Well, it’s 00:29 on December 26… Christmas is officially over. I always get bummed after Christmas; the lights don’t seem as pretty and the tree seems lonely and sad. We had a great Christmas here. My son, Thomas got everything he had asked for and more. My wife and I got a nice new digital camera that I’ve been trying out. Very nice and easy to use. I just wish it didn’t store its images in JPG format. It’s a 4 megapixel camera so the jpeg-iness probably won’t really be a problem, I just don’t like lossy compression without a conscious decision to use it…

Anyway, so Christmas was good for us. It was good in another respect too: I got my laptop setup with Red Hat Linux. I’m using their default window manager, which is built on/with/is Gnome. Looks great. Feels pretty good. Still a bit tricky to do things that should be easy like adding icons to the main menu… I did get it working with my LinkSys WPC11 wireless LAN card. I can pretty easily switch between a hard line and the wireless, which is nice. I installed the latest Mozilla, Eclipse and Java dev kit, so I’m really cooking now. I still need to install DB2 and WebLogic Server 7 to get my day-job project going. (I just got JBoss going…)

Then for fun I need to update Ruby, Python and the myriad Eclipse plugins that I use regularly. It’s taking time, but I’m pretty happy with the results so far.