Thursday, March 8, 2007

I can already hear that banjo music...

Today I leave for Alabama for the weekend. NAWFest '07. should be a blast.

I've been getting extra nerdy in preparation for this event. My roommate Matt has a company, WhiteWaterPlayboating.com. It's still in its infancy, but he's trying to make his millions selling the sport of whitewater kayaking. So he spent about $3000 to have some web development company make a site for him. Well, after more than a year, there was still only the 'Coming Soon' page online.

So, last September, when Matt and I were rambling about the country on another kayaking trip, I decided enough was enough, and made this version of the page. This was done in about thirty minutes, sitting in the Jeep outside of a coffee shop in Fayetteville, West Virginia, stealing their internet access, while I tried desperately to remember what little bit I could of the Hyper Text Markup Language.

Well, that worked out for a brief fix, but obviously not of a quality I would want to associate myself with, nor would WhiteWaterPlayboating.com.

So, I dusted off my web development 'skills' and put them to good use and made the page(s) you see now when you visit the site. Obviously no one needs to worry about losing their job as a web developer. (With the exception of the woman who took Matt's 3 grand and ran.)


I also accomplished all of this while working on the 'new' laptop I received from work. It's an old Sony VAIO, probably a Pentium III, 256 MB RAM, Windows 2k.

But while trying to clean all of the crap that had accumulated on it, I realized that the previous owner had partitioned the 30 GB hard drive into to partitions. And I did something I've always wanted to do: I tried Linux.


I had just seen an article online about dual-booting, and decided it was time for me to jump right in. I downloaded the latest version of Kubuntu, burned it to a CD, and went to town. And I have no intention of going back. This is great. It was easy. Almost too easy. I would never re-boot back into Windows, if it weren't for the fact that I have to use a Windows program for work. I've done a little research, and no one seems to have gotten it to work yet. So I'll just keep booting back into Windows whenever I have to. If there was only a web version of the software we use.... Oh well, can't win 'em all.


(p.s. All of this has been typed, posted, edited and re-posted on my beautiful Linux machine.)

(p.p.s. The link for this trip's travelblog is here.)

3 comments:

Margaret said...

Wow, Donald got nerd all over your comments.

I was just gonna say way to go for using the ubiqutious Papyrus font. I'm seeing that font everywhere lately.

Jim said...

Bluh?

-al said...

Yeah, so I'm still loving Linux. I've taken most of your suggestions, thank you very much, Donald.
Work is just a plain old POP3 email, so I don't have need for evolution, but I'll still check it out.
I'm going to need to upgrade my wireless. I'm still using 'B' wireless, so I have limited connectivity as it is. But I did install wireless manager, and it works so much better.
As far as 'getting nerd on my blog,' I'd like to point out that a) I got nerd on it first, and willingly. and
b)it's all been very good advice.