I finally got fed up with Windows 2000 on my laptop and decided to replace it with Linux. The current popular distro is Ubuntu, so I went with that. As far as work things go, I’ve set up everything I need and because so much of what I do is Linux based anyway, things are a good bit nicer. But, being me, I had to mess around with settings and get everything just the way I like it, so I set it up to automatically mount my network attached storage device. This makes it so that as soon as I’m logged in, I can navigate to /nas and access all the files stored on the external hard-drive connected to my router. The only real problem I had with this setup was that the NAS wasn’t unmounting when I shutdown the laptop. After doing some reading, I found out what I had suspected, which was that the people that make Ubuntu, in they’re infinite brilliance, had set it up to shutdown network connections before attempting to unmount shares. I followed these instructions, and it fixed the problem, so it no longer takes forever to turn off my laptop.

Oh, and don’t give me that line about Linux not being user-friendly, it’s not really true these days. I ran into a problem because I was doing something that few people would even attempt on a Windows machine. When I was running Windows 2000 I couldn’t even print files at school. I often had to print my plots to a file, convert them to pdf, upload them to my web server, go up a flight of stairs, login to a machine there, navigate to where I stored the files online, and then, finally, print my plots.

[Joe]

Dad comes home fuming about something to do with Microsoft too often for his own good. The things he says about Bill Gates, well… I can’t repeat here. Recently Dad was working on a proposal that was due the next day at 6am. The problem was that the night before, the computer gnomes had upgraded his Word to the latest version. The latest version which, of course, completely changed the interface around. As he tells it, the only things he could find were cut, copy and paste. Everything else was a mess of unrecognizable icons. You can guess what happened to that proposal.

Anyway, it’s because of all that, that I dedicate this link to Dad. It’s an email that Bill Gates sent to a number of people inside Microsoft regarding his experience trying to download Windows Movie Maker. This is from back before it was included with the OS. If you scroll down to the bottom, there’s even a link to a dramatic reading, but the email is so long that he doesn’t do it all.

[Joe]