Changing habits… and dreaming a bit

It has been a hot month of August as I visited back home in Italy and even here in Germany, I mean… everything is relative!

Returning home after a few days off is typically a moment of (small) revelations. Things that had gone unnoticed, in the day to day routine, can stand out when the background changes. Yesterday morning for example, the satellite TV receiver was looking at me sad and lonely from the back of the living room!  It had been months since I had turned it on last.  Actually I just realized that the only user of the TV screen in my house for the last several months has been my 20 months old son. Not much of a user either, as he has only been watching Bamby II (in 15 minutes installments) before going to bed each night …

What happened to the news? I don’t trust the TV anymore… I check things on the internet.

What happened to the occasional movies? I hate the frequent commercial interruptions (even if less frequent here than in the US) so I mostly watch them off DVDs (on my wife Mac mostly) or streaming directly from the “media server” ( a Linux machine by the way…)

Speaking of PCs, I turned my attention to the “desktop” which is a Windows XP machine we keep in the office room. That one has been off for several months now as well. Last I remember using it was because of a printing job (we are not printing that much either… apparently, good for the trees). The cheap inkjet printer I bought last year (for Euro 59) is not natively supported by my Linux distro (Ubuntu), so I attached it to the XP machine making it probably the last and only useful application for it!?

All the action is now on the Linux media server and my (and my wife’s) laptop(s). While my wife is already on OS X, which covers pretty much all her needs, I am still running on a (company issue) crancky IBM laptop under Windows XP.

Could that last installation of Windows on my lap be replaced by something else one of these days ?

There are three critical systems I use every day on that laptop: Office, Outlook and MPLAB.

The copy of Microsoft Office I use is so old and basic that I am pretty sure it could be easily and compatibly replaced by OpenOffice on Linux or similar package on the Mac.

The version of Outlook I am using is very old as well, and it was not a long time ago when we were using a completely different system. I am not sure why we did the switch to MSFT as I did not notice any advantage in the transition, at least there was none from a user perspective…

But it is truly MPLAB that seems to be last bastion of Windowsness…

Now I heard rumors that that might be changing… well’ see… perhaps next year, I will be writing a similar post and realize that I am now completely TV and Windows free and working on my shiny brand new and ultra-thin Mac Air !?