Today was a very fast day at work. That suited me just fine. I worked straight through lunch without even really noticing. We had a sort of “day off” from the kids coming in, seeing as there was a bunch of money to disburse.

Holy living balls my job is boring. I can’t believe I started this post with that many words about it.

Yesterday, I attended a meeting for the English master’s students. It was an orientation of sorts, and I found it fairly useful, since there were topics brought up that I hadn’t thought about before. It made me really want to get started on getting done with school. By the evening, though, I was a little worn out, and stopped thinking of it very much.

One thing that I think is funny about being a grad program coordinator– apparently, your first act in that position has to be to go on sabattical for a year. The program coordinator at MSU did it, Jeannie Grant-Moore? did it, and now Margaret Hostetler. I don’t really hold it against any of them, I just think it’s funny. “Hi, I’m the new program coordinator. No, I won’t be here this year, you’ll need to talk to this other person…”

So whatever.

I’m working on getting a new Linux desktop system working here at home. I will say this about it to start: easiest one that I’ve worked with so far, and my computer actually seems to be running a little faster. That may just be me imagining things, but whatever…

My three leading problems that I need to work on with it:
– Get networking to work the way I want it to. (I would like my server shares permanently mounted at login)
– Get the damn network printer to work (this is apparently “a snap” for most people, but for me it’s a problem)
– Get all the various media filetypes to work (your .mov’s, .wmv’s, .ra’s, etc.)

I came across a thread in a support forum where someone got on and said, “Eh, Linux sucks. I have Windows, what do I need this for?” And I think there’s an extent to which he has a point. For average users, Windows has everything, it’s exceedingly easy, and pretty much available.

My issue is that Vista will be making XP obsolete within the next year, and I do not have plans to really ever buy another system with Windows pre-installed, if I can avoid it. I figure that if I learn enough about Linux, I will come to prefer it. The switch is hard, though. I’ve had a lot of starts and stops, usually predecated by something really basic that I absolutely need to do becoming difficult in Linux for no apparent reason (like losing the ability to write to a server share, for example). I’ve avoided that thus far with Ubuntu, so this seems to be a good candidate…

I think I’m going to call Michelle. You have a good evening/day. Whenever you read this.