Big Friendly

My laptop got infected again so I’m doing the re-install boogy …. again. Before I started I put all the Led Zeppelin I have onto my iPod Nano and am listening to it while I install Windows XP, drivers and patches. The whole exercise has made me realise two things:

One

• Microsoft Windows really sucks the big one. It takes a whole day to get to a point where I can  even start using the machine. The OS install takes 40 minutes. Then the drivers for my particular hardware takes 15 minutes with 8 restarts. Once I’m on the Internet I have to activate and download Anti-Virus software. Then the patches start, 100s of megabytes worth of patches and endless rebooting, and at the end of that the machine is still not good for much. You still have to install all the software you need to do anything.
•  Ubuntu Linux takes 20 minutes to install and I have a fully functional productive computer. All hardware is detected and active. I have office applications, media applications, web applications and utilities up the wazoo. Granted you will need to apply about 200 megabytes of patches and upgrades, but while you are doing this you can setup your email client, chat to your friends on IM, write a proposal, create a spread sheet of why Green Wing is the best damn TV show ever. Download your photos from your digital camera AND edit them. It really is a no-brainer at the end of the day.

So why do I still use Windows XP as on my main workstation OS? Because of Dreamweaver. It’s the best IDE there is for web site development for me. I create and support web sites for a living and nothing I’ve tried on GNU/Linux comes close. And the games, strategy games is my weakness and the ones that I like to play only run on Windows. So till the day comes that I can play any game I want on GNU/Linux and find a IDE that compares to Dreamweaver I’m stuck on this verkakte OS.

Two

Led Zeppelin is truly the seminal rock band of the last 50 years, and I have way too many versions of the same songs. I’ve also "rediscovered" CODA. The blues influence is very strong and I can feel it pulling the strings of my two left feet. The results of my twitching around the office is a promise to Habibti that I will dance next weekend at brother-in-laws birthday party. Oi vey, a momentary lapse in control and a whole group of very nice people have to suffer.

I started ripping our CDs on Saturday and something happened after I’d done number 20. All the mp3s vanished. Poof!! After much cursing and swearing off iTunes I started again and have to date ripped just 100 CDs. The big names in our CD collection so far are Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash and Led Zeppelin with Bruce still just in the lead and Johnny a close second. The cool thing is that Habibti and I have very similar taste in music, so I’ve had to do very little "censoring".

I’m almost exactly half way through our collection and there are 1559 songs on my laptop, so by the end off the week I should have +/- 3000 songs for us to bop to while we iLive, iWork, iPlay or just iChill.

We really need to broaden our musical exposure and find some new stuff.

So here I am, working myself up to writing my first post, listening to Led Zeppelin “Mothership” bought for me by Habibti for my 44th birthday and watching England take on Sri Lanka in the 3rd Test of the series and I’m wondering what direction this blog is going to take. Do I really want to add to the already over 100 000 000 blogs out there? If I post it will they come?

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the first site known as a weblog went online and I ponder what I have to say that warrants another node on the Interweb. So there is going to be no defining declaration of intent, I’ll just let this thing unfold as it must.

For now I must do some updates to a friends personal site that I maintain and host as a favor.