[Mon Jul 31 18:45:35 CEST 2006]

Remember that old saying according to which a lie repeated a thousand times ends up becoming the truth? People tend to use it when discussing politics, of course. Well, it applies to your technology too. I recently received a new laptop that I'm supposed to use to work remotely from Spain, and it includes a nice wireless card with an Intel chip that's perfectly compatible with Linux. During a visit to my father-in-law in Aitkin before leaving for Spain, my wife and I went into an Internet cafe (yeah, these days even small towns have them!) and attempted to connect using Windows XP... to no avail. The supposedly intelligent wizard came up with a bunch of cryptic questions about a manual or automatic setup that I just didn't understand at all. So, since the laptop is configured as a dual-boot system, I promptly booted my Ubuntu partition, selected System from the menu, then Administration and Networking, and... voila, the SSI ID even showed there by default! All I had to do was enter the WEP key and I was navigating through the web just fine. The very same thing happened when I set up my own wireless network here in the house. While Windows continued coming up with cryptic menus and choices, Ubuntu just easily sailed away. Oh, and by the way, while the Windows XP partition still doesn't show a battery on the system tray by default so I can see the status of my laptop battery at all times, Ubuntu had it there by default. To make matters worse, I haven't been able to find where the heck Windows allows me to select that widget so I can drag it to the system tray. All I've been able to find so far is the entry in the Control Panel that I have to manually launch whenever I want to see if I'm about to run out of gas. Not that all this will stop anybody from repeating over and over again that Windows is "user-friendly" to a point that Linux will never be. Baloney! An OS is only "user-friendly" if you're just used to it. Other than that, there's nothing less natural than a piece of software (mind you, any piece of software). {link to this story}

[Fri Jul 14 20:04:24 EDT 2006]

A good friend of mine just sent me a link to a pretty funny story: The Top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs, including gems such as whorepresentes.com, therapistfinder.com and powergenitalia.com. {link to this story}