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After my macbook fried and my xp box got infected beyond repair, I decided to start all over with linux. I’ve never used it before, so here are some initial reactions from a long time computer user, both in windows and mac environments, starting fresh:

1. It’s the most user-friendly environment I’ve tried. It combines the best of windows and mac in one interface. Open folders and files along the bottom (the tray?) is such a natural thing that I always liked about windows. The intrusive dock is something I’ve always disliked about mac. Everything is crisp, the system fonts are legible, and working in it from a gui standpoint is very satisfying.
2. I love discovering how it works. At first, it’s annoying to deal with package installations and terminal commands, but after a while you get a feel for how and why they work.  There are strange icons nestled into the various static bars on the top and bottom of the screen (menu bar? task bar? Again, I need to learn the lingo), that do cool stuff when you click them.  For instance, in the lower left is an interesting one, that nicle hides everything on your desktop when clicked. I know os x does this and much more with the f9 f10 f11 keys, can’t think of what they call it at the moment. But all I ever really need regarding windows is a quick way to see my desktop. Each time I find something new in it, I feel a sense of accomplishment (wow I am a geek).
3. It seems no faster or slower than osx or windows at the moment (maybe a little bit faster, I’m using a dell 4600 with 1.5 gb Ram).
4. I wish the windows were anti-aliased. Probably a memory saver, but I’d turn it on if I knew how.
5. It came with some interesting apps. So far, I’ve used gimp (graphics), rythmbox (music management), firefox (web browser), picasa (photo manager), and Kino (video editor). Some thoughts:
   • Gimp sucks. Gimp is such a horrible name for software anyway; it connotes a crippled, inferior entity, which Gimp unfortunately seems to be. I need shape layers, I need precision zooming, and I can’t imagine Gimp has Photoshop’s anti-aliasing prowess (see my previous post), so I’ll do my icon work on my old mac for now. If you don’t have an old mac with photoshop 7 on it to use, then I guess gimp is for you.
   • Rythmbox with built in lastfm is cool, and I’d love to get better at it. Unfortunately, my ipod/iphone centric life would need some hardware adjustments.
   • Firefox is fine, although one of my sites looked weird, maybe due to font issues, which I’ll address in a future post.
   • Picasa is really critical. I have every photo I’ve taken in the last 10 years on the second drive of this machine, and it was all managed via picasa running on xp before I wiped the first drive and installed ubuntu. It seems that picasa won’t recognize the 2nd drive. I briefly checked for answers via google and hit the wall (future post). You would think it would be easy for picasa to pick up where it left off, but no luck yet.
   • Kino imported the .mps files from my camcorder, but made them look weird. Need to investigate.
6. I miss Georgia, more than anything. Nothing reads like that font. Please, Matthew Carter, if you ever read this, get me some Georgia on Linux.
7. Using Linux makes you feel free, in general. But Inkscape and Gimp just ain’t Illustrator and Photoshop.
8. FTP is perfect. I don’t know why OS X doesn’t build it in like linux. FTP programs are pointless when you can just mount a remote server like any disk.

Great show. Loved the sax, and seeing it live made me realize how hard it is to pull off solos like they did in the 80s. Not enough people there, which is a shame. We’re lucky they keep coming back and should support one of the most notable, iconic sounds out of that era.

When I was very young, I spent a lot of time at the Steins house:
View Larger Map Around the corner was a kid named Chucky. He was a little younger than Matt Stein and me, so we pushed him around. He was really weird. I don’t think his parents lived in that house; I think it was his grandparents or his uncle/aunt. There were lots of weird things about his house. First of all, we never went there through the front door. We always got there through the back, from Steins. It always seemed like we went through a forest to get there. The uncle/aunt/granparents never really knew if we were there or not, and they’d sometimes get mad at us when we popped up. A few things about Chucky’s house:

• There was a garage in the back that we used as a club house.
• We had a fight with the club from W. Milton St. I was in both clubs.
• Chucky had some “land” in front of the garage, basically a 6’x5′ plot. He said his U/A/G gave it to him. He tried to grow shit on his land, we dug it up and he got mad.
• Chucky’s UAGs were eccentric. They made a helium balloon in the house (not hydrogen, “it’s highly flammable!”). They taught me how to play chess. They had all kinds of knick-knacks, I think there was tons of war memorabilia.
• Chucky had a little sister who bore the brunt of lots of teasing.
• Chucky had very long, black hair but white skin. He looked like a vampire.

“Let’s go to Chucky’s!!”

In the beginning, format was king. The mere fact that we were reading something on the web made it important. It had somehow come to occupy this new medium, which in itself was novel and beautiful and confusing. Whoever put it there had to be smart, and therefore the content as well.

Then, at some point, maybe the early 2000’s, content became king. Your format is getting in the way of our content, we’d say. Enough of the tables, the flash, the jpeg-rendered text. Let us read <pre> formatted courier and be fulfilled.

Then context became king; it was more important where, when, and how readers got the content than what the content actually was. Can I read it on my iWatch? Because that’s how I read stuff nowadays. Is it RTL compatible? Pft, how dare we ignore half the world (if not more)’s readership.

Contrast is next. It’s all we have left. Is it different than what I’ve seen before? Does it stand out? In my daily sea-of-noise, what clambers to the surface, bobbing aggressively for attention like some snagged snapper float? That’s what I’ll read.

I wish < and > were keys on the keyboard.