... this is like running a hair salon and then letting Britney come in and cut her own hair. And charging her only $5 for it. And selling the photos.

If you buy a PC from Best Buy and don't immediately boot it into a Linux install then you are an idiot.

Then it would be more like running a hair salon and giving your male patrons something for the weekend and your female patrons some root conditioner.

I pride myself on being a know-it-all but in this case I want to thank you sincerely; I have never heard of NetBeans before but after you mentioned it I tried it and it is now my favourite Python IDE. Thanks!

Glad you asked.

Make sure you give Freemind a try - it really is superb.

I guess I'd rather not die and be pissed off about it ...

"What did he say?"
"I dunno - here - give him this iPhone - it has a translation app"
"Nah - it's bust - no network signal in this area, something about the local cell provider not supporting network heavy phones in this area - If only it was a Toshiba"
"Anyway, where's that syringe gone ..."

... ants that is...

Clever statistics cannot hide the fact that road traffic deaths are usually accidental and terrorist bombings are not. Personally I'd rather die in an accident than at the hands (or underpants) of a bomber. Maybe it's just me - so please feel free to trot over to Kashmir where terrorist attacks are much more frequent (probably more than road deaths) and act like a white guy and see what happens.
Of course I am spooked and it's the terrorists who did it --- not my government (I hate them too but for different reasons) -- the government I can vote out of office, the terrorists I cannot.
Pay no attention to self-serving statistics.

You know I wouldn't have responded except that you seemed to be levelling some criticism at me (and missing the 'I' point of view). So here goes with some unnecessarily vitriolic responses...

1. If I needed grep to find email then I think I would rather go to hell, which is where you obviously already.

2. Gmail may lose data but cannot believe that it does so as often as a regular user unless you are on crack.

3. If you can SSH from your work PC then you are probably breaking a whole load of company security policies and should be fired.

So, you are in hell, on crack, and soon to be fired.

I, on the other hand, am drinking vodka, have half a dozen laptops in various locations from where I can access all my email and documents without having to do a single thing.

Seriously - this is dumb - IT projects, just like life, will often fail. We know they will and we know why. If it was such a problem then clients and project managers would actually do something about it - but they don't. So in that case all I care about is that I get some of the money - and I work in IT - so I do. Hooray!

Also, failure isn't such a bad thing - my past relationships failed, I didn't regret them (well, ok, I did...) - my latest poem failed to be any good, I didn't regret trying - my last batch of home brew has gone bad (I may still drink it of course) but that's life.

I regret nothing ;) the speed and agility one gains from 'light' but imperfect solutions is far better than the effort required to do anything else.

Plain text is best of course, but binary formats are easier for dimwit colleagues to understand - and I get paid quicker that way too. We both have problems diff'ing between binary formats so most of the time they don't bother and neither do I - no loss really because most documents have a very limited lifetime (especially when you use LiveLink :). It's kind of a devil's pact - I promise to write documents in MS Word if you promise never to ask me to figure out the history of changes or keep older versions.

Email is the same story really- I never really searched through past email, but I did lose archives during sync operations and missed having access to email when at the office. Gmail wins this battle every time. Another devil's pact - I promise to reply to emails quickly wherever I am if you promise never to ask me to remember what we talked about.

It sounds a bit lackadaisical - and it is - because life's really like that - and in the real world of the idiots no one even backs up their computers - so we are already on to a winner! And in the real world it's always better to have an immediate if imperfect (but rosier) recall of past events than it is to say 'yeah, well let me just go and grep that for you' because not only does that sound dorky, but no one will thank you for remembering the truth (not if you want to be president that is :)

OK, so when it gets serious, i.e. when I start coding (because emails, documents, spreadsheets are just the pointless stuff that stops me from coding) then it's plain text, Python and Mercurial SCM every single time. No argument. Colleagues can't understand how Mercurial works? Then I tell them to find another job. Another devil's pact ... let me use my own tools and I will write good software for you.

Basically, aside from coding work, life's too short to worry about retracing your steps --- it's much easier (and rosier) to try and remember what you 'think' happened and go from there.

One past client had a rule that all email was auto-deleted after two months ... sound horrific, but boy did it stop all the 'you said' 'he said' arguments... (also, stopped any horrible litigation :)

The killer app in all these years, as I transition from thinking like a coder to thinking like a mild alcoholic, has been Freemind, which helps me organise my thoughts and tasks but is practically useless for keeping a history of changes (ok, so it does, but the whole 'history' keeping doesn't work in mind maps). The thing about Freemind is that keeping information in a mind map somehow etches that same information in your brain - so I can remember almost exactly what's in my Freemind project map.

So, in summary, drink vodka...

.... just what I need to fool my clients into using Ubuntu instead of crappy Microsoft XP.

I was trying to be polite to De Icaza :) but by suggesting we boycott Gnome (in the same damn sentance) I had hoped that would indicate where I stand on his whole surreal Microsoft love affair (to make it clear - I HATE IT)
Also, Novell, for literally going to bed with Microsoft (I HATE IT)
Also Jono Bacon, for giving the Boycott Novell guy a hard time on FOSS Weekly (I HATE HIM FOR THAT)
And finally Microsoft, for all the crappy software, every changing interfaces, having had a part in inventing web services (which I like, so it makes it worse), having a damn good tech support site (which again I like but also regret), inventing visual basic for applications, SmartTags and Clippy, the way my work laptop takes 30 minutes to start (I HATE MICOSOFT)
So, to summarise, I HATE MICROSOFT, NOVELL, ICAZA, BACON, MOST OF AMERICA

Have you thought of re-booting your Emacs addiction?

gVim was perfect - I used to write all of my documents in restructured text (gVim addon or rst2pdf to get PDFs) and all my emails with Mutt and Pine.

One day I switched to Freemind and Open Office for documents and Gmail for email ... so terribly un-geek like, but so much easier.

Never looked back.

You should give it a try.

Surely the Evangeline* is War email is pure and simple evidence that they are evil and we should do everything in our power to oppose them. A company as big as that should be scrupulously decent and honest and try to avoid any embarrassment --- but apparently they no longer feel embarrassed about their own actions --- a bit like a friend of mine who gets high and then acts like a c**ck but really doesn't seem to feel ashamed of his own behaviour --- so he keeps on doing stupid things until I hit him. Facebook are the same; sometimes even Google.
In all cases, we-the-people need to beat them back into behaving decently.
Boycott Microsoft.
Also, boycott Novell (stfu Jono Bacon...)
And whilst I like Ubuntu and De Icaza, also boycott Gnome.
Not just at home on your crappy home PCs and laptops --- but in the office too.

(*we are all lost)

... but we're not all writers or rock stars.