Linux desktop attempt

Yes, I guess it's that time again. Once in a while I like to see where Linux is. This time was probably brought about by reading Little Brother, though it's been due anyway.

Actually, it's going quite well. Ubuntu 9.10 is behaving quite well and I haven't found much that is really a problem. So far most everything I do day-to-day is covered, and the OS is pretty nice feeling.

There's a bug in the latest WINE that means I can't get Photoshop installed, but that's OK because my Epson scanner isn't supported either (Epson refuses to either write a driver or release specs). Since I need a virtual machine to log in to work anyway, I installed VirtualBox and a copy of XP in that. I'll see if I can get the scanner running there. It's supposed to work but I've never tried to get a USB device running in a VirtualBox client OS.

I'm running a few other Windows apps under WINE and they work very well. I will be trying my astronomy software soon; that's another one that's irreplaceable, but if it doesn't like WINE it can just go into the XP box.

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is giving me a good feeling that I hadn't felt up to now. The best I could describe it is that with previous versions of Linux, I got a feeling of alienness, that the OS really didn't belong there, that somehow it was just shoehorned in. Karmic installed incredibly smoothly and felt "right" all along. I don't know what exactly caused that feeling.

Y'know....

When you run the hot water for 1 minute to rinse out a yogurt container so you can recycle it, you're not really saving the planet. I just saw someone in the kitchen here at work do this. Buddy, the planet would thank you to just throw that away. Better yet, take it home and wash it at the end of your dishwater, so you're not really using any extra water to clean it. THEN recycle it.

I tried to tell something similar to the "green team" here at work - I've seen many people running the hot water for 2+ minutes to rinse out the reusable plastic company mugs that they gave out so that they could save the planet by not using styrofoam cups. Not Really Helping.

Audiobook finished

Bearing An Hourglass by Piers Anthony

About 30 pages of story stretched into 400. Seriously, I guess he had already sold it so he needed to write it, and since (as he points out in his smarmy author's notes at the end) he's "immune to writer's block", he just puked out some garbage about a fantasy dream world in the middle of the story to flesh it out.

What other author would get away with putting 20 pages of self-aggrandizing author's notes in the book? And as to "immune to writer's block" - that's probably easier for him since he's already got a guaranteed sale, he just needs to generate a certain number of words.

Anyway, people have said this is probably the worst of the bunch, so I'll plow onward.