I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games - like this Sesame Street game (that unfortunately a quick search on Google Images does not turn up) where you had to suck the Tweedles (bugs from Ernie’s flower box) to solve math problems. I also, and I’ve mentioned this before in several places on the net, learned to program from a book on BASIC and made myself a bunch of simple games, including Madlibs clones.

note: I wrote this on 17 April, a full week before it is published on the blog

Nearly six years ago I bought my first laptop.  I’d never seen the point of laptops over desktops - the value per dollar just isn’t there.  But I was going to be traveling for work now and again and needed to be able to get in contact with the family while away.  I got an old Acer that was on sale at best buy because it was the last one left.  A year after buying that laptop, netbooks came out.  I got my wife one of the first Asus EEE PCs because she was going on a work trip didn’t want to haul my heavy laptop around.  So for the past few years we’ve traveled with both of those so I can use my laptop to watch my movies and she can use her netbook to watch hers.  But I’m getting tired of that heavy laptop and now netbooks aren’t saddled with crippled versions of Linux and inferior hardware.  So I got myself a new Acer Aspire One from Amazon.  I’d seen the same one at Costco for $50 more (because it has double the battery life) and I’d wanted to get it for a while now.  I’m going to be traveling to Chicago for a trip soon, and since my back has been giving me issues, I figured it was the time to go to a lighter laptop.

I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified.  Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop.  Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will be using tablets more and more, but some of us have real work to get done.  We need to do photo editing, programming, video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that require something more than a glorified smart phone.  This is where KDE excels.