The end is near...oh emm gee!

I joke frequently about the end of the world being the fault of the Spanish, whose troops killed the Mayan calendar maker so no more calendars were made.

It's not so different than my joke about 666 being upside down and the correct number was 999, and as FORTRAN programmers will recall, "GOTO 999" was often paired with "999: END" in that language's programmes to cease programme execution.  Truly the end.

If anything truly happens, I'll be surprised and delighted.  For once, someone will be correct about the end of the world.  However, it will likely just include the human infestation (Star Trek: The Motion Picture), and the cockroaches will continue.

People might arrive on the planet millennia later and think that we obliterated ourselves with our stupidity.  How could a people be able to put a computing device in their pocket and couldn't stop ridiculous violence?

The whole world has felt the sting of murders, such as those in Newtown, Connecticut and Toronto, Ontario recently.  Canada is much less in love with guns than the U.S.A., yet a similar incident happened.  How do military weapons end up outside the military?

Oh, and there is another end: the fiscal cliff.  This Congress has been in session for 2 years and didn't accomplish anything that I can recall.  I can't recall a Congress so useless, even when Pres. Nixon and Carter were in office.  This Congress spent all their time trying to undo the previous 2 years and achieved nothing of their own.  Now, they're blaming everything on the president, who as they might recall, has no ability to make laws.  They are the anchor to this sinking ship.

We've had some tremendous weather today.  I'm not talking about sunshine and moderate temperatures.  We've had high winds, rain, and overnight, it'll all turn to snow and ice, as the temperatures drop steadily.  I just had someone at the door to tell me how some company from New York got the state of Indiana to invest in a natural gas facility.  It's awful outside and they couldn't organize months ago?  Besides, they should know by now that the holiday season has left a lot of empty pockets by now.

Well, if the end is near, it'll be a welcome change.  Life is too stressful at this point, and only a major catastrophe could change that.  You never know.  Maybe, aliens (from space) will come and take us all away to be enslaved on another planet to serve milk and cookies to Santa Claus.

Hmm...I think we missed out.  Durn.  I'm still here.  You're still here.  We had Christmas Day and plenty of people will have to pay their credit card bills for those once-in-a-lifetime items they bought just because the world was ending.  Oops.

Looking forward to Ubuntu Linux 12.04

Remember being a small child on Christmas morning?  I know that not everyone had that experience but it always surprised me because I was obedient so I never found the gifts ahead of time.  Surprises are many times a good thing.

A few releases ago, the Canonical people decided to go their own way and cover up GNOME by putting their own desktop, Unity, out front.  It has been a somewhat painful transition for me.  I liked GNOME for its simplicity (as opposed to KDE or Windows), although it might have been too simple at times.  It reminded me of the earlier days of graphical user interfaces, when GEM and Macintosh ruled in the mid to late-1980s.

I don't use Unity every day, unfortunately.  Being forced to use something, you're much better at it, of course.  I spend most of my time in Mac OS X, which is a love-hate relationship.  I'm not a fanatic of any operating system by any means, but it's been almost 12 years since the public beta test of Mac OS X and it doesn't feel any more usable.  Some days, it's just downright unfriendly and I wish I had an alternative.

I've been using Ubuntu since 07.04.  It started as an experiment to see what the Linux fanatics were saying was better than anything else.  Well, unfortunately, it wasn't better then, and it was not all that good at all.  The installations would leave a few things to be figured out by the end user.  Grandma wouldn't have been happy when she couldn't get an internet connection.  Linux would have been perfect for the grandmas of the world who only used a web browser, e-mail, and the occasional letter writing application.

I think the 10.04 was the first release that seemed good for grandma.  Now, with Unity, are things better for her?  I think if I'd switched her machine, she'd be cursing me.  My mum was that kind of person.  She'd say "I hate that !@#$ computer!" quite frequently.  My uncle gave her a laptop computer as a gift and she gave it back the next year.

In any case, I'm looking forward to what the next Ubuntu distribution will bring.  I haven't been checking the website regularly, so it will be like a Christmas morning surprise.  I'd really like to switch, though I have paid software that I'd rather would run on my machine instead of using something that looks as though someone was testing it.  I won't give my photography to a half-baked application.  I can't sell it if it's not the highest image quality I can provide.  I saw that Corel was providing an application but their software quality isn't exactly high.

Here's to an interesting Ubuntu 12.04 release.  I hope they find new friends to install it.