Bonjour eh
Father's Day -- Last Sunday was Father's Day. The night before I had
taken Mrs A to the City Hospital where she was admitted with fluid
around her heart. I got home at 2, to bed at 4 and was up at 10 AM to
the sound of a hair dryer. I was beat -- tired, stressed and rather in
a down mood. I had to go to the hospital early that day as I had to
work that night. I returned home feeling more beat, more tired and more
stressed.
Just before leaving for work my youngest asked if she was still going in
with me to help me bake, since it was a quiet night ... I hesitated,
sighed, then said 'Sure. Fine. C'mon'.
What I got in return was possibly the best Father's Day gift of all time.
My youngest can be a real challenge. But she loves to bake. And being
in a bakery was like being in Heaven for her. Her excitement and
enthusiasm blew away the dark clouds over my head and revealed the
sun****ne that had always been there. I believe she's quite proud that
her Dad is the Town Baker ... Hero Wor****p (or something close to it)
can do a person good.
Everything turned around at that point.
It was the best Father's Day gift. Ever.
---
Linux.
For the past few weeks Mrs A's mobility had decreased to the point where
she was no longer able to sit at her computer. I set her up with my
Nintendo DS browser, but the interface was a little clunky for her
liking (plus I would be called in 'How do you do this? Why doesn't this
work? What happened to ...??'
As a result I went out and picked up an Asus Eee PC mini-notebook or Web
Book laptop. It has a 4 Gig Solid State Drive, with a 4 Gig High
Capacity SD memory card, 512 Meg of RAM, an Intel 900 MHz mobile
processor, built-in webcam and mic and preloaded with Xandros Linux
(Easy Mode desktop). The display is 7", 800 x 480 pixels. The keyboard
is a little tiny but once you get use to it you can type fine ... you
just don't have to reach as far to hit the keys. For ****ts -- VGA out,
3 USB 2.0, RJ45 for LAN, headphones and mic, and Atheros wireless
chipset.
For apps it has Firefox, Open Office (Word processor, spread sheet and
presentation software), Mozilla Thunderbird, chat software and a bunch
of other stuff ... and everything 'just works'. Java Chat (for
aschat.com) works perfect. All embedded Windows media plays fine.
I'm totally impressed. The 'Easy Mode' desktop is elegant and a breeze
to use.
I've now ordered a book from Amazon on Linux. I've used it (SuSE Linux)
to run a Quake2 server on our LAN for the kids and it 'just worked' ...
for months without being rebooted or needing any attention and if I
decided to come along and start surfing on it or farting about it kicked
right in ... no hard drive clunking, memory swapping, stuttering recovery.
So -- my question. What is the best version of Linux to use? I've read
Ubuntu is quite good. I like the Xandros on the mini-laptop. I intend
to learn how to 'get under the hood' and really get my hands dirty, but
for a typical user, what version offers the best GUI for tweaking Linux
(I'm thinking of myself as well as Mrs A and the kids -- my eldest loves
computers and can do a lot of tweaking on her own).
---
That's it!!
Finally some heat and sun****ne today -- off for some Pool Therapy then
some BBQ Chicken Therapy.
Great Love & Appreciation,
Marvie & Family
--
I don't smoke. I smell like bread. Life is Good.
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