The switch itself was pretty seamless. I could access all of my NTFS drives, both internal and external ones, my mobile broadband USB modem worked immediately as did my Wacom tablet. Even my ancient scanner worked as soon as I plugged it in, the same which could not be said with XP or Vista. For that, the manufacturer wanted to sell me the updated drivers. Software-wise, I have everything a web developer/designer/automated QA engineer/whatevertheheckIam needs: GIMP, Inkscape, vi, Firefox. I could install MySQL and Apache without it seeming like some bastardized unholy union. w00t x2!

That isn’t to say that I’ve been completely Windows free the past year. My work laptop is a Mac with three guest instances of XP for QA purposes. Even then, I spend most of my time on that machine at the command prompt – the Selenium server is the one that gets to muck around with the fancy GUI and the VMs. My personal laptop is still 64-bit Vista partly for non-work QA purposes, partly as a games console, and partly just in case I get the full screening again by the TSA. I suspect a security checkpoint isn’t exactly the best place to preach the virtues of FOSS… I have resorted to using Wine when there’s a piece of software I’d like to use that lacks a Linux version (would it kill you to have one, Evernote?) but it’s rare that I cannot find a suitable alternative.

Has switching made me more productive with my various personal projects, one of the primary reasons for the switch? Er, um, well, y’see, it’s like this… not really. But that has less to do with OS and more to do with work & family and overall motivation for and interest in said projects. Do I find my day-to-day use of this machine less aggravating and more enjoyable? A thousand times yes, and that is reason enough in and of itself.

More excuses about the lack of updates will arrive by RSS in about 4-6 weeks!

About a month ago I found myself with more free time than I had anticipated, so I did what most people would do in that sort of situation: I took two weeks off to remove some badly-installed vinyl siding and repair and repaint a side of my house. Once that was complete and I had managed not to fall off of the scaffolding and give myself a pre-existing condition, I decided to rework my website. The design itself was around six years old and the content had been more or less static for most of the time. I had, in effect, let this site get middle-aged and go to seed. Now it was time to get on a treadmill or buy a sports car or something.

A while back I had been playing around with Illustrator and Inkscape and had created a background and color scheme that I thought was at least somewhat interesting. I quickly threw that together with an unused logo redesign I had made and took down the old crufty content. Goodbye, quirky advertising clip art from the 20s, 30s and 40s! (Don’t be sad, it will return in a future site to be named later)

I admit my first redesign (thankfully never published) was a little heavy on the jQuery. Too many things moving, too long of an animated intro. What was next, a rendering of a metal block spinning and burning down to a company logo? I decided to Keep It Simple, Stupid. I set about working on a second redesign, but for what purpose this time around? Well, why not start off with a blog and use that as a means to link to whatever experiments or projects? That seems simple enough.

I had had a blog around 9 years ago (back when people were still trying to decide between “web log”, “weblog” and “blog”) and had in fact written my own blogging platform, but this time around I decided I was going to just use WordPress. Why would a supposedly ‘webguru’ web developer do that? Simple. I didn’t want to spend the next year literally reinventing the wheel. Why bother with worrying about whether or not something was invented here when the real purpose was to engage in shameless self-promotion and to post funny pictures of cats? Once I had made my decision, I did not debate it. Such is the way of the samurai designer. It also gave me a chance to brush up on my PHP skills after years of working with Perl.

I also did not debate using some pre-packaged theme. Using this excellent tutorial as a starter and with help from the Codex, I modified the standard Kubrick theme to what you see now. And that’s how I spent my end-of-summer vacation. The End.