Surfacing
Just a quick entry to say all’s well around here.
The past couple of weeks have been productively busy, as opposed to the past year or so where there’s not been much to show for having been busy.
I’ve dropped all my pro bono clients, dropping off a CD to the last one on Tuesday. I immedately felt much, much better—great weight lifted and all. Now I have more time available to paying clients and to do things for my own business.
Next, I’ve been putting off, at least since late autumn, work on my own PCs. I’ve always wiped and reloaded my PCs on an annual basis. I try out so much stuff that after a while, the residue builds up and causes problems. It’s been 23 months since I last did that with on my main PC, and it shows.
I’ve been living with Windows locking-up, Word crashing and all the same frustrations that most people experience. I’ve just not had the time, or the disk space to image my drives then wipe out everything and reload.
Time-wise, it’s not something I can really do at my leisure, since it generally takes me four days to do it, and leisure time is in short supply. These days too, I have to be able to work without downtime. Sure I have three PCs (four if you count Tired Cow), but the issue has been software licensing.
I resolutely refuse to run pirated software. Yet, I can afford only one license each for FrontPage (yes, I still have a client who insists upon it) Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I’ve all but completely converted to OpenOffice as a replacement for Microsoft Office, so that’s not an issue, but DW and PS are my most-used applications after basic web browsing and email.
That’s been solved, for the most part, by Nvu, the open-source web editor, and by a guy who’s released something called GimpShop, which patches the commands and menu structure of GIMP, the open-source image manipulation program, so that they closely resemble those of PhotoShop. It hasn’t been the program’s capabilities that have kept me from using GIMP, but rather, the learning curve of it’s markedly different command structure. GimpShop solves my problem of old-dog, new-tricks.
I’ve swapped some drives around, made sure I’m happy enough with Nvu and GIMP running on my Red Hat 9 Linux box/test server, and I’m now off to wreak havoc on my main PC, Wretched Excess. If I reach my goal, by this time next week Wretched Excess will dual-boot Windows XP and Fedora Core 3 Linux.
Meanwhile, I’m replacing my client newsletter with a blog on my business site. Geek stuff will move there to relieve your suffering here. Isn’t that nice?
