beforeyoukillyourcomputer.com

A Sacramento County teenager is bragging about a big accomplishment.

She logged more than 300,000 text messages in one month.

“My friends said, ‘Text your little thumbs off’,” Crystal Wiski said.

“Thank God for free texting,” added her mother, Jacki Wiski.

Jacki Wiski said she just bought the iPhone for her daughter a month ago.

“I get cramps,” Crystal Wiski said of her habit.

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for her to get used to it.

Her mother is amazed by the number of texts.

“Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,” Jacki Wiski said. “She must text while she’s sleeping.”

“I am popular. I can’t help it,” Crystal Wiski added.

To put 303,000 text messages into perspective: that’s more than 10,000 text messages a day, 421 messages an hour and seven texts a minute.

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Yikes. Hey mom, how’s the family time? Just curious.

Longtime database maker FileMaker on Tuesday launched an iPhone and iPod touch version of its Macintosh Leopard personal database program, Bento.

The app, which can wirelessly sync with a user’s desktop version of Bento, is available for $4.99 from the Apple iTunes App Store. To get the app, you can navigate to Bento for iPhone’s download page on iTunes.

The personal database manager includes 25 templates for common tasks like home inventory, classes, recipes, events, time billing, expenses, exercise log, vehicle maintenance, and digital media – for keeping track of music and videos. An Apple “Cover Flow”-like interface lets users page through their databases, which can be subdivided into “collections” just as on the desktop app. For database creation, it sports 15 field types, including text, numbers, checkbox, media, time, date, currency, rating, address, phone number, email, URL, and IM Account.

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It seems Blizzard has been taking on unofficial WoW applications in the Apple Apps Store. According to Gaming Angels, Blizzard has asked the owners of Armory Browser, Warcraft Arena Calculator, and Warcraft Characters to remove the apps. Granted, these are all paid apps, but it seems that Blizzard doesn’t plan on stopping there and will target the free apps next. No explanation for these take-down requests have been posted yet, but many speculate that Blizzard may be creating a few apps of their own.

This week brought a major update to Microsoft Office 2007 — Service Pack 2, a free download that fixes bugs, improves performance and adds a few new features in the company’s bundle of productivity applications (see my review).

This update should arrive automatically if you use Windows’ Microsoft Update option, or you can download the 290-megabyte file yourself.

The headline attraction of Office 2007 SP2 is the support it adds for some important, non-Microsoft file formats. It can read and write Open Document Format files, which may help Office users share files with people running the sometimes-unimpressive, but always free and open-source OpenOffice.org suite. Office 2007 SP2 also lets users save a copy of their work as a Portable Document Format file — a helpful feature that Microsoft had unwisely required people to install an optional add-on to use before.

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Microsoft has announced that the Release Candidate version of Windows 7 will be available to the public as a free download on May 5. And since the RC version seems to be pretty much finished (I have not tried it), then it’s essentially giving it away for more than a year: as mentioned earlier, it won’t expire until 1 June next year.

RC includes a couple of new features, mainly Remote Media Streaming (so you can stream stuff from your home PC to your work PC, for example), and in pro versions, Windows XP Mode (below).

The slight drawback is that if or when you want to buy the final version, it’s not designed to install over the beta RC. Microsoft is only testing the normal use case, which is an upgrade from a previous version of Windows.

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I would not recommend using it as a main OS if reinstalling Windows 7 from scratch later is something you’d like to avoid. However, installing Windows 7 on a test computer, or one you don’t mind reinstalling later, for the purpose of kicking the tires sounds great.