jr conlin's ink stained banana

In my continuing stalking of Matt, i noticed that he's rather happy about translating a brochure that Canada provides to new parents. In said brochure, he notes that it tells new parents stuff like:

The umbilical cord can stay partially detached for two or three days and leave traces of blood on the baby’s diaper or clothing. Once it falls off, a few drops of blood may flow from the scar when your baby cries.This is not dangerous and the navel will heal by itself.

Thus undoubtedly saving several levels of panic for new parents that they can certainly use for other purposes.

Actually, you know it'd be nice to have that sort of thing for folks of any age.

i've recently been battling heartburn and i swear that the first few times i had it i was having a heart attack. Turns out it was my esophagus spasming (seeing how it didn't like being sprayed with nice caustic stomach acid for several decades and started taking it personally).

t'would have greatly reduced my stress levels to know that was a possible option as well.

Granted, nothing is as spiffy as bloody baby belly spray ("Junior, we need to work on that. You're hardly making it to the ceiling.") but it'd be great if folks had the same sort of checklist that you get with cars. You know:
40 years or 4,000,000 miles: Inspect parts you'd rather they not, rotate hair, changing fluids, etc.

Sure, we'd ignore those too, but at least we'd be better prepared to do so.

Granted it would mean walking around with one of those sticky vinyl "Next Oil Change at" stuck inside your eyeball.

Matt has decided Linux is not quite "there" yet. And i say good for him, mostly because he's right. Linux isn't ready for prime time.

At work, all the engineers are given two machines. One runs some flavor of Windows, another runs either Linux or FreeBSD. Inevitably, some aspect of "Winblowz i$ eViL!!!!!1!!!one!!" sets in, and the engineer then spends a few days configuring his Unix desktop to be The One True Source as they download various ports and spend hours carefully crafting dot files to get the most efficient twm interface they can, and getting the patch so that xeyes looks like Lum.

i've never understood that. To me, it's actually pretty simple. i use Linux as my server, and Windows as my client.

For those that still haven't figured it out yet, that means unix is my critical secondary platform. i use it to route my mail, handle my web serving, be my firewall and all the other non-client sort of stuff i can figure out how to get it to do, and it works pretty well. There are some things i'd love to change, but it's good enough.

Likewise, i use Windows as my principle client because, with ten+ years of highly profitable motivation, it's got lots of support for lots and lots of devices, GUI programs, and other bits of wonder that i just don't have to think about. Yeah, it costs me money to run some of these programs, and you know what? i'm happy to pay it for programs that work. (Yes, i'm aware that to some the concept of being willing to pay for software that one finds useful is tantamount to heresy, but there you have it.)

Like Matt, i too have better things to do with my time. Although i have debian installed on a partition, i've still yet to get it to talk to any of my network access cards, and every few weeks or so i'll shutdown, reboot to the debian partition and dork around trying to figure out how to fix that. Eventually, when i run low on space somewhere else (ha-ha) i'll wipe that partition and make it another NTFS drive. i only installed it initially so i could compile custom extensions for unitedHeroes.net (which runs debian as well). i'd also note that if i really wanted it to be productive, i'd still need another machine to be my Unix platform since the only way i can reliably exchange data between Debian and NT is via Samba.

i'm glad for folks that have some how managed to cajole their system into something that works and are happy with it. i'm glad that Matt tried and decided to give up after an adequate period of time and with far more effort than i'd be willing to exert. i do not believe that Linux will ever become a primary platform, mostly because of the immense hurdles to business that exist.

And i think that's fine.

It means me spending another $100 into the price of a $1000 platform to cover the OS, big freaking deal. It means me spending a few hours plugging holes and tweaking updates when i install a new system. Ok, again, no big, since i'd be doing that anyway. It also means that everything i get in the future will "just work" with minimum effort. So what if i have to reboot every two weeks or so? It's a client box. i'm the only one using it. It only takes a few minutes anyway and besides, It'll give me a chance to do something other than dork around on the computer.