The Ringtail

I’ve just had two weeks off work and used the opportunity to keep off of Twitter, identi.ca, facebook and all. Coming back to it all I’ve realised a few things:

• Work is tough and the commute too long, meaning lots of stress and lots of time in the week when I fill time rather than use it. My contract is up at the end of the year and I’d like to move into something more fulfilling and nearer home this time.
• Twitter is a time-suck. I know I’ve said here before that it’s useful for work and all, but I haven’t missed it at all in the last two week’s and I can’t think of a positive reason to get back into it again. I think I’ll keep identi.ca live as I like their approach, but Twitter and Facebook are going.
• I spend a lot of time thinking about coding, but I don’t spend much time actually building my knowledge. I’ve worked through the same problems in many languages, but I don’t think I’ve ever reached the stage where I was coding for a purpose rather than for the sake of it.
• Similar thoughts for fishing and photography – both are distractions that I don’t think I have any long term goals in. Sure there’s room for doing things just for fun, and not everything I do needs to be moving me forward as part of some master plan, but I do have things I want to accomplish that I’m not wholly focussed on while I have so many irons in the hobby fire.

I’m thinking a complete break from geekery for a few months would be nice. It’s a good time of year for birding so I’ll be grabbing my bins and heading out into the MK wilderness in my spare time for a little while. I’d like to write more so I’ll use the blog as a way of getting back into that, but keep my use of the computer to a minimum for a bit.

So, I write with exciting news. I am officially back on Linux and am officially back using Arch. I swapped to the Mac for a while there but it just doesn’t have the same experience for me as Linux. I missed the simplicity of a lot of the apps, I begrudged having to pay for every little app and utility you come across, I felt sidelined by the inexorable rise of the Apple brand, and I felt that Steve Jobs is increasingly treating most Apple users like mugs with the restrictions he is expecting you to accept to use his tools. I flirted with Ubuntu, but I think that’s run it’s course for me – too many distro-specific tricks and changes going on there. I figured if I was going ot head away from the safety and ease of Ubuntu that I might as well go the whole hog, and I’m back with arch for now.

I’m using a much slimmer system – Gnome for desktop, OpenOffice for work files, Gedit for text, Firefox for web and Mutt for mail. Throw in a few of the standard Gnome apps and I’ve got a quick, lean system that I have built, know how it all fits together, and am happy I can maintain. The main thing I don’t like about the Mac experience is that I always felt I was a bit hamstrung by the decisions they made for me and this feels like the way Ubuntu is going. Arch works how you expect, has a great user community and just feels right. I think I might stay this time.