Bottom line – I love this operating system.

It’s fast, stable, installed 95% perfectly, and is now running absolutely perfectly.  Printer works like a charm.  Plaxo works with Thunderbird.  Firefox is wonderful (I knew that before, but you get a better taste of it when you use it exclusively).  What is now left for me to mess with is Wine (the windows emulator for Linux – allows you to run Windows apps inside Ubuntu) so that I can run Visio and Project – and that is only because I haven’t looked to see if there are alternatives that run natively in Linux.  I also need to look into one of the many alternatives to Itunes for my music and Ipod.
I’m roughly 1 week away from installing it on my HP laptop and bidding farewell to Windows forever.  I kid you not.

And in some cases, smarter than I.

At dinner tonight, while discussing how important math is, she said “Yes – I know.  I do a lot of math.  Do YOU even know about AVERAGES?”  I laughed.  I’m in the programming business.  I know all ABOUT averages.  She proceeds to write out a list of 10 numbers, and tells me to give her the mean, median and mode of them.

SHIT.

I know what those mean to SOME degree, but don’t remember which is WHICH.  She is now very happy.  She INSISTS that I figure it out.  I fumble through, and with help from her and Pam both, I finally get it.  Sheesh.

Later she is doing her homework, and she asks what a declarative sentence is.  I tell her (I get this one right) and watch her write it down on a sample sentence.  Unfortunately, she spells it declarative.  I correct her by saying it’s spelled declaritive – with an I.  Absolutely WRONG of course, which she looks up and finds INSTANTLY.  I leave the room.

-sigh- (But I still love her so much)

Ok – so now I’m really up and running with Ubuntu – a search of Digg for help with the OS yielded a post on Top 13 things to do immediately after installing Ubuntu – very helpful indeed. I installed flash, codecs, fonts, repositories – everything. The only thing not working at the moment – and I feel confident I’ll fix it shortly – is my printer.

So the jury is still out, but it’s usable for now. Much more learning to do.

Just finished reading this great book by Richard Dawkins.  Always been an Atheist to SOME degree, but I am ashamed to admit I didn’t know to WHAT degree.  I am now convinced, absolutely and completely, that there is no God.  (I capitalize only because it is the standard convention)

This book truly is a life changer for me – in terms of my own thought process on religion, on how it affects my child (not to mention ALL children), and clarifies for me that nagging feeling I’ve always had when discussing religion with someone when a) I felt like they were deluded and b) I felt like i couldn’t openly discuss it with them.  Neither of these will be problems for me ever again.

So to all of my friends i say this – please read this book.  To those who still believe, I really don’t know what to say.

The Linux movement is one I have acutely aware of, but not terribly involved with.  My software company is going to be running on Linux (the App server anyway), and so i see it as necessary to become an expert of sorts.  i decided to start with it at home.

I started by installing Debian, and was more impressed with the installation than i was of Fedora 6 on our office server.  It was easy, fast, and fairly complete.  I say FAIRLY complete, because it lacked Firefox – which I would need to install.  I found this to be a confusing process in itself, but got through it.  I then decided to install Gaim (I live and die by IM), and that was FAR worse.  I had to consult Josh again – and finally made it work.

Att his point i was pretty unimpressed with this particular distro anyway, so I decided to back up and install the most popular of all distros – Ubuntu.  A slightly larger initial download, but a VERY smooth install, with FireFox AND Gaim both included.

I’m going to play with the install over the next few days and see how it goes.  Will report back.