Untrained and Derailed

Save the planet, and a grand, all at the same time...

2008-10-01T17:05:53Z

Right, so it's cool to save money. I can dig it. Especially right now with the whole economy being a shambles, politicians having their thumbs up each others asses, and The People worrying more about the presidential campaign than their Senators actually trying to accomplish anything of note to help it recover. Money is good, and right now, saving money is The Way Forward.

So how 'bout saving a grand this year? 1000 duckets may not sound like a ton of money to some, especially over the course of the whole year, but think about it: what can you get for a geeski? Tons of stuff. A fancy bike. Lots and lots of food. 1/50th of a really expensive car. I think a grand is worth saving. And that's the least you'll save.

But wait, there's more! You're not just saving a grand... you're also gonna save the planet! 'Cuz we're green, people! We're saving green while being green! How hot is that? Very.

Okay, here's how: Save at least $1000 while saving the planet.

Awesome article, ain't it? Now, I know it's not perfect, but it certainly gives some very good guidelines to follow (in case you don't follow most of these already, you non-green-person, you.) Take a look, though, even if you just do a few of those things, you could save yourself at least a little bit o' loot. And buy yourself an extra order of fries at Mickey-D's... ;)

The old Nissan vs. Nissan debate...

2008-04-22T21:02:36Z

So, everyone who's been on the interweb for more than a few years knows about the old Nissan vs. Nissan court case. What's that? You don't know about it?

Well, to avoid big yawns from those that do know about it, here's the synopsis. Go to nissan.com. Whoa, that's not Nissan, right? Mostly. Now go to nissandriven.com. There they are! The deal (briefly) is that some guy whose name is Uzi Nissan (seriously) has been using the nissan.com domain since the early days. During these early days Nissan used to be known as Datsun (they were very very early days). Once Nissan got it together and decided to re-brand themselves, they also decided that they just absolutely needed that nissan.com domain. Awesome. Only Uzi Nissan sure as heck wasn't gonna give it up (can you just imagine the sheer amount of traffic that domain must get? It's a freakin' gold mine!) So Nissan Motors got nasty. And not in a good way.

That started back in 1999. Yeah, seriously, like 10 years ago. A series of legal battles known as Nissan vs. Nissan ensued. At the end of the day, the little guy won out and Uzi Nissan got to keep his domain. I remember when this was in the news... and his website was basically a link to the legal documents and battles that were raging during the early 2000's. All pretty rough, no doubt.

So this begs the question: do we boycott Nissan for being a big fat faceless corporation that cares nothing about anything but itself? Apparently their evilness isn't limited to trying to yoink domains from small businessmen:

In another example of Nissan Motor's flexing its corporate might, age old eminent domain laws have been rewritten in Mississippi allowing the State to take land and homes from local landowners for the sole private benefit of Nissan Motors. How the State of Mississippi was "convinced" to change these laws is unclear, but it is clear that local individuals are being deprived of their property rights so Nissan Motors can build its own plant.

Wow. Nissan Motors' evil knows no bounds. They do however, make a mighty fine car. Knowing (or at least being aware) that Nissan is capable of such vile acts, can we really purchase a Nissan (or by proxy, an Infinity) and support this beast? I mean, I hate it when Corporate America flexes and squashes small businesses (damn you, Wal-Mart!) but at the end of the day, it's Corporate America that really sways the economy and creates the environment you enjoy now. They make the fancy cars, and the sweet computers, and the big televisions, and all that great stuff that you call 'name brand.' And listen: it's not like Sony isn't doing the same thing. Or IBM. Or (ahem) Motorola. When it comes to achieving their goals, there's not much a hefty-sized corporation isn't gonna do (and if they get caught, just throw lawyers at.)

So what do we do, then? Do we boycott all the major corporations and manufacturers, opting instead for the small businessman and the craftsmen that roll cigars on the plump thighs of Puerto Rican women? I'm not so sure we could, even if we wanted to. It's all well and good in theory, and when we get our self-righteous rage on, and our chests puff up in indignation, but at the end of the day I want the best technology money can buy. I want the best bang for my buck. I want what Corporate America is here to give me.

And that kinda sucks.

Aaaaargh! Bruins go down dirty, 5-0

2008-04-22T19:23:25Z

The Boston Bruins go down in Game 7, shut out with a score of 5 to zip. Zero. Nada. Couldn't even score a single goal against rookie Habs goalie Price. Tim Thomas made a terrible showing, spending more time laying down than a two dollar whore (that's two Canadian dollars, mind you...) Whoever taught him to tend goal should be tarred and feathered. Sure, he got lucky with a few halfway decent saves, but for the most part he was, as he has always been, a freakin' sieve.

Don't even think about blaming the defense on this one. I have nothing but respect for the Bruins defense that tried so hard to prevent shots on goal, knowing full well that any shot that came near the goal was probably going to get through Thomas. I'm not just underwhelmed by Thomas' performance - I'm straight up disappointed. I've been saying it for years, and I'll say it again - the Bruins need a real goalie. The season that the Bruins buck up and get themselves a professional to lock down the net will be the season they take the cup. If the entire team didn't have to concentrate on defense I can only imagine the amazing things the offense could accomplish. The guns are there - I was extremely impressed with the playing of the Bruins offense - but they do need a little more organization and leadership. It also wouldn't hurt to get some practice on that inside game the Habs used to tear us up. If the offense had been more on point, rather than running back and forth all over the ice to help the defense cover up the gaping hole that is Thomas, maybe they would've had the energy to put some pucks into the net. Who knows? We'll find out next year, I guess.

The Habs had speed, organization, and pretty good leadership (especially this game, thanks to the return of Saku Koivu to the lineup), and they simply outplayed the Bruins to finish the game with a ridiculous score. What a thrashing. I'm amazed and utterly disappointed with the fact that the Bruins just took it. The Bruins I watched and learned to love during my college years would never have taken that! Cam Neely alone would've started shelling out the hate the moment the score reached 3-0. Lucic started to get that homicidal gleam in his eye, and the team started to look like they were ready to rough up some froggies, but in the end the didn't close the deal. 5-0. Five to freakin' nothing. Embarrassing. And not a single fight.

Once the Habs fans started singing their song, the gloves should've come right off. "Lemme give you a parting gift, eh?"

So I'm disappointed, yes, but in general I give kudos to the Bruins for a strong showing, a great fight, and a good series. They got me back in the game and I'm once again on the Bruins bandwagon. I can't wait for next season, and it's gonna be a good one.

Boston Bruins take it to Game 7

2008-04-21T21:32:49Z

In what I can only describe as some of the most exciting hockey I have watched in the last decade, the Bruins (who I've been a long time fan of, despite the fact that they suck, their management sucks, and they haven't had a decent shot at anything even resembling a title in far too long) are in a Game 7 tussle against (of course) Montreal. I don't know how or why it always works out this way, but man am I excited. Even if the boys don't win it, consider me sold on the Bruins once again... I am once again proud to wear my Neely jersey.

Don't get me wrong - I still hit the Panthers - Bruins games and cheer 'em on. I still watch 'em on TV. But they really haven't gotten me excited about watching in forever. This series has been white-knuckle intense and the hockey has been just genuinely good. And that makes me happy as hell. So at 7pm tonight I will be glued to the TV to watch the conclusion of what I can only describe as the reigniting of my passion for hockey.

Bill Simmons wrote an excellent article about the Bruins and how he feels after this playoff series that describes exactly how I feel right now better than I can possibly express. I think that article can be related to by a lot of Bruins fans out there, and I think that any and every Boston pub and bar in the US is gonna be packed to the gills with Bruins jerseys. Hell yes.

Supporting the U.S. Military

2008-04-07T18:19:58Z

I gotta admit - the war (and there is a war going on) is really, really far away. Not just in physical distance, but in emotional distance too. The media isn't doing much to really 'bring the war home', and for good reason. The economy is in a shambles, and who wants to hear bad news? Not the American People, no way. They'd rather watch reality TV.

It's not that the war doesn't feel like it exists. It's there. But we have to get some perspective on a lower level, and make the 'soldier' more real. There's guys running around the middle east, American guys, trying to keep peace in an unbelievably hostile environment. Hostile because they're there? Sure, I guess that's one reason the environment might be hostile towards the U.S. military that's been busy rolling around all over them. Thing is, I think that the area is just hostile in general - each faction hates the other. The U.S. is just another faction to hate and shoot at. I don't think that's any reason to leave that area, although the reasons for being there in the first place is definitely suspect.

I don't think I support the war, but as long as we're there, I suppose I support the GI's dodging bullets over there. I ran across a website called The Tension, a blog, that gives an interesting perspective on what's happening over there. Far from being a political site, it concentrates more on a low-level perspective from the GI point of view. Day to day kind of stuff. Interesting, sure, but it accomplishes a more important task: it humanizes the war effort and shows what guys do when they're there. That makes things so much more real, and I can appreciate that.

From there, I followed some links and ended up at an article about improving military helmets. This was from the Marine Times, which also has a variety of interesting articles and interviews showing that those guys in uniform are actual people that worry about such things as being able to shoot back when they're laying down prone and getting shot at. Continuing that thread lead to this site that provides improved helmet padding for soldiers' helmets. Take a look, read about it, and maybe make a donation. Seems like a worthy cause. Especially now that I've gotten a little more perspective on the reality of "the soldier".

In the age of video games, it's hard to come to grips with the fact that getting shot in war doesn't mean your health bar goes down - it means that you are (potentially) in a shitload of pain, and vital parts of your body are destroyed. There's no such thing as the 1-Man-Army, an army is a team, and the team works together not only to accomplish their objective, but to protect itself.

A Pet Peeve

2008-04-07T16:38:16Z

I don't know why it bothers me, but it does. I freakin' hate it when someone's name comes up in all lowercase in the "From" field in emails. Like when they were setting up their email account they just couldn't bother to set up their own name correctly.

It's one thing to have no name at all - maybe you email client doesn't support it, maybe you just didn't feel like it. Whatever works for ya. But to misspell or miscapitalize your own name? Yuck.

Just sayin'.

Happy 30th Birthday, Cristi

2008-04-07T16:19:56Z

So this weekend was my sister's 30th birthday, and we celebrated in high style as far south as we could: Key West. Cayo Hueso (as it was originally called) is fun. Definitely fun. The drive down (and especially the drive back) is a complete and utter pain in the neck, and possibly the single most frustrating drive in existence, but Key West itself is a good time.

Speaking of the drive down... anybody notice that when you're 55 miles away, the speed limit is 55... then when you're 45 miles away, the speed limit drops to 45. Then when you're 35 miles away, it drops to 35. Seriously. There's a point on the road to Key West when for three hours, you're always "an hour away". This is assuming, of course, that you obey traffic laws (a good idea when traveling to the keys, considering the cops only have one major road to monitor and they're usually bored out of their skulls.) It's infuriating.

Once there, though, we had a great time. Key West really is just Duval street and its environs, but it's an amusing, entertaining ride for a weekend. We visited Ripley's Believe It Or Not, which was freakin' awesome, and we hung out at the beach (which sucked. That's the one thing that really sucks about Key West - the beaches are horrible.) We came, we saw, we burned like marshmallows. Then we went out again (after spending the better part of the day downing beer to combat the effects of 90 degree weather) and ended up at the drag show on 801 Duval. And holy crap was that hilarious.

One of our crew (who shall remain nameless to protect his innocence) got dragged up on stage. Dragged. Well, kicked, actually, by another member of the crew. Once up there, 90% of his clothes came off (except the boxers, which he clamped onto, thankfully, but not before he ended up with lipstick all over his ass). Then things happened very quickly, and suffice to say that the entire crew was doubled up laughing until faces hurt and we couldn't even breathe. The poor guy rolled with it though, and as they say in the biz, "The Show Must Go On", so he endured no small amount of... whatever you want to call it.

I managed to get a short video of about a minute of it before I simply couldn't take any more. Maybe I'll post it, who knows?

The rest of the trip passed relatively uneventfully, but it was still great fun. Happy birthday, Cristi!

Reconnection and recollection.

2008-03-31T18:07:52Z

MySpace sucks for a lot of reasons, but I admit that recently I went on a tear through its newest (not really newest, but probably biggest) competitor in the FOAF scene, Facebook. It's not been so much a social service (like MySpace has become), but rather more like a LinkedIn on a less professional level. I've run into and across a lot of faces and names that I haven't been exposed to for many, many years (15 years in some cases!)

So it's been kind of trippy. People from high school (viva la Pine Crest), even people from Middle School. All very jolly. Some people look so grown up, and some people just don't. Some people have these super awesomely developed lives with kids, families, and all that crazy jazz, yet in my mind they're still just teenagers. It's pretty weird how that works... I just see them with their younger faces on.

In some cases, that's just impossible (they just look all old and grown up and stuff). There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I find it most interesting when I reconnect with the people who still seem to be very much the same (in a lot of ways.) I've been disappointed in some cases (interestingly odd priorities are the prevalent cause of that) but in most cases, the people I've run into have been extremely interesting. And I'm enjoying the reconnection and (where appropriate) recollection. Sometimes it's cool to revisit old acquaintances and find out there's more in common there than you might've though. Sometimes it's cool to reminisce about the ol' high school crushes and find out how they're doing today. Dunno, but it's been surprisingly entertaining.

So I was driving down the street with a buddy the other day, and we saw an old Porsche 944. Something in my brain-memory-vault slid out, and I remembered Feinstein, who drove around in a souped up 944, all raced out. He was into actually racing these cars (not just street-racing, but SCCA stuff) and was a genuine enthusiast, as I recall. Anyway, I reminisced for a bit, then promptly forgot all about it. A week later, Harry (a different, unrelated friend) sends me a link with the message "Guess who I found..." Marc Feinstein now apparently runs a shop in North Cambridge, servicing german cars. Kudos to you, Feinstein, for (as the article says) finding the way into the business of your hobby.

When did the author become more important...

2008-03-13T15:28:08Z

...than the work? I was hanging out at Borders, sipping on some coffee and perusing books I have no intention of buying (and even if I did want the book, I'd just buy it on Amazon) when I noticed a strange trend.

This isn't a new trend, mind you, it's just something that I started noticing after years and years of simply ignoring the covers of books (it's true, by the way, that if only books could be as cool as their cover art is, there would significantly less illiteracy in the world.) The author's name is, usually, significantly bigger than the title of the book. I'm not just talking a few points of type bigger. I'm talking about HUGE author's name, tiny little book title. I might chalk it up to artistic license, but it's freakin' everywhere. The title of the book may as well not matter. It is all about the author.

I suppose it makes sense, from a marketing standpoint. You're not really trying to sell the title of the book, not really. I think most publishers have come to terms with the fact that there are two major demographics of book-buyers: the ones that ignore the covers and look for 'good authors', and the ones that think the cover art looks cool and therefore buy what is probably a horribly written book. The title itself? Kind of irrelevant. So you make the author's name hugenormous on the cover for the former, and you pay artists to come up with cool-looking artwork for the latter. And you slap a tiny title on it, just so it fits somewhere in the Dewey decimal system once the book is relegated to the dusty halls of a public library.

I'm going to write a book and publish it. And it's not going to have a title. I want to see how long I can get away with that fact before someone notices. In fact, I'm going to go one further - I'm going to write 4 books. Novels, probably. I'm not going to title them. Maybe I'll color-code them, maybe I won't.

Speaking of authors, on that same trip to the bookstore I discovered that authors are terrible readers of their own material. Makes me think that they didn't actually come up with it, they seem so haltingly unfamiliar with their own writing. Hm.

The days grow longer, and so do the shadows...

2008-03-12T22:03:15Z

Oooooh, that's kind of a creepy title.

It's not that summer is almost upon us again, but summer is almost upon us again. Okay, not quite. Still more than a few months off. But the days are getting longer. And thank God for that.

How can I tell? Mostly because I'm looking out the office window, it's 6pm, and there's still plenty of sunshine left. That's just A Good Sign. I also don't get home depressed, hungry, and ready to sleep (which happens during the winter months.)

Anybody who visits the site with regularity (all 3 of you) may have noticed that as the days are growing longer, so in fact has the design of the site changed to... basically... a pretty simple design. The reasons are simple.

I got sick of the last design. Literally, it was driving me to drink. Okay, not really.
It was kinda hard to read, I guess. I didn't think so, but apparently other people did. It's not like I do this for a living or anything. Whatever.
I decided I was gonna make a new template from scratch. Because God knows I haven't got anything else on my plate, and I totally love struggling with arcane templating systems. Man, I don't know why I do this to myself.
Do I really need a reason, much less 4 of them?

I was just so darned tired of looking at the old template that I'm leaving it on a plain-jane template. I've streamlined a bunch of other stuff on the site too, but it's nothing anybody will ever see (or probably notice.) That's okay though, because I know. Yeah.

Time to go home and finish Healing Light Yoga. There's still plenty to do on it, but I want to get it to a usable Milestone tonight or tomorrow. Phew. Who knew that bringing sexy back would be this hard?

Living in small spaces

2008-03-12T16:27:04Z

I like small, compact, clever things. Not exactly sure why, but there's an appeal to it. That being said, I've always theoretically been attracted to living in a small, compact, cleverly arranged habitation... even though in practice bigger is definitely better. In the past I've agreed with the notion that a living space need not be the place you spend the majority of your time in. My freshman college dorm room, for example, was little more than enough space for a couple of beds. If you're treating 'home' as simply a place to sleep, then living in a minifridge might work out just fine for you.

Treehugger is featuring an article (actually, several) showing a small, compact, clever living space, and admittedly it's pretty darned cool. But that's not all... apparently the 'movement' (if you want to call it that) to create livable space in 4 square meters or less has had plenty of action, including the Casulo, which crams all the furniture you need in your minispace in one medium sized box.

Traveling (or at least moving to a new space) suddenly becomes much easier when you can cram *everything* you own into a medium sized box or two - including furniture. You're also (potentially) minimizing environmental impact by compacting the amount of living space a person requires (very Brave New World ideology to me). At the same time, I don't see any of this stuff being especially comfortable, even if it is super clever. I guess you could spend most of your time at a Starbuck's sitting on their plush chairs and producing Smug all day, right?

OSX-style Expose for Windows Vista

2008-03-08T20:56:27Z

No, no, stop laughing, it's true. Some guy, apparently a guy who works for Microsoft, thought it'd be awesome if the Vista interface sucked a little less. So he went and put together one sweet little app called Switcher.

If you're one of those brave souls running Vista, and at any point in your life experienced the joy of using OSX, go get that app. It's not quite as unrelentingly cool as The True Expose, but it does a pretty bang-up job. I haven't played with all the options, so it's possible that one might be able to configure it to operate closer to The Real Deal, but even on default settings, I'm more than a little impressed. It really improves the usability and workflow of Vista's interface, and it just works great.

Wait, wait - aren't I running a Fedora machine? Yes I am. And I still love it. But a few things made me alter my work area. I had an interview at Fluent, and while we were chatting the subject of Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, and how much I know about security came up. Don't ask me why, it just did. Anyway, while it's true that I can accomplish 99% of my tasks with the GIMP and Inkscape (and God knows I love Inkscape), I forgot to append something to that (and it's becoming more and more relevant.) I can use GIMP and Inkscape for creative tasks, when I'm starting from scratch. If I have to import files (logos, graphics, whatever) then these packages fall very, very, very flat. This didn't used to be the case - but try to import a Photoshop CS2 or CS3 file into GIMP... or pretty much any Illustrator file after Ill-10. Nothin'. No love. And the unfortunate fact is that I get quite a lot of files in these formats, now that they've become all industry-standard an' stuff.

Granted, I could transfer the file to my Powerbook, open it, and re-save each file that comes in so GIMP/Inkscape can Do Their Deed, but man that's just a lot of extra hassle. I thought about it (a lot) and went ahead and decided to run my beloved Fedora 8 on a little box I keep in the closet as a web server for testing and kicking around, and slap Vista back on the quad-core. I can always remote into the Fedora box and play around all I want, should I have The Urge.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not hugely happy about all this. I've been loving on my Fedora box for a long time. But I have to face the facts, and until I can once again wield the Linux environment as an effective tool, I'll have to use Windows again for production. It hasn't been too painful, honestly - Vista has such annoying quirks that it makes me a little crazy - but it's been a lot smoother than I expected. This Switcher app I mentioned help ease the transition quite a bit. I don't know. Time will tell if this move was worth it.

Math nerds, prepare for humor.

2008-02-27T18:22:34Z

This one goes out to all the math nerds out there...

NEW YORK - A public school teacher was arrested today at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a slide-rule, a set-square, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said that he believes the man is a card-carrying member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-gebra is a serious problem for us," Gonzales said. "They desire solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes have been known to go on tangents in search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and often refer to themselves as 'unknowns,' but we have determined that they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with co-ordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles once said: 'There are three sides to every triangle.'"

When asked to comment on the arrest, President George "Dubya" Bush said: "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would've given us more fingers and toes."

Amen, President Bush. Amen.

Marketing is crazy. Just crazy.

2008-02-19T20:14:42Z

Having been involved in marketing, and having dealt with marketing people pretty extensively, I really shouldn't be surprised. But I am. Witness the insanity.

At the same time, Nerf has created a singularly amazing toy. Feast your eyes, cubicle warrior, upon your new weapon of choice! Belt-fed Nerf gun? Sir, yes sir!

That's all for today. My world is still spinning around as I try to get a handle on things. I don't mind being busy, but there's a limit to the amount of completely disparate projects even I can handle! Amazing, I know.

Fedora 8: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

2008-02-19T06:08:00Z

Yeah, so after about a month of slamming my head into Windows Vista (and even defending it) I flat-out decided it wasn't worth it. It is a freakin' hog. If you're rolling around in One Sweet Machine (which I am), then Vista will (mostly) work. But if you have anything less than the latest graphics card, a quad processor, some enormous hard drive, and more RAM than God himself would have on a computer, well then you should consider staying with XP.

But this isn't about XP. It's not about Windows (not directly, anyway.) It's about Fedora. Linux. That penguin OS that I've started to (finally) adapt and evolve to. Linux developers, meanwhile, have finally started to realize that even the most seasoned veterans of the Windows world (shy of those insane pundits of Microsoft technology, the MCSE) really have no idea how to write their own wireless-card drivers. This means good things for the rest of the world as "that other OS" finally becomes something my mom can use.

That's not a totally fair analogy - my mom's actually pretty good with a computer. Point is, however, that Linux distros have finally become useable. Some will thank Ubuntu, and it's true that Ubuntu is responsible for a nice, big, fat marketing campaign that spanned far and wide to make itself (well, Debian) the marketshare dominator. But I don't agree. I think that Red Hat is the real driving force behind it all. RH has been there since the beginning, and they were the first to offer a distro that wasn't freakin' impossible to use.

I remember the first time I tried using Linux. My roommate at the time - some jackass named Manesh, or Manish, or who the heck knows (or cares) - convinced me to give up my comfortable Windows environment in favor of what he called "Slackware". The name, you gotta admit, is appealing. Thing is, unless you're a CS major (that's Computer Science for the under-nerdy) Slackware is downright useless. To this day, I once in a while throw in a Slackware CD just to see how far it *hasn't* come. You know what, though? It's cool that there's even a distro for the ultra-nerdy kids out there.

Anyway, Red Hat was the first distro I got my hands on that installed mostly well. Hardware worked without too much kicking and screaming. Software worked. It wasn't half bad.

Now, granted they went and got all commercial. I can't blame them for wanting to make money. But it's cool, they're totally down for making money off the Big Dogs... the Corporate Giants that can't imagine using something that might be 'free'. No, seriously, I'm convinced that Red Hat went commercial (as commercial as open-source can really get) just because Big Corporate won't do it if it's free. "Well, that's fine" said Red Hat... "it'll cost ya." And now RHEL is firmly ensconced in the trenches with such greybeards as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Good for you, boys.

Seems like they didn't forget us, either. While they were busy charging down Corporate hills while wearing kilts and swinging big nerd-sticks around, the Fedora project was created to keep RH In The Game. And, let's face it, it's a good place to try new stuff out.

8 iterations later. It works. Fedora is one sweet distro. People (very nerdy people) are waving their live-CD's around and saying "try this. try it. you won't regret it." People who are fed up with Ubuntu's weird hug-the-world mentality are finding Fedora. And it lives up to the hype.

Linux is one buggy freakin' system. That being said, it's significantly more stable than Windows will ever hope to imagine being (doesn't say much for Windows, considering.) Nonetheless, it is still twitchy, a bit buggy, and stuff doesn't always work right out of the box unless you're meticulously careful about every last bit of hardware. And even if you are, you might still run into issues. But it's okay, because there's this thing associated with Linux... it's called a community. And there's lots of people in these communities, and they're all willing to help. It's awesome.

So Fedora 8. What makes it so hot? I'm going to save that for the next post. This one was just to say "Hey. Try this. Try it. It doesn't freakin' suck." It really is worth a look. And if you're not into Linux, well, maybe it's time to start.