Koplowicz.com

I remember the early "dot-com" days in 1999 and 2000.  It was an exciting time, and as a college student I had front row seats: a new computer, high speed internet access, plenty of free time, and surrounded by fellow students with a loose set of morals, especially when it came to things like pirating mp3's.  No one really knew what the internet would turn into.  One very popular technology was Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP.  Back then, it meant a website with a telephone keypad that let us make free long distance calls.

I just played one of the most fun games I've experienced in a long time.  It's only half finished, it's open source, and they want you to subscribe to a subversion repository.
My relationship with SVN is similar to the Republicans' relationship with public health care.  Not friendly.  So, I found someone who maintains their own Ubuntu-compatible repo for the game.  It took about five minutes to download and install.  The interface isn't terribly intuitive and there's no tutorial, but I managed to start a new single-player game.

Many years ago, my father in law and I bought several very old, cheap webcams so that our extended families could skype with each other.  Windows has long since stopped supporting this webcam, and the Taiwanese company that made the webcams have long since stopped supporting the driver.  Yelena's new MacBook has a gorgeous built-in webcam and I bought another new webcam for Nathan's Babycam, which I intend to set up again.  But I still have these old webcams and don't want to throw them away.  What to do?

I've now been running Ubuntu on two computers for 24 hours.  Here are my thoughts.

After five years, I'm switching back to Ubuntu.  There are three reasons for this: (1) a feeling that it really doesn't matter what distro you use, (2) there's a reason Ubuntu is the most popular, and (3) They'll let me have my Goddamn desktop menu bar.  Okay, it's mostly about the menu bar.

Now I know why law offices don't use open source software.  Pleadings.

An op-ed from today's New York Times talks about trusting your computer when it wants to automatically update.  The article reflects people's general ambivalent attitude toward computers: things that get in the way and boss you around and will theoretically make your life easier and more convenient but usually just slow you down and drive you nuts.  This attitude represents