Old Weird Ward
Unless otherwise noted, that which is posted here is opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. If you don't like my opinions, go somewhere else. Nobody is forcing you to actually read this drivel.
The presumption exists that you can read at all.
That may be a large assumption.
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Sunday, January 19, 2003
- - - - - Moving Out - - - - -
Spent most of yesterday helping our friends Brad and Susan load up a BIG trailer with all their worldly goods for the Big Move from San Jose to Austin TX.
How big? 53 feet qualifies, wouldn't you say?
About 33 feet of that was taken up with furniture and many, many boxes. The last 20 feet was allocated to one of the cars.
Loading up the car was interesting. Susan called in a tow truck that is actually a flat-bed truck with a tilting platform. So the tow-truck guy loads up the car and backs up to the rear door of the trailer. The trucker fella then drives the car into the trailer and ties it down. The whole business took about 15 minutes - Very Slick. Even Brad was impressed.
- - - - - Linux Stuff - - - - -
About two weeks back, SWMBO wanted to play around with Linux a bit. After a couple of false starts, we got Mandrake 8.1 up and running on her 800Mhz Celeron box. Performance seems to be OK, but it's her opinion, as an end-user, that the Linux applications aren't quite ready for Prime Time.
She will probably go back to Win2K/Office2K for business reasons - everyone at her job uses the Office Suite for everything, so she has to do the same.
Mind you, there's nothing at all wrong with Linux the Operating System - Mandrake's installer correctly identified the video card, and the networking card, and the sound card, did all it's configuration stuff and it all just works - no muss, no fuss.
The web browser (Konqueror) and the chat client (KSIRC) work very well, the email client (KMail) works very well too.
The office stuff works mostly OK during document creation, but saving the documents as something that MS Office can use (as she has to do at work) is kinda problematical, and not really practical for her. And there is not a known-to-be-stable substitute for Outlook. Ximian's Evolution is supposed to be able to do Outlookish stuff, but is reported to have some problems.
As always, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).
And why don't I use Linux and it's applications? By profession, I support users of Windows and Micrsoft Office. If I actually use the stuff, then I can better support the end-users. Annnnnd....I find that MS Office is a polished, easy-to-use, and reliable set of tools. Win2K is very stable (except when start loading up the box with all kinds of strange stuff).
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