Thought I would share why I am up at 5 am and how Marcel's new book saved me another hour.
My daughter loves dance. She goes to a dance studio owned by a woman I went to High School with. She has owned her studio for almost two decades...this makes me feel old. Anyway, keeping her studio's computers happy keep getting my daughter free tap and ballet which is a very good thing.
Her father is the office manager and his home computer was giving him problems. I went to his house this afternoon and found it had several ugly little trojans. I took the computer home, used the Knoppix, went to forums, and finally came to the conclusion that the current install was toast and it was time to reinstall. All the files in the computer are doc, xls, and jpg's. Mepis, Freespire, and Ubuntu teased me and taunted me, but I know the time is not right for them yet, so I did the Windows 2000 reinstall. Good Lord, that takes forever.
He did not have the disks for his MSOffice. By happenstance I bought Marcel's new book the day before yesterday...I even read the introduction. Well, tonight I grabbed the DVD out of the back cover and installed...welll...pretty much all of it save Ubuntu. The Windows copies of these progrms are not something I keep readily available and in less than ten minutes I had this new Windows box armed and ready with everything he needs to hit the ground running (except a firewall-that took me another 30 seconds to find one online ).
I get to save time, Ed gets some good software, and I get a chance to show what Free Software can do and am one step closer to getting the studio on a platform I like. To make sure he knows what he has on his PC, I am going to have to give him the book and go get myself another copy. Ah well.
So, when I am less crispy, I will get another copy, read it, and post one of those Amazon thingys. I need sleep.
Cheers
Saga Continued
I brought the poor Windows laden computer to Ed's house this morning along with the copy of the book...that was for my personal use. He was nervous when I told him it had open office dot org until I had him go into his my documents and open up a few spreadsheets (Thank GOD he does all the studio's finances with home made spreadsheets as opposed to using QB!!!) and docs. He was happy. His daughter called me a few minutes ago to tell me her mom cannot tear him away from FlightGear. On my way to get a spinal tap (lots of fun), I hit the local borders to get another copy.
I will be reading the book tonight, but if the goal is migration by exposing people to FOSS, this is a great step and already has a happy retired newbie exploring the right side of the source.
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