Strange Days for Me N You

The weekend this weekend was an interesting mix of sorting out a few things I wanted to try on Linux, getting my XP desktop rebuilt, and thinking a lot about the strangeness of life in general. I had an opportunity to watch the last few minutes of the Broncos and Steelers. Yay Steelers! Its always good when the Horsey Boys lose and when they lose at a superbowl bid; its even better. Its mo bettah. If it cannot be to those Silver and Black folks, losing a superbowl appearance is just as sweet.

One of the things I’ve blogged a bit about is how I tend to be a habilis type person with computers and OS’es. I basically use the OS which facilitates my work or play. I don’t have a set of zealotry which extends to any of it. If I use Windows XP, I know what I need there. I need anti-virus, spyware protection, registry cleaning. Windows XP seems to just require more “mantenance”. On Linux, I tend to not worry and get completely lazy. I open up the zip archives that have things that make my windows AV go off. Call it curiousity. I also don’t worry about registry cleaners (doh… of course). And as I blogged there are lesser and lesser reasons for me needing Windows these days which is a good thing. I’ve been doing Linux for about 10 years now give or take a kernel release. Since I am not a developer, I characterize myself as a “user”. A tool user to be truthful. I use tools and computers are tools. If Linux fails me at a job, I just pack it in and move to something else. It was a reality that I could not do complex flowcharting when I needed to before so I used Visio. I still have a thing about Visio at a technical and use level. Its just wonderful software. It does what it needs and it makes it easy to get a thing done. There is still nothing really on Linux to match it; but these days I don’t need its complexity so I can use OpenOffice or StarOffice and its draw program. The OODraw program appears to do a passable job and has export to PDF which is really handy and its integration points into the other programs are great.

At my work location, I simply don’t need Windows nor do many of my cohorts which is very nice. They all run something else and I am the token Debian user. That’s okay by me. We all know that Debian is inherently superior and soon all will know

Almost at the last paragraph now in this blog post. I’ve spent some years blogging the body anthropological because I enjoy now reclining in a chair and extrapolating the things, the ideas, the theories, and the worlds that make up the sciences I truly enjoy. Anthropology is one of those binding things to me. It gives me a thought process to understand, hypothesize, watch, and record events. When I was out stumbling the deserts in the American West, archeology was my mistress. She was a harsh and demanding one at times and made me walk a certain path. I had to walk the right-of-ways of bulldozers, pipelining equipment, powerlines. But I also did a lot of research that was funded by a variety of agencies. It all circles around on weekends and lets me dwell on the places and spaces and the desert sunsets I once saw. If there was one thing I loved truly and fully, it was the archeology. When I got into technology, the thing that shocked me the most was the way people dealt with each other. I remember thinking, “it cannot be this way”. People were and are treated like the software products they write or support or service. In vogue one year, gone and outdated the next. Geez. No wonder we have a disposable cuture at so many levels. In many cases in the past, the leadership was guilty of the same type of heresy; but they did their acts on living people and not services, products, or support.

My wife says it was all the same though. In archeology people did bad things too. I had a boss once we forced out of office for a variety of causes. It came down to me and a senior natural resource planner to take the action but it had to be.

So, its Sunday at almost 1600 now and I can see the places I want this blog to go next. Its always a mirror and I see things which need reflecting. If you don’t blog and perhaps you ask, “why should I”; I would challenge you to read a few weblogs and see if there is a thing which matches. Weblogs are growing at some rate and I think people need a medium to cuss and discuss.

Stand by for future transmissions from this channel. Mike out.