Linux changed my life today

I'm not even joking. This weekend was full of confusing thoughts and life evaluations. I went to work on a project with my life group (church people) to help renovate a room for an elderly couple who were friends with one of the newer members of our group. The project took about 15 hours, was one of the most grueling experiences of my life, and ended up being a wonderful transformation.

The room started as a host for mildew, mold, and dust, on top of being dangerous for elderly navigation, and in general quite unpleasant. It ended up being something I'd be proud to have as my front room. It brought up alot of questions regarding what is most beneficial for people you're serving, and what is an act pleasing to God. I'm still not sure how I feel about many of the different aspects, but what I do know is I was exhausted, and in physical pain after the ordeal.

This lead me to decide to descend into a vegetative state today, and just take it easy. This didn't go as planned. I started off playing Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox, but quickly became caught up in trying to set up a connection between the Wii and my work laptop, the only dual core machine that spends time at my house (required for reliable PlayOn performance). This became the obsession of hours of cursing and high blood pressure. This was followed by an unsuccessful attempt to connect the laptop directly to the TV using the monitor output, unsuccessful because the tv input is DVI, and the DVI to vga converter is not recognized by the laptop, so it refused to display anything.

Then as the Cowboys began to play, I set my work laptop to installing Ubuntu. The most amazing thing happened. Since getting this laptop, the speakers have been completely nonfunctional. No matter what I did, I could never get them to work. Before I could even log into my fresh Ubuntu install, it was playing little jingles over the laptop speakers. A quick downloading of flash and I was watching videos over youtube and hulu that used to require headphones, which was annoying when sharing with Brooke. A download of RealVNC allowed me to quickly connect to my desktop to adjust Vista's resolution on my TV. Function keys for things like volume, brightness, and others all simply work now. Not only was this Linux installation not more difficult to configure than Windows, it took auto configuration past plug and play and resurrected my proprietary LAPTOP hardware, and I've fought with Laptop hardware for days. I'm solidly in love.

Coders At Work by Peter Seibel

This is an absolutely amazing book. I'm only about 100 pages in, and I'm hooked. It's a collection of interviews with 15 high profile programmers in recent history, and it's motivation to become a better programmer, and inspiration on the things I want my son to see and experience growing up. It's a great history lesson to hear how some of the great contributors to our current state of software development came to be where they are, and it's thought provoking to hear where they see things going. Borrow it from me when I'm done, but seriously, think about buying a copy to keep on hand for yourself.

Also, my poor car is looking for attention, due in large part I think to jealousy over my current obsession with my infant boy and programming. It's been sputtering, died on the way home on Friday, and refused to start this morning, forcing me to bum a ride with Shannon, my next door neighbor, who now works with me.