Category: Personal

Winter has finally found its way to Michigan. We have snow. And ice. And salt all over the roadways. Fortunately I have a remote control snowmobile (1/8 scale) to play with. :-)

I finally got around to installing Parallels and Ubuntu Linux on the MacBook Pro. First off, kudos to Parallels for making the software dang easy to use and run. And Linux, my friends, if Ubuntu is any guide, will start to make headway on the desktop. When? Oh within the next year I think we could see a percentage tick up. Say from .5% (I’m just making this up) to 1.5%. Will this effect Apple? Only if Apple stops innovating – any effects will be minor – Ubuntu is good, but it’s not Apple crazy-easy-good. Will this effect Microsoft? Oh yes. Vista, from the anecdotal reports I’ve heard, is just a souped up update to XP. With some annoying twists. Ubuntu’s UI and ease of use is, right now, better then my XP experience. For example, at work, today, I hooked up my USB Memorystick reader to download some photos. On a Mac, just plug it in, add the Memorystick and you’re ready to go! Not on XP. No – I just got that “new hardware added” message/noise. And then a Wizard pops up (in Ubuntu they hilariously call them “druids”). So I work my way through the wizard, it searches, and then finally reports “No drivers found” or “could not install” message. So I head out to the USB reader manufacturers site (PNY for the record) and look for drivers – I couldn’t find any. So I head to Sony and find some drivers for my Camera. I install that, no problem. But I now need to reboot. Logging back in after that, nope, my card reader still is driverless. So I run through the wizard again. Nope. So I try it in advanced mode, select what I think might be good options. And it does something and asks me to restart. So again, I patiently restart and log back in. Still no sign of the memorystick reader. So I now go into the devices manager and delete the driver/device I just installed because obviously it’s not working! I check PNY’s site once more and discover there are drivers – but they are only for Windows 98. They further state that it’s not needed for XP because XP natively includes support for USB devices. Oh really? Then how come my XP isn’t supporting my USB device? Anyways, I decide that I might as well try the installer because who knows it might just work? So I do. A reboot later and no my PNY reader still is unsupported. So I use the device manager to remove what damage I may have done. I then fiddle with the install new hardware Wizard and not more then 10 minutes later it “magically” discovers the proper drivers and installs them. I mean what the crap? Why didn’t it do this the first time around? Now Ubuntu, they have this really easy to use Package manager. That’s how you install and remove things. And it works very well. So well that I prefer it already to Windows XP in the less than a week that I’ve installed and used it. Microsoft has lots to fear. No wonder Microsoft’s working the patents, law and lawsuit angles – they don’t have time to innovate and improve. Linux is here.

And finally I leave you with a wonderful image of a cluster of cardinals. These birds are amazingly hard to get photos of as they seem to have an innate hatred towards photography and can just sense when your finger is pressing down…