Windows Vista – Ubuntu – Windows 7

ubuntulogo Spending a week with a different operating system on my laptop is like learning a new religion. It’s intensely interesting, insightful, a true learning experience! Ultimately it teaches one what they took for granted about the things they already knew and cherished.

So I spent a refreshing week on the linux side of the operating system fence last week.  In the end, I had to come back to Windows.  It wasn’t the operating system, it wasn’t the software, it wasn’t the stability, nor was it any of the big things that people run into when trying to run any flavor of linux.

Instead, it was the little things – very little things.  Like not having the play/pause, and volume buttons on my laptop not work with the media player.  Or the media player not playing WMA files by default without a trip to the command line to make it work – yeah it matters, I have 15GB of tunes in WMA that I’m not re-encoding.

windows-7 I ran into a number of things that simply needed a little tweak or manual intervention.  Any one of them nothing at all a real problem.  All the really important things just simply worked.  For example, I didn’t have to find one single driver for my laptop hardware for Ubuntu 8.10 – it all worked out of the box.  My favorite Firefox plug-ins, and therefore my main work environment, were all set up in the same amount of time that it takes on Windows – and worked just as expected.  Email was set up in Evolution quickly and, again, just worked.

No, it was all the little things that added up made me decide I still needed to be running Windows.  I’m less a “techy” person than I have been in the past, and while it’s fun to try new things, and experiment, I need a system that I don’t have to think about or fight with.  I need something that simply works on every level at any point, and for me, Windows is that system.

So I’ll test Windows 7 a bit and then go back to Windows Vista until Win7 is released later this year.

Twitter Is…

twitter-2 Since Twitter is the current social media darling, I thought I’d record a few thoughts I’ve had about one of my favorite online tools.  I’ve had the privilege of using Twitter for two years, and each and every person I’ve followed or had follow me along the way has taught me something new.  So here we go.

Twitter is…

  • a place for friends
  • a news outlet
  • a place to share your greatest failures & your most stunning achievements
  • an attention getter
  • a publishing platform
  • a customer service tool
  • a researcher’s dream
  • vulgar
  • the ace up your sleeve
  • brilliant
  • a new entertainment channel
  • a social network
  • a micro-blogging platform
  • a marketing tool
  • your community
  • overwhelming
  • 24x7x365 (always on)
  • a level playing field for your ideas
  • a sounding board for your thoughts
  • a comment reel for your new book
  • your starting place for your online excursions
  • the place for your organization to learn about it’s customers
  • a multicasting instant messenger
  • a game changer
  • a PR tool
  • a messaging infrastructure
  • a simple way to share & trade information
  • can be inane
  • is faster to publish to than anything else
  • is where you go to learn
  • your online “water cooler”
  • a conduit into the lives of others
  • a conduit into the idea stream of smart people

I’ve got a lot more input on what Twitter is than I could fit in this post, so I’ll work on fitting that into another format of some type.  What is Twitter to you?  I mean, what has Twitter brought to your life that you can’t believe you lived without before you discovered it?

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rickmahn

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