After a hard drive crashed a few months ago, I made the switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu on my work laptop. I’ve used Linux for a long time but hadn’t run it as my primary system for years and especially not at work. It’s really been great and I’ve been able to integrate with our Windows-based office network and apps fairly easily.

I still run XP in a virtual machine but only for Outlook and the odd corporate application that hasn’t made it out of the stone-age and onto the net.

Of the few annoyances I ran into after the switch, slower network performance had me pulling my hair out until I found a fix for a 2.6.x kernel problem.

I sent in our absentee ballots for the ‘08 election yesterday. It was a bit anticlimactic after having followed the race so closely, swept up in the excitement of a potentially historic vote. I missed not going to the community center at the “Y”, signing in and manipulating the big red dial on the electroinc voting machine. Absentee voting was incredibly easy though and FedEx guarantees one day delivery of the ballots for free from here.

Related Australian Fact O’The Day: In Australia, voting is mandatory. As in, there is a federal law here that requires each citizen to vote. That still puzzles me. And my Australian friends think it’s equally bizarre that it’s not mandatory in the US.

A recent visitor to our house in Austin…

Picture courtesy of Lolo.

Update 8-Oct-2008: It’s a harmless orbweaver spider. Scroll down to Orbweavers on this page. Remarkable that the picture is almost identical.