In April Michelle and I went to Poland to visit her sister Alison who is working for AIM teaching English at their school Gateway to English. We were there for ten days and the following video slide show contains photos and videos from our trip. There are a number of clips of Alison teaching her classes. We spent about three days in and around the city of Krakow in southern Poland. We were at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp for one entire day and spent another half day at an underground salt mine. This was a once-in-a-lifetime trip during which we left all of our children at home with my wife’s parents. We thoroughly enjoyed it but we were glad to be home again with our children and have been so busy that it took till now to do a blog post about the trip.
The other night we got together with some of my wife’s cousins to play music. You learn something new every day. Jesse Ogburn demonstrated an instrument I have never heard of – the common hand saw. It’s quite an art and I could only manage to make it screech one or two notes. But by bending the saw and dragging a violin bow across the smooth edge it is possible to torture a melody out of it. Here he is playing Amazing Grace; background noise courtesy of the Funk house.
I have experimented with Linux many times and have been impressed by the way you can sample an OS by using a live CD. However the Linux people have officially outdone themselves. The newest and best way to try the latest Unbuntu Linux is with Wubi. With a simple Windows desktop installer you can painlessly install Ubuntu Hardy Heron (and uninstall it in Windows as well) without all the boot configuration and partitioning that a manual install demands.
I installed Hardy on an ancient desktop that I run mainly as a backup server in the hope that it would outperform XP. Unfortunately it was noticeably slower although I think this may have been because I did not allow it enough install space requiring more swapping of disc space. Otherwise I was impressed, almost enough that I want to try it on my main desktop or my laptop.
Hardy immediately recognized all hardware except my wireless network card which took just a little fiddling in the network settings.
There are a few reasons why I would not use Linux as a primary OS. One of them is just the extra work it takes to get everything running right. Yes there are many wonderful Linux programs out there but you simply have to have Windows compatibility in our world. Even using WINE, it’s just too strange and different for the average user who is accustomed to Windows. Another thing is that I don’t know of any Internet accountability software that works with Windows. I did a little googling on this and possibly there are some things in the works. But once again it is important that things like that are accessible to the average user and I think it will be awhile yet until something good turns up in that department. I would love to know if I am wrong there.
I think there is little reason to be spending a fortune for an OS or for software for a personal computer these days. (Even though a nice Mac still appeals to me.) Business is another matter. Commercial software has vast advantages over open source stuff in a lot of ways but I think the gap may be narrowing.
Today I received my free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate from Microsoft. Now the ultimate dilemma is, shall I install it? I was a wee bit disappointed that this was not a nice retail version such as is sold on Amazon for over $300. I should have known Microsoft would make sure I couldn’t opt to sell this on on eBay for a couple hundred bucks. “Not for resale.” Too bad. Still, this is the fully loaded version of the newest M$ OS and it should have all the bells and whistles. There’s one thing I will do if I decide to install it – make sure all my most important software works with Vista. I know my graphics card is Vista-compatible and I have plenty of RAM. So what do you all think – should I or shouldn’t I? *Mac fans’ comments may be deleted.
