Speaking of taxes.. Have you ever done taxes when you've purchased a home, refinanced, sold a home, relocated, and bought a new home in 13 months? Well, it's kind of depressing really. Partial year taxes in one state. Figuring cost basis on the old house. Deducting points, interest, and other stuff for a plethora of mortgages. Figuring out what relocation expenses can be deducted, etc. It's a real chore. On the good side, I get to deduct points for 3 mortgages in one year. Still, it's never fun to put all of this together.
I'm also suffering from motorcycle withdrawl. There was a recall on my bike and they recommended not riding it until the issue has been repaired. So, tomorrow, I get to take it in to the dealer (80 miles away) to get it fixed. I'm really looking forward to being able to ride again. It's been two weeks now since I got the recall notice and the weather has been really beautiful down here.
On another note (for you techies), I've been working on playing around with Linux lately. When Dad was here, I was trying to help him get set up to run wireless on his linux laptop. I decided that I should give it a whirl again since it'd been years since I've really played around with it. But which Linux distribution should I use? I decided to try a bunch of different ones and compare them. I started out with Kubuntu, but didn't like it because there was a bug in the distribution that prevented you from doing several administrative tasks. I found this to be really annoying. I tried OpenSuse and I actually liked it fairly well. I think if I was going to run something for business, OpenSuse would be a front-runner for me. Doing the web install took like 9 hours because of all of the downloading. I didn't like that. All of the other distros I tried came on single CD iso images of 650 MB or less. I tried Mepis as well. I really liked Mepis. It just worked. The distribution includes everything you need to play MP3s and DVDs. I really liked that, but it uses KDE, and I'm not a big fan of KDE. Too busy. And ugly. Too much like Windows. It's supposed to be unix. Don't make it look like Windows. Finally, I tried ubuntu. Kubuntu is actually a spin-off of ubuntu, so I wasn't expecting a lot out of ubuntu, but I actually ended up liking it more than any other. The Gnome interface is simple and elegant. Everything worked, and the install was a breeze. However, it doesn't come with support for MP3s and DVDs. Still, I think I'm going to stick with ubuntu and just add the other things I need. Dad, if you're still looking for a good linux distro, I'd recommend that you use ubuntu.
OK, but here's my gripe with Linux. I keep hearing from everyone about how much easier it is to setup and maintain than windows. If you want to install an application, you open your package manager and download what you need. But, often the software you want isn't in the package manager, so you have to go get it from some other source, or download the code and compile it yourself. Most people don't have a clue about how to do this. Shoot... I'm a developer and I don't usually like to compile someone else's code. With a windows system, you simply go to the manufacturer's website, download the installer, and run it. I fail to see how apt-get and package managers are easier.
The security update/patching mechanisms are cryptic and difficult to use. Plus, half the time, they prompt you to update almost every package on your machine, which takes hours. And people say this is better than WindowsUpdate?
In addition, wireless support is a joke. It's difficult to configure, and only supports WEP. Everyone knows that WEP is easy to crack... that's why we all run WPA/AES or WPA/TKIP these days.
It's frustrating, because I want to run a unix O/S, but I just don't think Linux is ready for prime time. I guess I'm just going to have to get an iMac so I can run OS X. Ok, I'll stop spewing out technical gibberish now.
Good Night.
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