Internet

Here are some Domain names that sound better on paper than in practice.

• A site called ‘Who Represents‘. Their domain name is www.whorepresents.com
• I go here from time to time for expert advice on computer problems….but not for what the domains spells out at www.expertsexchange.com
• Me and my brother stumbled upon this a while ago, Pen Island at www.penisland.net
• Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com
• This is an Italian Power Generator company… www.powergenitalia.com
• Mole Station Native Nursery somwhere in Australia: www.molestationnursery.com
• Pronounce the first two letters and the rest of the word out loud in a crowded room. www.ipanywhere.com
• What are they teaching kids at First Cumming Methodist Church? www.cummingfirst.com
• If you want to go to Lake Tahoe, visit here www.gotahoe.com

Never one to be satisfied, I ventured out to the net and gathered information on putting a random quote generator for the main index page. I remember back at A&M, a friend introduced me to Slackware. It was an early favorite among many current flavors of linux. What I enjoyed and miss from the Slackware distribution was everytime I logged on, a random fortune cookie awaited me. Granted they were mostly geeky, it was a welcome addition to the boring process of booting up an alien OS. This fortune program and Colored LS command are about the only thing I miss about Slackware. What I found was a PHP script that read those fortune files directly from the database without any modifications. I hope you enjoy Homer’s wisdom. In time I may add other fortune subjects.

…is but a train. For the last few days, I’ve been putting on the finishing touches to this website. As of last night, I have a fully functional forum. I had lots of trouble incorporating some open source PHP forum scripts to fit my website’s style. Eventually I broke down and just simply dissected one I thought was simple yet had the features I wanted. I’ve been using OSX for two days and so far I’m pretty impressed. I’ve always used Windows/Dos ever since I started “pooter’n”. Every once in a while I will get adventuresome and install linux on a spare machine only to go back to my windows machine due to lack of useful applications. To this day I have yet gotten sound or printer to work in linux. To be fair though, Ubuntu has gone a long ways to make life in linux easier. What I like about OSX is how pretty it looks. Everything seems uniform and fit together like a good jigsaw puzzle. The only disadvantage I see so far are the following:

There aren’t as much applications for it. Hardware is expensive and inflexible for tinkerers like me. Games! Where are the games?

I manage to install Firefox with all my usual extensions therefore, day-to-day, it’s not that different than working in windows. Whether you use OSX, Windows XP, Linux, BeOS, the only thing that matters over the Internet is your browser…or the spyware you unwittingly let run on your computer. I think Microsoft know that Windows is not the focus to users as much as their experience online these days. When someone ask me to fix their computer, 90 percent of the time it is the Internet that is not working right. Well, back to tinkering with OSX! I’m like a kid with a new toy. Soon I’ll either break it and resign to playing with something else, or I’ll get bored with it and put Windows Vista back on to kick around.