Open Sourcing My Life

Hi. My name is Patrick, and I'm a Microsoft drone.

There, that wasn't so hard.

The fact is, I am kind of an MS drone, and I'm a big apologist for the company, too. I believe in the American dream: Make something that everyone wants, and you too can become a bazillionaire like Bill Gates and his friends. We Americans believe this sort of thing...and when someone does it, we do our damnedest to tear them to pieces. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of Americans are hypocrites in this regard. No skin off my nose, though.

I don't give Microsoft a free pass, by any means. They do a lot of things wrong, and their marketing practices have been...hmmm...unfortunate in the past. I've lived with their products, though, and like them, and have defended them for a long time.

So for me to say that I'm looking at a Linux distribution instead of Windows Vista because, well, Vista sucks...that's a bold statement on my part. I gave up beta testing for Microsoft because they never seemed to listen to their beta testers when we told them, "Such-and-such is a very bad idea."  That so many of us have been proven right over the years finally led me to the belief that they just don't listen to people.

This doesn't much work for me anymore.

So now I'm in the middle of downloading Ubuntu 6.10 (well, actually the early stages of downloading it...I'm 18% through a 698MB download as I type this) and researching alternatives to the hundreds of megabytes of commercial software on my PC. Getting my laser printer to work under Linux shouldn't be hard, but getting my color inkjet to do its thing might be a monumental pain in the tuchis.  My office docs shouldn't be a hassle; working with PDFs might be, I don't know.

Watch this space; I'll let you know how it all shakes out.