As if you weren't worried enough, we saw a study that reported a scary 20 percent of drivers send text messages on their cell phones or Blackberries while driving. For drivers ages 18 to 27, the percentage shoots up to 37 percent. So, better than one in three young drivers on the road are sending and receiving text messages while they're driving.

   The study was conducted by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, a major auto insurer, which gave the accident-prone activity a new name: DWT -- Driving While Texting. This resembles the police charge: DWI -- Driving While Intoxicated.

   We got this information through Plantronics (Plantronics.com ), a leading maker of headsets. It's promoting its new $150 Discovery wireless headset, a miniature version that fits your ear. The key here is that this headset and many others can use Pinger, a free service from Pinger.com, instead of typing messages on the phone while you're driving. With Pinger, your voice can be instantly sent to one recipient or a hundred, and there is no cost beyond the regular charge of your phone service provider for a single call. The recipients get a text message of a phone number to call where they hear your voice.

   How bad is it out there? A Washington, D.C., teenager sent nearly 7,000 text messages (not all of them while driving) in one month for a charge of over $1,000. This is not so unusual. Verizon Wireless recently started offering unlimited text-messaging service because its previous limit of 5,000 messages a month turned out to be not enough. (If we take out eight hours for sleep, that would mean sending messages at a rate of about one every five minutes, all day long.)

To PDF or UN-PDF

   We've discovered a cheaper way to edit PDF files, using a new $40 program called deskUnPDF from Docudesk.

   PDF, of course, stands for Adobe's popular "Portable Document Format," which preserves everything about an original document so it can be sent through e-mail and look just like the original. The PDF can't be edited, however. That's fine for most purposes, but sometimes you want to make changes. Several programs are available to make a PDF file open for editing, but they're all more expensive than UnPDF, the lowest-priced one costing more than twice as much.

   We used deskUnPDF on a complex newsletter created with Adobe Illustrator and saved as a PDF. It converted the newsletter to a Word document with just a single click. The newsletter's title spilled off the page, but that was the only problem and an easy one to fix. You can get a free trial version to try out at the Docudesk Web site: Docudesk.com.

   If you want to try out other PDF programs yourself, you can look at free trials for Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional at Adobe.com; PDF Converter at Nuance.com and PDF Transformer at Abbyy.com.

Mathematica

   Version 6 of Mathematica just came out. This is a serious program for mathematicians, engineers and students. It first came out in 1988, and it keeps getting better every time. The idea behind it is to give the user the kind of tools it would otherwise take a programmer to develop.

   The new version offers what Mathematica calls "instant interactivity." It takes mathematical models, simulations and computations and makes them interactive, so you can change the criteria and see the results within a few seconds. This is nice and handy for manipulating supply-and-demand curves and other equations in chemistry, physics and the social sciences.

You can browse over a thousand examples of equations and changes, including constructing ever more complex labyrinths, at demonstrations.wolfram.com. The list price for Mathematica 6 is $2,500 at Wolfram.com, but a classroom version is available to teachers and professors for $265 at AcademicSuperstore.com. If you know a teacher, note that there is no limit on the number of classroom versions they can order.

Internut Pricing

·  HealthPricer.com  has lists of drug prices, supplements, contact lenses and other health products and where to get them cheaper from Canada. No trip abroad is required, since you can order them online. We liked the fact that the site gave you the price per package and per pill. All the prices we checked were cheaper than ordering the same things from Drugstore.com, a major U.S. online drugstore service.

·  www.PriceGrabber.com  has a new "green" category that steers you to environmentally friendly products. Joy ordered a skirt made from hemp. Hemp fabric has been made since at least 8,000 B.C. There's also recycled office furniture.

That's Entertainment

   Another Nancy Drew Mystery. They've been coming our way for several years now, but this time the game is timely because a new Nancy Drew movie has just come out. We are both fans of the old movie series that starred the irrepressible Bonita Granville, so the new one better be good. Meanwhile, you can try to solve the mystery of "The White Wolf of Icicle Creek," $20 for Windows. We confess that we've never been able to solve one of these without help from people like "Detective Chrissy," age 11, and other junior sleuths that can be found at the game's web site: www.HerInteractive.com.

Books

   "Do-It-Yourself Windows Vista Projects" by Curt Simmons; $25 from McGraw-Hill.

   The projects run from real simple, like creating a slide show or a custom Windows sidebar for your desktop screen, to only slightly more complex ones like using Vista for global positioning or storing TV shows. Most of the projects require no extra expense. You can watch instructional videos for the projects at diyvista.cnet.com.