The perhaps greatest curse of this world is how everything decays. Wear and tear, aging. Everything withers, fades, falls apart and corrupts. The only thing humans create that doesn't require maintenance is thoughts, ideas. If it can be written down, or digitised and thus copied, it has a chance of escaping the jaws of time.
[img_assist|nid=72|title=New horizons|desc=My new ubuntu desktop…|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=160] had a nasty reminder of that recently. My old computer gave up after a thunderstorm. Now it boots very slowly and crashes randomly. It's almost like 1997. So I've got a new machine from work. An old Dell. It's a fairly good machine, but the hard disk is slow and it only has 256MB of RAM. So now I run Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) on it. I know I could run less RAM-expensive software on it, but I've gotten fed up on micromanaging all kinds of settings. GNOME and Ubuntu gives me a nice and easily managed desktop, although not the same amount of fine grained control as other linux distributions – but I don't need that 99% of the time anyways. So here I am…
