Its a slow day and I’ve been fortunate lucky blessed with a lot of free time at work.  I took care of all my immediate obligations by 11:30 and even did some personal favors for a few of my users before embarking on my own projects.

I found an old computer and proceeded to install Ubuntu on it.  I had no problems this time (except for this proof-of-concept thing which I’ll speak about in a minute) and I went in right away.  I did the formal install so I could begin to install applications and configure them the way I wanted to and am very glad I did.

Without making this an Ubuntu review (to come later, for sure), I cannot be more pleased with the OS.  I love it!  Its hard for me to learn the Linux way of things when I’m an old school DOS guy who knows Windows like the back of my friend’s hands (let alone mine) but I’m getting there.  The real important thing is that I’m learning new things and have a fresh desktop to play with.  Although I still want to get the Mac Mini, I am realizing something that this slow day has provided.

I love to hack.

Not in the black hat/white hat kind of way.  Not in the MacGyver way either like my friend does.  But in the Bob Bickford way, I am truly a hacker.  (Sorry for all the links here.)

In my immediate case, I like to circumvent the limitations of my enjoyment with my traditional Win-Tel computing – even moving away from the server side of it that I only get the play with at work.  So I’m enjoying hacking this new OS and discovering all it can do.  I’m hacking the applications I want to run and getting them to a point where I can enjoy my web work.  I’m even getting more enjoyment from using the native features of Ubuntu and Linux in general and plan to migrate my blog from my hosting provider to my own server!

I was going to do that with the Mac since it is all Unix anyway but hey, why not start early??!!

So its a slow day and I’m leaving work as soon as I can.  I’ll try and fix my PC or just dream of Ubuntu while I use my wife’s computer.