moving category archive

This ain’t no holiday

Oh no this ain’t no vacation
(This is your chance to pay
The great casino foundation…)

Ain’t no vacation anymore, anyway.

Twelve glorious days off work and now it’s time to return to the grind.

So what have I been up to, besides miscellaneous family gatherings and activities?

Shoveling. We’re getting a decent Minnesota winter this year, with more snow earlier than we have in recent years. I usually make it a mission to keep the driveway clear to the blacktop, so that means obsessively pushing a shovel around.

And it has been a great year to get new boots. I’ve had a pair of Sorels for over 20 years that are still in great shape, but they were big and unwieldy for walking the dog around the neighborhood. I splurged on a pair …

Free Software Money Management Quandary

Update, 10 January 2008: See “related” below for the latest on this topic.

I found myself facing a moral quandary yesterday. I considered using proprietary software for a job that has lots of free software alternatives. You see, I have these doubts and reservations about the free options.

The gravitational pull of 12 years worth of Microsoft Money data has me continuing to run that program on my laptop. I really like MS Money; it’s worked great for managing my finances from when I was an underemployed drop-out living in my Mom’s basement through going back to school, moving out, having a real job and investments, getting married, and buying a house. It has great reporting features: you can really slice and dice the data.

Another potential problem I’ve created for …

Lines are Blurring

I still work on a Windows laptop for my day job (but thankfully also on a Red Hat Linux server), and I’m using VNC to remotely run Microsoft Money and a couple of Excel spreadsheets on a laptop at home, but other than that I’ve been all in Ubuntu at home (well, a little bit of Fedora also). Still loving the learning process and still so much to do. Every direction I turn there’s something new I want to figure out and I go down all kinds of side alleys in addition to the normal time I burn in my feeds.

It feels comfortable and it feels like home, with a few minor exceptions of things I want to do and haven’t figured out how to do yet.

I just read a humorous rant …

Using GNU/Linux: Happy, Happy

I’m happily setting up shop in Ubuntu. There’s much to do, and now that I’m actually using it, I’m even more scattered in my approach. I run around getting this or that working as needed. All of which takes time, which is one reason I haven’t written much lately.

Another reason is that my writing resistance has been stronger than my will to open up the WordPress editor. One of the things I did to keep that specter at bay was move my local WordPress instance to Zodiac after having got it all set up on Prometheus. (Which prompted a couple of updates to my installing WordPress howto post.) Wasn’t hard to move, though, so I had to keep diligently practicing writing avoidance in other ways. (Not …

On the other side…

Or at least: a foot through the door. Or maybe both feet, with a hand resting on the door frame.

I’m getting moved in at 1776 Freedom Lane. Just a few boxes unpacked so far. I have backups set up going to the slug, and am getting mail in Thunderbird. I knew the house came furnished with some nice accessories, but was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it was to use one of the features.

One thing that really stands out is I can waste time wandering around the web in GNU/Linux just as effectively as I could in Windows. (This post should have come out on Monday.)

I wiped out Windows on Zodiac Thursday night and installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) GNU/Linux. It felt very liberating, …

I’m Going In. (Freedom, Yeah!)

Penguin Pete had a thoughtful post recently about struggling with technology, and it reminded me of things I know but often forget.

One of my problems in moving to free software has been a stubborn resistance to letting go of my old Windows ways and jumping in to the deeper end of the freedom pool. I’ve often indulged in despair when I’ve struggled with getting something working. It’s normal to feel some frustration when confronted with road blocks and wrong turns, but you have to just keep at it. Pete wrote, “It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.”

I’ve been getting over my self-directed FUD campaign and am enjoying the learning process these days. I really like the Unix way …