The eyes have it

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Wow, it’s been a December of medicine. As you’ll recall, I boogered up my back in the first week of the month. Last week, my honey had glaucoma surgery. She had some peculiarities in her eye that caused some problems, and doctors had to go in and rebuild the whole thing (it seemed like). Pressure’s down, and she’s got a shiny, new lens in there, so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. The first sign of good news is that, with the pressure down, there’s a lot less pain, but now she’s got stitches in her eye. Yeesh. Kathleen’s part of the family here; she reads the proofs almost every week with an English teacher’s eye, so I know you’ll send her some good wishes.

As for me, I’ve been doing some stretching exercises with one of those Pilates balls. I was doing fine as long as I was doing crunches, but, of course, when I decided to try some leg-lifts, I felt a little grind and pop that made me think better. Still, at least I’m standing upright.

Finally, with a weekend confined to the house and unable to do anything strenuous—my 8-year-old voluntarily shoveled the walk and driveway, to my mortification—I started geeking hard. I installed Suse 10, Novell’s latest Linux version, on one of the partitions of my old laptop. Frankly, it runs like a dream—no problems with OpenOffice, Firefox or my wireless network. I may have to reinstall it, though, because I decided to give it a full half of the hard drive. I’m going to remove the Windows XP from the other half and install Solaris 10, Sun Microsystem’s latest version of Unix. I might add that both of these operating systems are free.

You may wonder why I keep harping on these open-source systems. The bottom line is that with next year’s release of Windows Vista, a lot of folks’ computers are going to be on the way out in this economy’s planned obsolescence paradigm. You might save yourself some money and heartache if you start learning now.