Glorious week!

[GreyGeek]

Three Windows installations were wiped out and from the ashes rose three new Kubuntu 9.10 installations!

One of the parties drove over 200 miles to have me replace XP with Kubuntu for them!

That's now over a dozen and a half former XP/VISTA installations that are now soley Kubuntu.

Life is good! 8)

[sithlord48]

Re: Glorious week!

nice , good week for me too. finally got a new car.. that old one was falling apart not fun driving for work when most of what comes out the heat is antifreeze, makes thinking when i get to my calls difficult at best

[claydoh]

Re: Glorious week!

GreyGeek that is fantastic! I have yet to get anyone to make the full switch, though 2 dual-boot. I have a long way to go. Now that I have a second laptop built from spares, I really should start taking it to work to show off.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Glorious week!

GreyGeek that is fantastic! I have yet to get anyone to make the full switch, though 2 dual-boot. I have a long way to go. Now that I have a second laptop built from spares, I really should start taking it to work to show off.

Well, IMO, dual booting is still a victory. For some situations it is not possible to find suitable Linux programs to replace specialty Windows programs. It's when people really grasp the insecurity of running Windows, even with current up to date and active AV "protection" in place that they being to see the light. One of the poeple from over by North Platte discovered a keyboard logger on their XP.

A relative of mine, and the bum is setting on the couch next to my recliner as I write , opted to keep VISTA on his new HP laptop until Kubuntu 10.,4 goes gold.

Make sure it is running KDE 4.4, or at least 4.3.4. BTW, that new CWP weather plasmoid is really super, especially when the IR weather map is just a click away!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Glorious week!

nice , good week for me too. finally got a new car.....

What kind of car did you get? What kind of mileage is it supposed to get?

Seven years ago my wife and I bought a new 2002 Saturn SL2 four door with 5 speed stick. It currently has 73,000 miles on it and looks pretty good. Runs pretty good too. We've decided to keep it until the odometer rolls 140,000. By then I'll probably be around 75-78 and that's about the time I plan to put the drivers license in the drawer and start riding a bike!

The Saturn regularly gets about 30 mph +- 2 in town, and about 40 +- 2 on the highway. I doubt that economical all electric cars recharged by Solar stations will be available before I turn in my license.

[claydoh]

Re: Glorious week!



My boss is a good candidate for Kubuntu. He and his wife have a slightly older Emachines with only 512 mb ram running Vista(!!?!!), and the antivirus and anything else brings his system to a crawl. All they do is surf and email, and even that is web-based. It can take more than 5 minutes just to boot and have IE open their webmail!!

Then next time I volunteer to go and 'fix' his machine, I am bringing a stick of ram and installing Kubuntu for him. Luckily he is cheap, so even the lower price of Windows 7 hasn't drawn him to that yet. In his case a dual boot would definitely show him which OS is zippier.

Last time I did a clean install from his recovery disk and was there for literally 4 hours, mostly waiting. A Kubuntu install would be done in about 30-45 minutes, including configuring options and tweaking settings , maybe another 15 minutes installing some cool toys for him as well

[Qqmike]

Re: Glorious week!


(I moved this here from somewhere it didn't belong, exactly)

sithlord48, I saw your post elsewhere on your car and was going to ask you about it! I tried to find a good used one, tried every day for 6 months (Jan-June) but even though there's 500,000 people around here, very few GOOD used Hondas or Toyotas to choose from--they all get sold asap. Some with 90k-110k miles and 7-10 years old if decent/good, might run $8000-$12000, even up to $14k. OTOH, the new car market in July was slow here, so I got a new basic Civic '09 for $17k, delivered (w/taxes). Will keep it for 15-20 years, or until it drops me by the side of the road. My '91 Corolla was burning oil badly enough and was run hard enough to say goodbye, or I would have kept it going (had two, trusted mechanics look at it). Glad you got a good one. Nice feeling not to have to worry about getting from A to B!

[sithlord48]

Re: Glorious week!

mine is a 97 accord with 120k on it , sadly its a DX so no power windows green 4d. body is like new the car has 0 Rust on it. and runs very nice, interior has been used but is still in very nice condition. no burns or cuts and all the mats were in the car and this will be the first time the car sees salt in the winter. !!!
its like new inside and out. got a very good deal on it. thanks to a friend who owns a dealership and was trying to help me out of a jam w/ my last car it was a pos buick, that i was given as payment for a car that was crushed on me... my 91 civic i was fixing so i could drive it instead.has now just became a project car, guess it time to strip it and put that b18 in it.... ah i love those hondas its very good to finally not have to worry about the A to B for sure. since i drive a Lot at work so it was becoming a bit of a worry as my job kinda depends on my car. now if only i could get lucid to install on my computer with out making drives powercycle this could very well be the best week ever...

[Qqmike]

Re: Glorious week!

"...thanks to a friend who owns a dealership..."

THAT was your ace-in-the-hole! Something I've had in the past but no longer. Good cars like the one you got are usually placed privately, are sold before they get a For Sale sign on them. You did get lucky on that one! If you know the person selling to you, "high" mileage doesn't mean too much when it comes to Hondas or Toyotas as they can easily go up to 200k with usual maintenance/repair, and I know several people doing 250k and still going. And here where I live, as I said, you might pay up to 75% of new car prices for a good used one, a shortage and premium on those two makes. Issue was moot for me though: there was no acceptable used supply when I was looking. Sounds like you got a good one there.

[Detonate]

Re: Glorious week!

As I was an auto mechanic in a previous life, and now exist on a very fixed income, I always drive older cars. If you shop around, you can find some good deals. Craig's List has been good to me. The problem is, the really good high gas mileage cars are snapped up fast, and people are getting premium prices for them. Hondas are especially in demand. I recently bought a 1991 Cadillac Seville with only 100k on it that has been garaged all of its life for $2500. Great car. Look for cars like that. It gets 24 mpg, which is not bad, and for the money difference between that and a good used Honda I can buy a lot of gas and travel in complete comfort. I have owned several Hondas and I think they are great cars, but as I said, the really good used ones are difficult to find now. Another thing is that the recent "cash for clunkers" program took a lot of nice used cars off the market.

[sithlord48]

Re: Glorious week!

yea my last civic has just under 400k mi on it. and the one before that. and my first car (86 accord ) had 250k when i sold it and i still see it driving around once and a while . but then again everything works nice when u take care of it.. i terms of MPG i am will surely get better then the ~15 mpg my old buick was getting...

[Ole Juul]

Re: Glorious week!

Detonate has it figured out. There's more than mpg to the equation.

Another thing is that the recent "cash for clunkers" program took a lot of nice used cars off the market.

We have that political agenda up here too which the government pushes in an effort to sell more cars. There is absolutely no concern for how much pollution is actually taking place. The only concern is an easy to comprehend mpg and absolutely no concern about the actual number of gallons. A typical 500 gallons a year in a new truck pollutes more than 5 gallons in a clunker.

My neighbour has an old truck which he runs once every couple of months to go to the dump and some short trips in the autumn to get firewood. I can smell it when he fires it up. It probably gets 15mpg at this point in it's life. However he only uses a few gallons a year. If he was forced to get a new truck it would be an environmental disaster when you add up all the numbers. Politics and pollution just don't mix.

I share my partner's little 10 yr old neon which actually drives these mountain roads as fast as anything else I've seen, and gets very good mileage. However, we don't count mpg in this house. We count the number of trips to town. If we go once a week instead of twice, we have halved our gas consumption. No politician could ever figure that one out but it's the same as going from 35 to 70 mpg.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Glorious week!

My wife thinks the way you do!

When ever we go for walks she says that she has to walk twice as far as I do. "How?", I ask incredulously.

"Because, I have to take twice as many steps as you do!"

She keeps life enjoyable!

[Ole Juul]

Re: Glorious week!

Perspective is everything.

I live in a part of the world where people live to burn gas and I think that if you halved the price, or they got better mileage, many would just drive twice as far. In our case we enjoy the luxury of shopping once a week instead of a more environmentally reasonable once a month. Within a certain range, the actual miles is a personal choice. We do a 25 mile round trip to the store. Others around here do that trip every day, and to an even bigger town once a week which is a 150 mile round trip. I'm sure that if gas was free, some people would never get out of their car.

[Qqmike]

Re: Glorious week!

I have several places I need to go around my neighborhood--stores and post office. This past year or so, I've been walking more often. Walking briskly, it takes 8-9 minutes one way to the post office, another 2-3 minutes to a favorite natural foods store, then another 3 minutes to a large national food chain, etc. About 20-35 minutes average round trip (actual walking time). It doesn't work when I have a whole bunch of stuff to carry, but it cuts out many of those quick trips in the car during the day running out to "pick something up." Also, since I tell myself I "have" to walk, and although I enjoy it, I keep the trips down to one or two per day on foot, the post office being kind of a "must" walk each day. Figure I'm walking (briskly) a minimum of 50 miles a month, some months up to 75. Gas mileage is infinite (x miles divided by 0 gallons). Good exercise at my age (the Lone Ranger was a favorite show as a kid ). And, strange thing I noticed: Walking, a round trip to the PO Box takes 16-18 minutes. Driving (starting up, doing it, parking, and returning home and putting the car in the garage), it takes 14-18 minutes depending on conditions and traffic and parking and takes a lot of stress sometimes. Walking, you come home unstressed and clear. Sometimes, you can walk in about the same time--even less--than it takes to drive on short trips.
Ole Juul has a good point that applies to USA: people here like to drive! One thing I do is deal with various artists in the Southwest desert USA. They think nothing about driving 50-150 miles from remote locations to make a small $100-$300 purchase for supplies! and then do it again in one or two weeks; some drive into metro areas EVERY day. I do know people--lots of them--who, essentially, live in their vehicles, driving a three- or four-state area, selling their art work for weeks at a time, even working on their artwork as someone drives for them.