The last year, maybe just the last six or seven months, has taught me a lesson. I am a moral person. I don’t like feeling guilty. I don’t like to feel like I am doing something bad. I don’t like software piracy and I especially don’t like being put into that position by Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.

Someone one of these days is going to have to point out to Mr Jobs, Mr Warnock and Mr Gates that the common man can’t afford their constantly changing software. Constant upgrades are killing the empires that these men have built and more and more people are turning to alternatives because enough is enough.

Enough that I have owned seven different computers in the last decade and they are all obsolete except one - even though for the most part all they did was write text. Enough of built in obsolescence. Enough of upgrading for no practical computing reason. Enough of upgrading because the stockholders want to see the stock value rise.

Last summer I took an old 866Mhz PC with 400Mb of RAM. I installed a bunch of large disk drives in it. I installed Ubuntu Linux on it. Linux is Free software.

I want to design web sites. I can. I want to retouch images, I can. I want to get the fancy interface features Apple and Microsoft are touting in their newest releases that require behemoth hardware. I can. I can run Google Earth. I can open and edit any Microsoft Office document. I can serve any type of data on a network. I have no viruses or spyware. On an old piece of hardware no one really wants to use anymore.

After too many years, I don’t want to follow the pack anymore. I don’t care about Vista. Mac OS X is cool, but I don’t want to fork over several thousand dollars for Apple hardware to run it on. I’d rather do something worthwhile with my kids.

Ubuntu - Linux for human beings.

Enough said.

I’ve finally had the chance to start looking at the CSS that lies in front of WordPress (the “database backend” of this blog), and so I’ve begun hacking away at some themes that I have found ~ trying to find a voice that I recognize for these pages.

For now, the stable heliomedia weblog look is based on Frederic de Villamil’s theme “Back in Black”, which you can peruse here: http://www.eretzvaju.org/download/black

I found the aesthetics of his theme close to what I could call my own; and I must admit that I’m learning new CSS tricks along the way.

Cheers Fred!

E.

Changing web hosts is a drag.

Especially when you want dynamic content hosting. Setting up MySQL databases, webmail, blogs, forums and wikis isn’t a simple thing… no matter a control panel vendor says. I’ve spent more time with Tech support in the last couple of days than I ever have. But then before all I needed was simple HTML hosting.

To be fair, the Tech Support has been great. I can chat with them and usually everything gets taken care of in about 15 minutes to half an hour.

Word to the wise: switch hosts before your previous contract expires. Give yourself a lot of overlap time and don’t change the DNS until all the kinks are ironed out.