Today's open thread is a bit late because of some technical difficulties this morning. Namely, the fact that when I tried to open the spreadsheet with all my deadlines and income and pitches, it wouldn't open. I tried opening it in Google docs (no dice), closed Excel, restarted my computer, and when it still wouldn't open, started wailing at Mr. Muse about my freelance career being over (yes, I'm prone to melodrama at times like this). Mr. Muse is the Computer Whisperer of our household, but even he couldn't get it to work. That was when I stopped hyperventilating and instead had an epiphany. "Hey, doesn't Jungle Disk back up my files each night? And it was working last night, so maybe Jungle Disk has an uncorrupted version we could open?" He'd thought of this, too, but figured it might have already backed up the new version and overwritten the old one. Fortunately, it had not, so we restored the older version and, in the process, restored my sanity. (We already had an internet outage on Monday, so things have been a little harried this week.) Which brings me to the topic of this week's open thread. What are your can't-live-without tools of the trade? A favorite pen and notepad? A certain software program? Something else? As you can imagine, I'm feeling extra warm and fuzzy about Jungle Disk, my file backup service. I'm also a huge fan of Boomerang for Gmail, which I use to schedule follow-up emails or other missives in advance, and SocialOomph .com, which does the same thing for tweets. What about you? Flickr photo courtesy of jcarlosn