Yeah, that’s the best title I can come up with, let alone coming up with two jokes (no one has commented yet on the double jokes in the post titles and URLs, which means — although I’m still likely funnier than Dane Cook — that it’s not really working.) Cut me some slack. You’re reading at a reasonable time. It’s 01:00 for me.
No, I’m not in Ubuntu yet. I still have to [illegal] a bit more. So, a parting thought: I’m giving up some stuff in fleeing Redmond. Like any abusive relationship, it wasn’t all bad. There are some things I’ll miss.
Three, actually. Homebase; Quicken; and Windows-Tab.
Windows-Tab is Irene-Jacob-sexy. Damn. It is the coolest fucking thing in the world. If there is not a KDE clone of it, I’m going to have to write one. It would be good to keep my coding neurons busy, anyway. Do they even document this? Are you on Vista (you poor sod)? Hold down the Windows key (which has euphemistic names in other PC OSs), and hit Tab. Oh. My. God.
Why isn’t a Quicken replacement available on *nix? I don’t know. Maybe nerds don’t want to admit that they can’t figure out double-entry accounting to a sufficient degree to use GnuCash. And a substitute for Homebase? Robby’s doing an unbelievable job with Tellico, and he’s even incorporated some of my code as well as written an export template geared towards booksellers at my request (not sure which shows greater benevolence.) But Win-Tab? It’s not going to displace Katee — but it might well show up in my dreams. I can’t wait.
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Yes, I admit that I almost wrote “Oh. My. Gods.” — just to piss Bob Mike off. And although this is a really weird place to do it, I’ll parry him in this auto-comment:
I think, Mike, that you didn’t read as much sci-fi as I did growing up. I read enough Niven, for instance, that “What the tanj?” started to read smoothly for me (tanj — for real — is short for “There Ain’t No Justice”.) And in BSG, “Oh my gods” and “frak” just (subtly) remind me that I’m not dealing with Terrans. Sorry it bugs you. Hope you can deal.
(OK, so I’m behind on BSG — so please don’t spoiler me — but if the writers would put the “Who’s a cylon?” dartboard [that they presumably used] up for auction, I’d bid every penny I own to buy it.)
I am not, generally, bothered by the notion of phrases from mass media (particularly sci-fi or fantasy) being used in daily conversation. My life in retrospect can be charted by the various books, shows and movies that I’d quote or from which I’d borrow terms. It’s not like I’ve never worked the phrases “dust off and nuke the site from orbit“, “by the hoary hosts of Hoggoth“, “Brock f’ing Samson” or “what is the riddle of steel” into a conversation, and Gawd help anyone trying to have a chat with high-school aged me if I’d recently watched Pulp Fiction or anything by Monty Python (which I did on a roughly weekly basis, if you’ll recall). I think it’s charming when Tina Fey says “by the hammer of Thor“. References and catch-phrases are a big part of my conversational style; I don’t think it’s accurate to think that I have a problem with certain Galactica-derived ones as a result of a lack of early exposure to sci-fi. I know half a dozen terms in Klingon and twice as many in Hutt.
My problem is that sometimes a term is used in a fashion that seems so forced and shoehorned into the show/book/whatever that it drops me out of my suspension of disbelief. “Frak” and “oh my Gods” do this for Galactica. “Shiny” did it on Firefly. These things don’t remind me that I’m dealing with non-Terrans, they remind me that I’m watching a television show, and that’s the last thing that I want to remember when I’m wrapping myself in a story.