Jumping on the Bed!

On April 13th, 2007, Canonical ended official support and security patches for Ubuntu 5.10 codenamed “Breezy Badger”. I can’t believe it’s already been 18 months since I first tried Ubuntu.

I wish I could say that once it was on my system, I never looked back. The truth is that after I dropped Mandrake (now Mandriva) for it being a pain in the arse, I have waffled between Ubuntu and Windows XP. I even dated Suse for a few days, but was not impressed. I really enjoyed Breezy, and I even picked up a few of the free installation discs from Shipit. I appreciate the Gnome desktop much more than I do KDE, but that’s all a matter of preference.

I think the biggest draw to Ubuntu is it’s user base. They’re competent, they’re growing, and most importantly they’re friendly. Whenever I have a problem, I simply google “ubuntu” + whatever it is I need help with. 99% of the time, the answer was graciously offered by some other Ubuntu user. I also tried to play with Compiz, but spent most of the time reinstalling corrupted installations than using the 3d desktop, so I gave up on it for a while.

These days, I have Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake) running the FTP Server at work, and installed it on a separate computer we’re going to stick on the edge of the firewall as an Intrusion Detection System. I have 6.10 (Edgy Eft) and Beryl on my 2nd machine at work for most of my coding tasks, and I have Edgy running as the primary partition at home. I even got Mancer to agree to use Edgy for his internet use and to boot into Windows only for gaming. Near as I can tell, he’s been pretty happy with it. I know I have.

So for now, I bid a fond adieu to the gateway OS that has offered millions of people the vision of what the world could be like. Think of it as Open Source with Open Hearts. ^_^

Busy ass week. Wow. First, my raise will take effect for this week’s worth of work. I’m getting a whole dollar an hour more! It’s still about $5 less than I should be making an hour, but that’s still another $120 a month I can use to pay off bills, save up for sparklies and computers, and you know… food.

Secondly, I have been approved essentially “Unlimited Overtime” to bury myself in PHP code to make a quoting module residing on a separate server to tie into our FileMaker solution. Yay! Plus, if I can get this done by the end of the month, I’ll get some “Serious change” as a reward. Kick ass! Bigger shinies! Faster computers! XD

So yeah, I’ll be a little worse for the wear the next couple of weeks working from 9:00am until probably 11:00pm or later. What’s even better is that I get to tell all the helpdesk requests to back off while I’m working on the project! So very, very happy! XD

This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. Time to show these guys what I can do.

<rolls up sleeves> Yosh!