Post-election Ramblings on DTV, Linux and more...

Well, it has been two weeks now since the election, and I am glad the political ads are no longer filling the airwaves, the mail box and the voice mail (darn robo-calls!). Now the broadcast TV stations can go back to what they had been advertising non-stop for the past year - DTV transition messages. Now we get to have a daily countdown until the day that analog transmissions end. Is this exciting, or what? We already purchased out two converter boxes, but we are wondering if we can get two more $40 coupons since we have a new house and a new address where we could receive them. We actually could use them since we are a cable-free, satellite free household.

The release of Ubuntu 8.10 arrived without much fanfare, and I have left all our systems at 8.04.1 since it is a long term release. I did not see any reason to upgrade when 8.04.1 seems so stable and will be supported for 3 years until 4/2011(whereas 8.10 will only be supported for 18 months until 4/2010.) We have more and more Ubuntu systems popping up in the department these days. More people use Ubuntu than Vista here!

The excitement in our own household is that we purchased a "new" house late last Spring and are fixing it up. We are keeping our old house until early 2009 when we were hoping the housing market would improve. That may not pan out so well now, but I am sure we can sell it since we do not have one of those enormous, over leveraged loans outstanding. Since we bought our old home in 1996 we will definitely be selling for some gain (even if it is a much smaller gain than if we had sold it 2 to 3 years ago), which will make us an exception in the market these days! Nonetheless, owning two homes right now is getting pretty old, and it is stretching the dollar pretty tight, especially with our stock portfolio looking fairly meager these days. Anyone who wants to contribute to our cause can feel free to help out our attempt to improve the St. Louis economy!

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