Hello.
Yes, this blog is still maintained. Sorta. It’s just that I have this new job, and I’m working about 200x harder than at my old job (which, curiously, is a good thing.) Also, my new job so far has been entirely hacking on WordPress, the very WordPress which runs this blog, so you can understand if good ol’ WordPress is pretty much the last thing I want to look at when I get home in the evening.
One thing about my new job… and, keep in mind that I am trying to think of a non-geeky way to say this, but… Microsoft Windows really blows chunks. I have gotten conflicting opinions from different people about whether or not it’s OK to install Linux on my computer at work, and I decided I would not be a whiny boy, and just buck up and use Windows like everyone else. The move back to Windows has been… difficult. To wit:
- Why won’t iTunes let me copy music off my iPod? I have to use some shareware thing, download the music into a temporary folder, and then ask iTunes to import that into my collection. Then, I have to delete the files from the temporary folder. A pain!
- I have a text editor on my machine that is supposed to open and save files via FTP. Except that one of the servers I work with only supports SFTP, and so I have to use a different text editor for that. Oh, and it’s shareware, and pretty soon I’m gonna have to ask my boss to pay for it so I can keep using it.
- Said text editor won’t let me edit files in UTF-8. Or rather, it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t work.
- WS-FTP also doesn’t support SFTP, so I have to use two different programs for moving files between my desktop and the servers. They’re both really ugly and hard to use.
- AOL Instant Messenger thinks it’s cute to open three different windows full of advertising every time my computer starts up. So, I installed Trillian, which is without ads, but is totally weird and hard to use. (It’s pretty, at least.)
- I installed a little Microsoft add-on that gives me four different screens where I can put windows, just like Linux (this may sound like the height of geekitude, but programmers usually have a billion windows open at once.) Except it’s really buggy and causes different programs to misbehave in different ways.
- I tried to open a text file in Excel the other day, but apparently support for .csv files wasn’t installed on my harddrive. In order to install this, I needed access to some mysterious drive “X:” that wasn’t available. So, I had to give up and figure out some other way to look at my data.
- Omigod the Start menu. Holy crap. It takes me forever to find anything. I’m used to programs being organized in folders like “Web Browser,” not in folders named after the company that makes the software.
You can scoff if you like, but I never had any of these problems before I went back to Windows.
So, tomorrow at 6pm, when my day is officially over and people start to go home, I am installing Linux. I noticed that several other people at work are using it, so it’s not like I can get into that much trouble. Plus I’ll still be leaving Windows on my harddrive, I’ll just be… not using it. With extreme prejudice.
