stillhacking

After a week away, I'm back. It feels funny to not write any code for a full week. I had my notebook with me and limited Internet access during the week but time and energy kept me from coding. We took the week away to finish up a long term project. The project, which was the major renovation of a house that's been in my wife's family for many years, never had a specific time line but it feels good to be done. While we put a lot of time and energy into this multi -year project it was truly a labor of love. Because I enjoy programming so much, on some levels I liken it to software projects I have been a part of over the years which take on a life of their own. When we complete or reach major milestones on such projects we should take time to reflect on our efforts. I took a good bit of time before we left to come home and on the six hour ride back to do just that. It's not all that unlikely that I'll take on a similar effort in the future and I am confide

A couple of weekends ago we decided it was well past time to get rid of some old computer hardware. I don't consider myself an environmental nut but I must admit I was bothered by the fact that I could pay $3 and dump as much electronic equipment as I wanted in my local landfill. I was previously under the impression that this was against local, state, and federal law but then I am sometimes guilty of listening to media folks who don't know the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day (so check your facts). The bottom line this hardware was taking up room and we were allowed to dump it. So after pondering this for a week or so and being a long time Linux fan, I made some time to check out a few of the smaller Linux distros. I must say as I write this I am still not sure there is one I would recommend to anyone who has an old 200Mhz computer with 64MB of RAM on it but Vector Linux is installing as I write (I did not say I got rid of everything). Anyway I was surpri