Forced Patience

People have told me I have the patience of dripping water on a rock. For most things, that's true. I can't have a great time watching a spider build a web. HyperFocus, I believe is what the shrinks call it. But, I still have a problem with impulsiveness. When life gets confusing, frustrating, or generally bad, in the past I'd try to quell the tension by purchasing something. Preferably, something techy. I new hardware device, a piece of software, or a techy type project.

Being mostly broke keeps that under control. While free and open source software do keep my mind and efforts occupied, sometimes other circumstance force me to be more patient.

Earlier this week, I was able to set up Vista. It works quite well, actually. Even the annoying little pop-up "Cancel or Allow" - like the Mac commercial- wasn't too bad. But, I finally ran into a few things I couldn't do with it. Burn ISO CD's for one. Getting admin privledges to do that is interesting. I'm sure I'll learn it soon enough. Suffice to say, you can't just go burning things willy-nilly. I suspect that has more to do with Digital Rights Management than security. I also wasn't able to install a Sam's Academy Course program on it. Evidently, it only works on Windows XP and Windows 2000. I also had a few videos it wouldn't let me watch. No, not porn. Educational videos.

Give Vista about two more years. More software, more hardware, and technology that we don't have today will work on it. But, it will always have that DRM problem. For right now, I still prefer Ubuntu over Windows or Mac. I don't like my Operating System tell me what I can do or not do.

Ubuntu has it's share of problems, too. Growing pains. The lastest version -Feisty Fawn 7.04 came out on Thursday. The reviews are excellent. People love it. At least, the ones who are able to get it on their system. Seems that the same installation problems Edgy went through initially are happening again. I'm not sure how many, but quite a few people in the forums are having problems. I do read about people with no troubles at all.

When I upgraded to Edgy, I did it about three months after it had come out. By then, most of the bugs were fixed, and any updates I did went to the absolute latest programs.

I have finals next week, and can't afford to mess anything up on this laptop till they are over. That, and I can't take the mental time to focus on customizing an installation either. So, even if I wanted to upgrade right now, I'm having to do the forced patience thing. Evidently, it's paid off. I might wait another few weeks, and see what other issues Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has. I might even let this computer ride out the 18 month cycle.