A penny for thoughts?

I tried to give vista a chance. I really did. It does have many major improvements over XP but overall I’ll still take XP anyway. I used vista for a long time (a couple of months) and it just irritated me more and more until I couldn’t take it and tried installing linux again.

The first time I couldn’t boot into the ubuntu live cd. It would just keep spitting out error loading something or other over and over on the console. I couldn’t get to any choices so I was screwed. I figured I’d just make do with vista but eventually couldn’t stand it anymore.

The second time around I decided to try fedora core 8. It installed itself fine but screwed up on installing the boot loader. I could boot into fedora but not windows. No big loss I can live with that, I didn’t try to fix grub. I however failed miserably at getting my wireless card working. The reason why linux is having so much difficulty is because I bought an HP dv9000 laptop this fall. Amd 64 dual core processor (bad start) and, since it’s a laptop, all kinds of random crappy internals and wireless problems. (The audio which used to always be a problem with linux a few years ago seems to generally be fine now.) After playing around with a bunch of things I read off forums and how-tos I eventually just gave up. At one point I had 3 wlan0′s, none of them functional obviously. It was sad.

So I figured I’d try ubuntu’s “alternate” cd, with the regular text-based linux installer. It worked fine. No problem. When I first logged in I got a little popup saying hey there are non-free drivers you can install. I click and tell it to install the nvidia graphics and broadcomm wireless drivers. It explains what non-free is and means and lets me decide whether I want to do it anyway. Then it just installs the stuff no problem. I then download updates to all the installed software and the system is good to go.

Linux is generally still freaking hard to get right but Ubuntu is way ahead of the pack. Everything is just so easy.

I’m sorry I strayed Ubuntu. <3

Oh god, not another one of these you’re saying. Yeah, I never normally read anything with a title like the above either. I got tricked. Jeff Atwood posted this tinyurl on twitter and I’m a sucker for all his links. (He posts so many and they’re always so good.)

This article I was shrugging off as the usual omg Facebook is a fad people! post but it put everything into perspective. Facebook isn’t losing market share, they’ve just dropped the explosive growth. The law of exponents had to kick in eventually, the trend was that in something like a couple of years every human on the planet would be on Facebook. Obviously not going to happen. So growth has slowed, that’s expected and fine (well it actually stopped entirely, uniques are stable and page hits are down but that’s not my point). Beacon flopped huge (thankfully) but what company has never had a flop? That’s not why they’re in trouble.

First thing I look at when I decide whether I want to work at a company is whether they might go under this year. Facebook might not go under *this* year but according to that article they’re definitely trending in the wrong direction.

Add to that coverage of Facebook’s announcement that they plan to have a cashflow of negative $150 million this year [...]

Negative cash flow is bad. Bad bad bad. So while having people in the office jump up and scream hack night! and just hacking away at some cool idea you had in the back of your head just for the hell of it might be cool, if you’re getting paid in stock options, that 15 billion $ valuation Microsoft put on Facebook must hurt and these latest financial reports from Zuckerberg must hurt too. I don’t think Facebook is going to be attracting many new employees good at finance anytime soon.

I’m unemployed.

Or at least I am today.

Back in April 2007, I had my last final exam on a Thursday. I then had the Friday off and started working at Mansef the following Monday. I never took any vacation while I worked at Mansef. Now, my last day at Mansef was yesterday. Monday is my first day at the new job.

Oops, I did it again.