Looking back on letters I wrote in 93-94 from Indonesia, what strikes me is the consistency of message that characterizes each one from beginning to end over the course of three or four pages. These days, my emails don't look like that, and I've usually begin thinking about the next message before I've finished composing the first one.
But the consistency of my writing is no surprise when I think back to the lifestyle I enjoyed at that point in my life and the environment in which I composed my thoughts and expressed myself on paper. Working in Indonesia at that time, I was blissfully ignorant of the Internet. I lived in a simple house in a Javanese neighborhood overrun
with small families, barnyard animals, and wet with the splash of water from the well. I wrote nights on the big wooden table lit by kerosene lamp, with my journal on one side and a big bottle of fountain pen ink on the other. There was no TV, and few distractions except the call of the geckos. I was free to think.
Continue reading "What's Old is New Again: the Quest for Distraction-Free Writing"
On 21 July 2006 I updated www.therandymon.com from Joomla 1.04 to 1.10. In about the same time period I built a completely new site, http://www.gotonicaragua.com. This article looks at both sites simultaneously because the latter was installed with 1.10.
Continue reading "Joomla 1.10 Upgrade Process"
The unfortunate truth is that word processors don't do a whole lot more today than they did 10 years ago, so to encourage continued upgrading, software makers wield the planned obsolescence of document formats like a sledgehammer. So we’ve learned to communicate with each other and are now enjoying the brave new Information Age, in which most any computer can communicate with most any other computer, right? Not completely. Certainly we've come a long way forward in being able to interchange information from the “bad old days” when specific equipment was required to access specific information. But Nirvana it is not: at the opening of the 21st century data formats have become a competitive weapon, and proprietary protocols are being wielded in a way that leads us back towards a world of less interoperability, not more.
Continue reading "The Battle for your Data"
It wouldn't be stretching the truth too much to say that Copywrite sold me a Macintosh. It's that good. Copywrite was made for the creative writer. It is "missing" things you'd expect from other word processors, like the ability to make tables and so on, but that's not Copywrite's intended audience. Copywrite is for writers, and as creative writing software goes, it has no equal.
Continue reading "Copywrite: No Distractions"
As of mid-March 2006, browser statistics for this website are as follows:
Continue reading "Zeitgeist March 2006"
The real inspiration to try out BSD came from wrestling with Linux’s sloppy virtual console configuration. I love the console and use it for a lot of my work, not because I’m forced to but because it’s a less distracting environment for when I write or answer my mail. But goofing around with mutt, emacs, LOCALE environment variables, and console fonts that were missing important glyphs made me wonder if there wasn’t a better way. BSD's reputation for excellence piqued my curiosity, and a free CD made it easy to experiment.
Continue reading "FreeBSD: Flirtation with Excellence"
In 1997, a small electronic device that could have revolutionized the writer's world was created in the research department of a small British company. It did come to revolutionize the world of electronic pocket gadgets but was quickly overcome by another company's products. The device was the Psion 5 and later, the 5MX. The reason it was quickly overcome was because it was marketed not to writers but to businesspeople, and not as the world's lightest laptop but as an agenda and personal digital information organizer, the very class of device that would later come to be known by the name of the device that would dominate the market: the palm pilot.
Continue reading "The Psion 5: for Writers on the Move"
In November 2004 I wiped the hard drive of my PIII Compaq laptop in irritation at how slowly SUSE Linux 9.2 was running, and installed Xandros Open Circulation Release 2. It was lean and mean, ran quickly on my old hardware, and was in general a positive experience, so in January 2005 I purchased their Deluxe Desktop 3 and installed it. I later moved on to SUSE Linux 9.3, but reinstalled Xandros again in January 2006 after FreeBSD hosed my MBR and I was unable to fix it without reinstalling something else, and Xandros was the first disk I reached for.
Here are some thoughts on Xandros.
Continue reading "Xandros Deluxe Desktop 3.0"
In December 2005, I made the move from a system of static webpages that worked well for my way of thinking but didn't captivate the reader or encourage browsing of my site, to a PHP-based content managed site running Joomla. A month later I've uploaded 50 articles and the site is registering hundreds of hits a day. Overall I'm impressed with the software, the things it's enabled me to do with my content, and the power of this platform. The following are a few thoughts about Joomla in general.
Continue reading "Some Thoughts on Joomla"
On a typical web surfing day I hit two or three of my favorite tech sites, two American news sources and a half dozen foreign news sources, for a grand total of about eleven web sites and maybe twenty articles. That's a lot of clicking. And it can get to be a lot more than that if you factor in a couple of blogs, or any other site that has rapidly changing content. There must be an easy way to keep up on a variety of sites.
Continue reading "Stay Up to Date with News Feeds"
I first heard of the Dvorak keyboard somewhere on a Slashdot thread back in 2001, and checked out a couple of sites to confirm my suspicion that the Dvorak key layout is a neat idea.
Continue reading "Smart Typing with Dvorak"
January 2001. I'd completed my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in the dry mountains north of Estelí a year previous, and returned to Nicaragua from a brief shopping trip to the States with a Compaq laptop running Windows 98 SE, a 12 string guitar, and a whole lot of enthusiasm for a modern lifestyle in Nicaragua's unassuming capital. The Internet had become huge in the quiet years I'd spent in the mountains. I'd been essentially glad to give technology - computers, specifically - a miss in all that time, but after such a prolongued drought of information and intellectual stimulation I was thrilled to be able to connect to the Internet and feel my horizons expand.
Continue reading "Birth of an Era - Linux comes to Nicaragua"
From 2005-2014 this website ran on
Joomla content management software, produced by Open Source Matters. This article details some of the tips and tweaks that made this site run smoothly as I was installing and configuring (this page is a work in progress and the website evolves).
Continue reading "Joomla Install"
Chalk me up as another satisfied Ubuntu user. Kubuntu, really, which is Ubuntu with the KDE desktop in lieu of Gnome. That's an important distinction, as far as I'm concerned: when I first abandoned SUSE and was looking around for a new distro, I checked out Ubuntu and rejected it because I simply prefer KDE over Gnome. It's not religious to me, the KDE desktop just fits the way I work, and that means a lot. So when I heard about Kubuntu, I was excited to give it a try, and after a couple of days tinkering with the live distro, I made the decision to install. And no regrets! The following comments apply to Breezy Badger, the second official release.
Continue reading "Kubuntu for the Masses"
People like me keep Microsoft's upper management awake at night: In 2000 I bought a new laptop, which
came preloaded with Windows 98 and Microsoft Works. I paid around $400
more for a copy of Office 2000 Premium (with Front Page, Access, and
Photodraw in addition to the regular suite of office programs).
Windows did everything I wanted it to do, and I had no reason to
change operating systems. Instead, one year later, I
reformatted my hard drive, installed Linux, and liked it.
I found Linux to be powerful, stable, inexpensive, and a lot of fun.
There are still times when I revert to Windows to accomplish a specific task,
but those occasions are less and less frequent and I'm now
looking forward to the day when I can do away with Windows on
my computer entirely. Here's why I made the change to Linux, why I don't regret it,
and a whole lot of links, in case you're asking yourself the same
questions about Linux I was (updated 14 Feb 2006) :
Continue reading "Questions and Answers for Those Curious about Linux"
