September 2006 archive

Eeyore is Dead

Originally published in Free Software Magazine.

No, not Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend, but that computer I mentioned last week. Do you feel cheated? Maybe you were expecting a murder mystery instead? Although Eeyore the donkey seems more like the died-of-natural-causes type. Let me briefly eulogize Eeyore the computer before wandering erratically to a new subject: copyright control.

Eeyore-the-Computer is dead

My plan to install Ubuntu on an old computer named Eeyore didn’t go so well. I finally sat down Friday night (I know: life in the fast lane) to give it a go and it turns out the machine is totally dead now. Disconnected all the drives and still couldn’t get to the BIOS. As is …

StarTribune isn’t del.icio.us

I mentioned in a previous post that seeing the “Save to del.icio.us” link on the Minneapolis StarTribune web site was one of the things that nudged me in to paying more attention to del.icio.us.

In addition to promoting their articles, I think the Strib would like to be new and trendy. Hey, kids! Look! We’re in to del.icio.us also. Save our articles to del.icio.us and share with all your friends!

(Probably the same motivation that has me doing the same thing on this site.)

So that’s what I did. I bookmarked a review of Snakes on a Plane. (I had my reasons.) And then recently I clicked on the …

Ubuntu for Web Surfing and Spreadsheets

Originally published in Free Software Magazine as Moving to freedom, one step at a time.

Time to get on with the move. Giving up Windows is like kicking a drug habit. It’s easier to take the path of least resistance and keep using. If quitting proprietary software was a twelve step program–although let’s not push the analogy too far–maybe after admitting we were powerless over our proprietary programs, coming to believe that a Higher Power could restore us to Freedom, and so on and so forth, maybe we’d… make a searching and fearless inventory of cross-platform free programs we could run on Windows first so that a new operating system wouldn’t be entirely alien when we …

Blogging for ‘Free Software Magazine’

Tony Mobily and Dave Guard over at Free Software Magazine kindly invited me to start a blogging account there. I’m scheduled for Mondays and today you can read my first entry, Moving to Freedom, One Step at a Time. (Unless they saw what I wrote and decided to bury it :-)

If you found your way here from there, welcome, and thanks for visiting!

I’ll repost the entry here later this week and will try to have some new content soon also.

Update: I noticed the story is on digg. If you want to help promote my writing, you can digg it. Of course, that leaves me open for all kinds of scathing criticism, which might appeal to you more than the promotion. In either case, it’s still a reason to digg it …

Introducing: Minimalist Reviews

I like reading reviews, usually of books and movies. I like it when the reviewer has some insight about the item being reviewed that helps me see things I missed, educates me, or clarifies my own feeble thinking.

Does that sound like I’m reading the review after the fact? Aren’t reviews supposed to help us make decisions on what to read or watch? Well, I use them sometimes for that purpose, but as often as not I want to read a review after finishing a book or movie, being curious what other people think.

Movies

Rotten Tomatoes is a good place to get a sprinkling of opinions on a movie, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen them link to my favorite movie reviewer: …

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”– Walt Whitman
A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then

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