Radio Userland: The desktop content management system that generates this weblog. A great value, software and a year of weblog hosting for $39.95.

Adobe PhotoShop Elements: Entry level digital photo editing. If you have a digital camera, then you need an editing program. Elements is one of the best.

FruitMenu, Xounds, and WindowShade X from Unsanity: FruitMenu allows me to customize my Apple menu with a cascading program menu. Xounds brings back the appearance sounds from pre OS/X, restoring a wonderful bit of whimsy. And WindowShade X allows me to alter the behavior of the window title double-click and minimize actions. I would buy FruitMenu and Xounds again. But the jury is out on WindowShade X.

Norton SystemWorks: Anti-Virus, Disk Utilties, and Retrospect Express Backup. It may not be exciting, but it’s part of the nuts and bolts that keeps everything running.

Medal of Honor: Games are the strength of the market and I try to do my part.

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET: the comprehensive developer tool for Windows. Microsoft is the 900 pound gorilla, you ignore it at your own risk.

1 June: I forgot to mention that I also have email forwarding from pobox and email from fastmail. Pobox gives me permanent email addresses, independent of my service provider. Fastmail provides IMAP, allowing me to share email folders among multiple email clients. If I had it to do over again, I might just get a full fastmail account rather than my member fastmail account paired with pobox. But it’s a close call and cost neutral.