When Ubuntu 7.04 was released, I downloaded a copy. I didn’t experiment with it much at the time. I have been caught up in the whirlwind of owning my new Mac. Well, I was using my laptop the other night and decided to toss in my Ubuntu CD. It rebooted into the full Ubuntu environment, where you can use the OS without actually installing it. I ended up being stunned at how well it operated, despite the fact that it was running entirely from the CD. All of my devices, including wireless Internet, worked without a hitch.

Today, I decided to actually install Ubuntu on my laptop. This is as easy as booting the CD and clicking “install” on the desktop. I was only asked a few simple questions, such as language and time zone information. Installation was a breeze. It didn’t take long at all. I am using it now to write this blog entry. I hadn’t used Linux before on a processor any higher than an old Pentium-III. My Dell laptop is much faster than that and Linux is surprisingly snappy. Even the external media player buttons work, without any setup at all.

My only complaint is that it isn’t easy to choose between Ubuntu and Windows for the default operating system. This should be made clear and simple during installation. It knows I use Windows, because it had to resize my Windows NTFS partition to make room for Linux. I wish it would ask me which OS I want to boot to. If nothing else, make it an easy option in the system preferences. The only way I could configure this was using the Terminal and manually editing the menu.lst file in the Grub folder. It took me a couple of tries to get it so that Windows booted automatically after five seconds. Still, that is small potatoes compared to Linux from years past.

Ubuntu 7.04 is awesome. I am very happy with it. The new desktop effects are really cool. I have only been using it for a couple of hours now and I am very happy with it all around. I think the Linux community has a clear winner. Thanks to Ubuntu, I think Linux may finally be a true desktop contender.

Me and Laura both are on a big Pogo.com gaming kick. I had visited the site in years past, but didn’t get hooked until more recently. I’ve played games on Yahoo and MSN, but Pogo is my favorite. I haven’t actually tried Yahoo Games in a while. It got kind of stale. There were no rewards. As for MSN, I love the reward badges, but hate that the whole site is so heavily built for Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer. Almost none of the games play on my Mac, which is ridiculous.

Pogo, on the other hand, mostly has Java-coded web games, which work on my PC platform. A few of the games do require IE and Active X (like Bejeweled), but I have found there to be decent alternatives to these that use Java (i.e. Sweet Tooth). Pogo is a product of EA Games, who I have much more admiration for than Microsoft. I love the reward of earning tokens. You can use them to buy in to nightly, weekly, or monthly drawings…for real money! Overall, the site itself it is a pleasure to navigate and use. Adding friends is also easy, allowing you to join your buddies in a game.

I now use Pogo exclusively for web gaming. I think it is the best of its kind. Laura is now a Club Pogo member. She is enjoying ad-free gaming, with access to 30+ games that I cannot access on my free account. Sweet. It is easy to lose a couple of hours on the site without even realizing it.

I love stuff about time and visiting the atomic clocks online. I don’t know if this website is any sort of official time keeper, but this is the coolest clock I have ever seen: Polar Clock.

I have seen a crop of newspaper articles lately where some egghead motorist mouths off about saving gas by driving slower. Gimme a break. Please do not follow this advice. People on the highway don’t need any more excuses to drive slower than they already do. I don’t care if it saves gas or not. Ask yourself how much your time is worth. If the speed limit on the interstate is 70, then drive 75. These clowns in the paper said they drove from state to state over the Fourth of July driving 60 mph! Are they nuts! That should be illegal.

I can’t help the fact that we have cars that run on oil and gasoline. I wish that wasn’t the case, but I am not about to drive any slower to save a few nickels and dimes. My car’s A/C doesn’t even work, so I am saving already. If you want to save on gas, go buy a more fuel efficient car and ditch the SUV.

Have you tried meebo.com? It is a website where you can log on to all of your instant messaging accounts in one place, with any software installation necessary! It not only gets the job done, it does so with ease and in style.

I often log on to IM services (usually with AOL and Yahoo). I don’t use the native software for any of them. I don’t need to, but keep in mind that in order to do some advanced features, you may need to use the actual native programs. Ads, feature bloat, and memory hogging are the mean reasons why I don’t download a one of them. I usually use an all-in-one chat program, such as Trillian (Win), Adium (Mac), and Gaim (now called Pidgin), which lets me log on to most any network there is today. But you really don’t need to install any of these programs. You can chat with all of your buddies on any service via Meebo. I used it exclusively when I first bought my Mac. I found that I really didn’t need anything more.

It has all the features you need and it works fantastically. You’ll soon forget you are using a website at all. You can sign on to any single chat service outright, but if you use more than one, I recommend creating a Meebo username so you can store all of your accounts under one roof. That way you need only sign on to their site with a single username and password.

I hear they have a sweet new mobile version of the site as well, for phone users. I have no interest in that, but if you want to sign on to your account from anyone’s computer, or your own at home without all the feature bloat, try Meebo. You won’t be disappointed. It finally does for instant messaging what webmail has done for email. All of your friends and contacts are automatically pulled from the server for each service, so absolutely no effort is required. Let’s hope this service is around for years to come.

A few months ago, I’d written Netflix an email with a suggestion that they make it easier to reorder my movie queue. Sure, they have always allowed you to edit the number next to the each title. You can do so and change the order of your movies, completing the action with an “update” button. It did get the job done, but I am sure that I am not the only person who suggested that this be made easier.

Well, tonight I pull up my movie queue and a message comes onscreen telling me that users can now reorder their titles by simply dragging and dropping, in true AJAX style. Totally freakin’ awesome. Hooray!

I love my Mac Mini, but due to its small size, it admit that it does have a smallish hard drive inside. It is fairly adequate for general purposes, but since moving my entire music library over to the new machine, and capturing some camcorder videos with iMovie, my space was filling up very fast.

This past Friday, I went to Best Buy and picked up a Seagate FreeAgent 320 GB 7200rpm USB 2.0 external hard drive. It is sweet! It is black with discreet cord connections at the bottom, and has cool futuristic amber side lighting. It runs virtually silent, and file transfers are very speedy. The drive came pre-formatted with Windows NTFS. I had to reformat it for the Mac OS in order to use it to read and write from my Mac. I since have moved my iTunes library over to the new hard drive, my digital camera picture backups, as well as my new iMovie projects. This freed up the majority of space that was consuming my internal drive. The packaging and instructions with the new drive were all extremely user-friendly and enjoyable. Good work, Seagate! This should fill my space needs for some time to come. I am very satisfied.