Well, this is the first time I'm going to try to use an offline blog writer and I happen to choose the new Windows Live Writer.  I'm doing this because the past experience that I have had with trying to cut and paste text from Microsoft Word 2007 onto an HTML text area produces unknown XHTML characters and I just felt that I could actively write while offline like for instance when I'm commuting back and forth from San Diego to Atlanta and back.  Let's just see how this works out.  (it didn't with blogger)