Taking Michelle down to Nashville for surgery labs and pre-op today. I didn't sleep well last night, was up for several hours from four-thirty on. Four-thirty is a not unreasonable hour to get up until you consider that I didn't even go to bed until one-thirty. My butt is dragging right now. Just finishing a cup of java to hopefully add that caffeine kick before going in to get dressed. It may be a long day.

Saw a slashdot article What Did You Do First With Linux? today. I found the article very interesting, I remember the first time I tried to use Linux. It was Slashdot, 1994 or so. A friend loaned me a bunch of floppies (around 15) and I tried to load it onto the 386 I had at the time. I am still not sure if the problem was me or that I was trying to put the OS on too small of a computer but it didn't work.
I next tried Linux in around 1995. I bought a box set of Red Hat version 2 and installed it on a spare computer I had. This time it took and I had a running OS. I set it up and got FVWM running as my windowing system (talk about ugly!). I have run a distro of Linux since. I followed Red Hat until Mandrake forked off of it and then ran Mandrake until Mandrake 10. I then went back to Red Hat for a while. I read about a new distro that would be arriving soon called Ubuntu. It was being started by this rich South African dude and was going to be a fork off of Debian. It was said it would be a desktop version of Debian that would be easier to install (not hard to be easier to install than Debian was at that time). I moved to Ubuntu when it was released and have used it since pretty much full time.

Today, I decided to change to focus of this blog so it will not be so limiting to me. Instead of my original idea to just discuss my feelings as a liberal in a community that is strongly conservative, I will expand to cover my feelings and ideas in general. A public diary, so to speak.

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Last night, I installed the new Ubuntu verson 9.04 that was released yesterday. It looks pretty good so far (very earlly in the process). The install was pain free and the system has had no stumbles (so far). All in all, good. Todays blog post has been made from within it.

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Mike telephoned me this morning to tell me that he had been to the BMW motorcycle dealership in Louisville to look at bikes. We had talked last night about new motorcycles for him and I suggested that he would not be doing himself well unless he at least went and looked at the BMW line. He was excited when he called but we did not talk long as my hips were hurting bad this morning when I got up and I had gone back to bed after taking a pain pill.

I called him back a little after noon, and we talked again about the BMW lineup. I suspect that he is going to try to buy one of their smaller bikes. The big downside for him is that they do not take any motorcycles on trade so he is going to have to sell his bike first. I hope he gets what he wants.

A Start...

It is a few minutes after 1AM here in south-central Kentucky and my brain is somewhat foggy. In spite of this and the fact that at the best of times my literacy is suspect, I feel compelled to start this log.

My log is called A voice in the forest because I feel more and more that I am alone, a liberal adrift in a community of conservatives. Not just conservatives, but conservatives leaning far, far to the right. I have been trying to cope with this by mainly keeping my mouth shut and venting to a few close friends and to my wife. More and more this isn't helping so I am going to try to keep a blog of my feelings and venting about things that bug me. Hopefully this will help keep me from "blowing a gasket" so to speak.

I expect to tell you (who ever "you" turns out to be) more about me in the short future but am signing off tonight (this morning?) for now.

Peace to you,
Doug