A quick evaluation of new things:
1) Gmail – good. The layout of the mailbox, in which your responses to emails are grouped with the original emails, makes a lot of sense. I’ve not explored it much beyond that, but it seems better than Yahoo by leaps and bounds.
2) WordPress. There are some things I still don’t understand – the whole “blogroll” function with the categories really confuses me. I just don’t get it, even after studying up on it. I just don’t understand why they have something called “categories” that applies to both blog posts you want to categorize and items for a blogroll.  Hence the separate page for the blogroll. I just gave up, and am using text box widgets to do things like “current reads.”

I also wish the posting box was larger. If anyone can tell me how to enlarge it, I’d appreciate it.
Update: Got it. Feel stupid. I never noticed the “writing” tab on the options tab. Huh.
I forgot to mention that aside from ease of playing with better looking templates than Typepad has, the thing I like about WordPress is being able to edit directly from the page. That means when I load my own blog and I’m logged in, there are (edit) options next to the entry. So you’re not going back and forth between blog and editing windows.
But other than that, I’m liking it fine. And it’s free. Which reminds me – I’ve got to downgrade my Typepad account, and am sort of unsure what will happen to the template there after I do that.  So who knows what that will look like when that happens.
3) Google Docs. I am going to have to buy a new laptop in the next few weeks, and I am blasted if I am going to buy yet one more edition of Word for that computer. Just not going to do it. And since my word processing needs are very, very simple, with no spreadsheets and such, I decided to try Google Docs, and I’m finding that I like it a lot. The only thing I don’t like is that it doesn’t have a “page view” option – I like to look at what I’m typing as if it’s on a real piece of paper. I think not having that option is a problem, and from my brief research, others do too. But I can cope with that. There are other free word processing programs – many – that seek to imitate and improve on Word, but this one required the least work on my part, so here I am.
Your suggestions/comments?