient PC to run such a thing (or an emulator), the world is your oyster at Vetusware. Definitely check it out.

Wambooli Updates Dept. My old blog, Wambooli Lunch, contained some interesting articles. One of them I pulled from the maws of that gravesite is my article about producing a vinculum in Word. It’s a cool trick, and you can read about it here.

New Years 404 Dept. The New Years Eve celebration in Seattle is marked by a festive fireworks display at the Space Needle. It almost didn’t go off this past week; at the last minute technicians noticed that the file which controls the fireworks display was corrupted. One, two reboots failed to fix the situation. Eventually the show was run manually. My question: was the computer running Windows?

Welcome to the horror that is upgrading your computer! No, I’m not talking about Windows Vista, I’m talking about the Macintosh OS X, Leopard incarnation. Yes, Apple is supposed to be the better operating system, but I don’t think you’ll find Justin Long’s “Mac guy” explaining the finer details of what a Leopard update entails.

First, the update process went well on my Mac. I updated onto a new, second hard drive. Then I booted that drive and “migrated” all my old applications and data to the hard drive. Things worked great at first! I enjoy using the new Time Machine, a feature that I wanted and one of the reasons for my updating. (Never update unless there are features you want or need.) But then the problems came wandering in like cats smelling an open tuna can.

I just spent $600 updating all my Adobe software. (This is similar to my spending $1,000 to update all my Adobe software when I updated from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.)

I spent another $200 updating Final Cut Express.

I plan on spending another $250 to update Microsoft Office when version 2008 comes out later in January.

Am I done? I don’t know! I did re-buy the iLife suite as my original iLife suite was two versions old (dated 2004). And there are still bugs in the Terminal program, specifically with the History feature.

I don’t mind updating my software, but I shouldn’t have to. I was completely happy with the programs I had — until they stopped working properly! Again, the pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backs. Supposedly Apple is working on a massive update to Leopard. It may address some of my issues, but I still plan on buying more software. Caveat User!

Video Dept. If you haven’t already, check out my new Video page. I’ll be updating it with new videos from time to time.

News Dept. Apparently this year in high-tech is the Year of the Personal Networking Site, aka MySpace or Facebook. I do have a MySpace account, which I activated mostly so I could subscribe to my son’s MySpace diary (which turned out to be eye-opening!). I’ve never been to Facebook, but apparently some folks do waste, er, spend a lot of time there.

Predictions Dept. I’ve long predicted that spinning disks inside computers will be a thing of the past. Recently, Samsung introduced a solid state memory card that can hold up to 128GB of information. Eventually, high-capacity memory cards will replace hard drives, as well as your PC’s optical drive. Access time is still an issue, as is the issue about memory cards only having so many “writes” available to them. But my guess is that computer engineers will figure something out. Imagine the energy savings alone that a solid state drive would bring!

Happy New Year!