First off, hello stranger. February 10th, first Groovy Mom post of the year. Facebook has been my friend, as well as some time away from the ‘puter.

Jumping in with two feet on the ground, I’m interested to find out if anyone has Google Buzz in their Gmail yet? I was reading this blog post regarding the Google service, but have not yet found anyone who is able to utilize it. With Facebook’s new (and constant) changes, I’d like to see something rival it. Though I wonder how many people will actually have the desire/energy to switch over. Personally, one thing I like about Facebook over Myspace is that it is relatively simple (functionally and aesthetically). But their continuous forced changes are a bit hard to stomach.

UPDATE: Once I signed out and signed back in I was able to access (activate?) Google Buzz. It didn’t get me very far, and is very bare bones right now. There’s got to be more to it?

With the out-of-the-box trial version of Word that came on my laptop, I’ve been frustrated that every time I wanted to start a new document, it would open up in a separate window. I like how my older XP-friendly version would open right in front of the already open document. If you’re struggling with this same issue and don’t know how to fix it – here you go:

In Word go to:

Word Options> Advanced> Display> Show all windows in the Taskbar (untick this checkbox)

Voila!! Your documents will now layer on top of each other. Of coarse, if you’re trying to do the opposite of what I favor, you would instead tick off the checkbox.

Call me a dork, but I’m totally excited that Gmail has (finally) added Gmail emoticons. Hoorah. I love my gmail, having had it when you needed an invite to get it. I use it for work and personal use, but it has lacked some of the traditional bells and whistles of rival web-based email (Yahoo, Hotmail). It is nice to see these little improvements coming along. Hopefully we continue to see improvements being made in Picasa as well. Keep it up, Google.