hobbies

OK...so since Felix came along I've sort of put most of my hobbies on the back burner because I want to do my fair share of child-rearing and currently that means trying to take care of him as much as possible when I'm available (a.k.a. not at work) and also give Andrea as much of a break from it as possible since she is the one who is, essentially, doing that job full-time and after hours on-call as well (he still wakes up at least once a night for feeding). So the hobbies I kept up with are mainly ones that can be done on the bus ride to and from work (scribbling story outlines in my notebook, watching TV shows on my laptop). Andrea has essentially put her career goals on hold to raise Felix so I think giving up my after-work entertainment and hobbies like aikido and taking apart/putting together computers (and associated computer tinkering) is not that huge of a sacrifice in comparison. And of course, both Andrea's full-time career and my part-time hobbies, are not gone for good, just on hold until Felix lets us resume them to whatever degrees we can.

That said...I think I'm finally going to make the switch from running Windows to Linux as my main home OS. Ubuntu has gotten to the point where I feel I can really, honestly, replace XP as the OS on the "main" computer. And part of the reason for this is particularly BECAUSE of my hobby reduction. What are the reasons for using Windows? Because you need it for A) most commercial software B) almost ALL commercial games. Honestly, I don't buy a lot of software. Almost none, really. I've "sampled" quite a bit of software and many games (in the past, not really so much at all in the recent past).

But what do I do with my home computer right now? I download TV shows. I burn DVDs. I browse the web. Maybe do some email. And every once in a while run a webcam to capture police raids in my neighborhood. Mostly my home computer just sits and downloads TV shows and then serves them up to us to watch on a laptop somewhere else in the house.

So here's the thing: I don't have time for games, especially not the super whizzbang new games that come out now. I'd love to, but don't, probably won't ever, have time (or even money) for doing video editing (other than the once-a-year fun project at work). My current hardware, which will not see any major upgrades in the forseeable future, is not cutting edge and probably won't support Vista anyway. So, as the next MS OS is coming out, I might as well move completely off of MS. ALSO, Andrea is a Mac user and I can't imagine that the communication between a Linux computer and her Unix-based OSX laptop could be any worse (and probably even better than) than that with a Windows machine. And to top it off, I have an AMD64 processor that is going to waste running standard XP (I never made the leap to Xp 64 because it sounded like a LOT more work and poor peripheral support). Why not run a 64-bit Ubuntu which is much better (and freely) supported?

So, maybe sometime in the next few weeks our mother's helper will provide enough slack for Andrea that can trickle down to me and allow me to reload my computer with Ubuntu... we shall see.

And by the way, boy is it ever dead at work on the day after Thanksgiving.