Self Indulgent? Yes, I suppose.

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

I was chatting with a fellow blogger yesterday (this blogger happened also to be my manager). He took a 6+ month hiatus on his blog during the latter part of last year and I was telling him that it made me feel better to see another abandoned blog. He stated that he only blogged when he remembered and called his blogging "self indulgent". I thought about that for a few seconds and realized that he was right, especially for my blog. I mean, come on, I am not really providing a service here. I am not giving any new information and overall I am not adding to the good of mankind. But, I like it so I will continue to do it (I know my 20 or so regular readers are breathing a sigh of relief).

On Christmas day, my brother gave me a 6 year old laptop that he no longer needed. I put the factory image of Windows XP on it and spent a few hours patching it up and then decided what use it would be to me. I decided to put it in the son's room and set up a shared on the main computer so he could stream the movies that we have ripped to our main computer's hard drive. Due to the age of the computer and the slowness of the wireless card that was in it, this did not work so well and the movies were often choppy. The son then started using it as a music player. Recently my sister-in-law had a BSoD problem with her 3 year old laptop and rather than try to repair it, decided to buy a new laptop. She then sold her old one to my son for $50 which then started the discussion with the daughter whether or not I would sell her the other laptop (so she would not be left out). The new(er) laptop's internal wired and wireless network devices both stopped working (XP didn't even find them) so it is pretty useless as a laptop.

I decided to put ubuntu (linux) on the older laptop since XP was really slow on it. The daughter has not really used Windows that much so switching to another OS would not be an issue for her. I was secretly hoping the son would be jealous and desire to have ubuntu on his as well. This plan worked perfectly and now he is running ubuntu now as well. I even got a usb wireless card working on it with little effort. So now, both kids are making me a proud geek dad. I don't know why I like the idea of NOT using Windows but I just do. And to have kids that can function with linux, well that is just another feather in my geek cap (and self indulgent).

So if blogging is self indulgent, what is blogging about self indulgence?

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon