Jeff Longland

1. trampled on or down
2. oppressed; subjugated; tyrannized over

So today I’m feeling like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, minus the weapons… but who knows, maybe I’ll meet a Nazi gun dealer and find myself a missile launcher. Anyhoo, I’ve been falling down, literally. Yesterday evening I took a face plant after tripping on a small, inconspicuous twig - I stumbled, trying to regain balance, alas, I was destined to fall. My glasses slipped off and fell to the ground - not broken, but thoroughly scuffed - enough to drive me nuts when sitting in front of a computer - which is all day. But just so I get the message, destiny has it that I’m going to slip’n’slide my way down a hill this morning - covering myself in mud and grass. If it weren’t for having to catch the bus and get to the office for a meeting, maybe I would’ve gone for another trip down the hill… but that would be too much fun. So a quick change of clothes and then a change of route to catch the next bus. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Oh, and now it’s raining… and I’m without umbrella. Not a good day. Why this is blog worthy I don’t know… but it feels good to get it off my chest.

For what audience remains, apologies for the lack of content. Fall is here… At least there’s good music.

So I ran into a funky error while installing Adobe Acrobat 7.0 - off to Adobe’s site for some support. And boy oh boy, do they have lots of it. And by it, I mean confusion. Or at least for the average user. For my particular problem, Adobe lists thirteen possible solutions! How is the average computer user supposed to deal with that?  My particular issue was fixed by cleaning up my PATH variable but I’m fairly familiar with environment variables - what about the average user?

I know that there are good applications and equally good support in the world…  but as I’m wearing my average user goggles I continue to see barrier upon barrier to reliable computing…

Oy. I’ve puttered with Linux for a few years, but I decided 6 or 7 months ago that I was going to cast away Windows completely - or at least at home. I’m running SuSe 10 / OpenSuSe / whatever the heck they’re calling it these days. I only use a handful of apps on any regular basis: Firefox, Thunderbird, Netbeans, BlogBridge, xterm, ssh, etc. But every once in a while I run across something I can’t do and it irks me: VPN client doesn’t support Linux, taking quizzes in WebCT Vista 4 I’m unable to save questions or complete the quiz! I could go on with the little things, but for the most part my experience has been positive, even on a PIII 750MHz. Sure, sometimes the road is a little bumpy but I think I’ve reached a point where I feel that I’m as productive in Linux as I am in Windows. So not really a frustration, just a couple of little ones.