McQ Four Line Limit - the McQ limit is named after George F. McQuary. He was a regular on the newsgroup alt.fan.warlord. The McQ limit is that the signature should be no larger than 80 columns wide and 4 lines long, and separated from the main body via a dash-dash-space marker.

OpenID - a new way to identify yourself online. I use it, very useful. You use it in conjuction with http://www.myopenid.com

Mozilla produce some very useful software, luckily for most common platforms. You are no doubt aware of the Firefox browser. I know people are talking about Google Chrome, but Firefox remains important due to its plug-in architecture. Additionally, they provide Camino, a Firefox variant for the Mac, it maximises screen space and fits the mac gui better. SeaMonkey is a useful tool for integrating lots of things, include html authoring. There is also Thunderbird, which is a rather useful main client, ready purposed for gmail, mac and yahoo integration. And finally, there is Ubiquity - check it out for the future of mash-ups.

Instant messaging is fun, espeically if you mix clients together. The best for the PC is Trillian, the best for the mac is Adium, and then you have a dark horse Mozilla backed Instantbird. They all support the usual of AIM, YIM, MSN, GCHAT and ICQ.

Latex, aha, got your attention. To be precise, its LaTeX. A very unique document preparation system that is unfortunately not for the faint hearted. It is used in academia and by some niche book publishers. However, the results it produces are beyond compare, and its free. There are WYSIWYG variations that are not entirely fabulous but usable, for example I use Lyx for professional letters (when Pages fails me that is).

Authoring, well I prefer Writeroom, its very simple and it focuses my attention. Other options include Darkroom, and Rubyroom (see the familiarity?) and Q10 (which breaks the naming convention but has ability to work from a usb stick).