Technology 
No Comments Open Office; a cross platform must.
As a student I am often caught between the crossfire of multiple platforms. At home I use OSX and have Lynux (eeebuntu) netbook. Most of the schools computers run windows, but there are a couple of labs that have Apple machines.
In this hostile environment most word processing or spreadsheet documents are worthless. Trying to move files from one computer lab to home, or the next lab is inconvenient at best.
In order to survive the greed of these corporations, I have turned to two opensource (sorta) resources. The first is Google Docs, I cannot stress how useful Gdocs has been, I take all my leture notes directly to google docs on my netbook. I share and collaborate with other students and my professors. Do I trust Google? to an extent, yes, but especially with recent security problems, I limit the access of my most precious intellectual material to my own Disk space.
Ive solved the problem of dealing with incompatible office suites (I could just buy them all… If I weren’t a student and had money.) by putting a copy of each platforms OpenOffice.org application on a thumbdrive. And save all my files on that drive. Don’t Forget backups!