At this point in my life, I’ve driven from Minnesota to California twice, and done the reverse trip once. I’ve also road-tripped from Minnesota to Virginia, Kansas City (twice), and Nashville. I feel pretty confident that if I needed to, I could hop in a car and get where I needed without much effort or worry. It’s a mode of transportation I am extremely comfortable with on any scale, and am well-versed in some of its intricacies.
Why Linux? Part 1: Free As In…
During sophomore year of college, I embarked on a project to put a Linux operating system on my laptop. I had been interested ever since using a computer in one of the engineering labs which ran Ubuntu, one of the most mainstream, user-friendly distributions out there. I was intrigued both by the visual design, and the ease with which complex programs could be run. There was also the intrigue of feeling like a cool hacker, using a terminal and typing commands to get around a file system. I was hooked, and since then I’ve had a Linux distribution running on every computer I’ve owned over the past three years.
I want to spend a good chunk of time explaining my growing passion for Linux, and why I think more people should seriously consider it as an option for the computers in their lives. This first post will focus on two of the oft-repeated phrases in the Linux community, and its main inspiration: Linux is free.
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New Blog
Yesterday I switched over from using WordPress.com to hosting my blog on Bluehost and using the official WordPress blogging environment. The main difference here is when you are using WordPress.com, there is some gray area about who really has control over the content. You are ultimately at the whims of their hosting structure, and also you must pay through the nose to access the various features of the actual WordPress blogging platform it claims to deal with.
WordPress is an open-source blogging platform, and is very widely used. Wonderful plug-ins are created to increase its functionality and customizability, and I have enjoyed dealing with it. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a company run by one of the people who created the WordPress platform in the first place, but has various hosting options built in. For people who just want to get things going and keep things simple, that’s fine. I still run OHAC on WordPress.com, and things are going fine. But, I wanted more ability to be in control of my personal blog, and not have to worry about something going wrong that I didn’t have control over.
This is in large part influenced by the post I have written which will be published this upcoming week, the first part in a long series about why I use Linux. As you will understand once you read it, one main part of using Linux is freedom to customize the software you’re using, as well as software being actually free. WordPress.com provides neither of these; WordPress as a platform allows both. So, I switched things over, created a simplified dark template, and I’m loving it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it a bit as well.
Spongebob is Back
I recently discovered that Spongebob Squarepants is available on Amazon Prime Video. Since I am still a subscriber to said service, I enjoyed a fun weekend night watching the first couple of seasons. I’ve always had such positive nostalgia for the show, in large part due to how quotable it is. Little did I realize that nearly every line in the show is quotable, and how good each episode was in the early seasons. Even today, they have a certain innocent charm to them, yet the jokes still have enough depth to be legitimately funny now.
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Beating the Schedule
Now that I’ve gotten into my full-time job, and I’m familiar with the area, a certain novelty that comes with a new situation has worn off. I am not finding brand new things all the time anymore. I know where I’m getting my groceries from, I know what I’m having for lunch each day, and generally know what I’m having for dinner. To a certain extent, I have fallen into a fairly predictable schedule on a weekly basis. Thursdays I have concert band rehearsal. Sunday or Monday I record Comical Start with Grant, and edit it that night. At some point each week, I sit down and try to write a sufficient post for this blog. Every so often a surprise phone call, or an episode of OHAC comes up, which I get to work in with everything else. But overall, I’ve developed a schedule.
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