On the other hand...

In endeavoring, in accordance with Sandy's advice, to look on the bright side...

My computer crashing beyond all repair is amazingly frustrating. Especially as I just recalled this AM some more student and school pics I had in my "NEW" folder that hadn't been backed up yet [sigh].

But!

It is true that I had a huge backlog of things to read, do and organize on the old computer. Ebooks, comics, photos, things to download, things to prioritize... But honestly, the when of when I was going to get to all that was kind of escaping me. Every day presents a new onslaught of info, video, RSS feeds and other things...

But now? Well, now I have a clean slate. Which is kinda cool actually. And honestly, I've got almost everything up to about 5 or 6 months completely backed up on a bunch of CD-Rs. So, once the new laptop gets here I can reinstall a bunch of it, in a far more discriminating way.

And the new laptop will give me a chance to do something I've been wanting to do for a while - switch over to a Linux operating system.

When the laptop gets here it'll be all set up with Vista, but the seeming consensus online and around the way is that Vista, well... kind of blows. Not that Windows ME and XP were outstanding or anything, but I was used to them.

The learning curve on Linux might be a little steep, but I figure most of the shortcuts I've played with in XP over the last 3 years wouldn't apply to Vista anyways.

And just, from a philosophical point of view, I really want to move to a Linux OS. Talking about free software. Talking about open source software. Talking about a revolution. Well, okay, not really that last one.

But honestly, I'm tired of... well, I read something recently... that the role of technology, the goal, should be to find ways to make technology work for you, in order to make your life easier.

Not lock you into some proprietary software that limits your choices and cripples your machine's capability to the benefit of some company's outdated business model or head-in-the-sand attempt to run from or block the future. [Looking right at you, Microsoft. You too, Apple.]

So, Ubuntu Linux seems to be the most user friendly distro out there. And I'm definitely gonna need 'user friendly.' So once I get the new laptop, I'll fire it up, download the Live CD and install it. I'll probably dual boot with Vista for awhile, till I get the hang of it, and make sure it plays nice with the hardware on my laptop. But after that, it's bye-bye Microsoft. Bye bye crippleware. Bye bye DRM. Bye bye nonsense. Hello computing freedom.

It'll probably be about the geekiest thing I've done. Well, computer geeky, anyways. My long tradition of comic book geekiness transcends. But honestly, besides playing around with my Commodore 64K [jesus, 20 years ago...] I've never really done a lot of computer nonsense. I never even really learned how to deal with spreadsheets. Word processing and the internet. That's been my computing life. But even with that, I've managed to figure out that it just doesn't have to be as difficult as some companies want to make it.

Open source is the way to go. Things you can tweak and change and make your own, make work the way you want them to work... that's what computers should be for. Even if you're only doing stuff as simple as figuring out what extensions and add-ons you want for your Firefox browser.

So yeah, geek mode on, I guess.