Lately I have been very serious about putting an end to my life as a Windows user, at least outside of work.  My Mac came upstairs from the cellar and is now living on a new desk in the living room.  I have shut off my old Windows XP desktop and am going to do my best to not use it anymore.

I am a Mac user from this day forward*!

I have some experience with Linux.  I ran Ubuntu on a laptop for a while and liked it, but I didn’t delve too deeply into it.  While I was in college I used Linux and Unix quite a bit.  I got some level of skill living in a command line world while working off of a Unix terminal.

Ever since the release of Mac OSX, the Mac operating system has been built on top of a Linux operating system.  One result of this is that Macs kick 10999 flavors of ass over Windows.  Another is that many of the things you can do via the Linux terminal can be done via the Mac terminal as the Mac terminal is literally a Linux terminal.

Unfortunately for my hacking skills, I haven’t been living in a terminal world at all since 2004 and I forget everything.  So earlier tonight I did a Google search for “Mac terminal commands”.  One of the pages it retured is titled Top 50 Terminal Commands.  It’s not really what I was looking for.  It’s just a collection of commands that can change the way things work on your Mac.  What I was more interested in is using the built in Linux utilities.  Still though, there are some interesting things…

and one thing that may be the most amazing thing ever done by human beings.

This is the line you enter into the terminal’s command line.  I did it from my user’s root directory:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl


What you get when you enter that command is a telnet connection to another machine somewhere.  For that reason alone I should have ignored it, but the teaser the webpage gave it was too much for me.

The command connects you to another machine somewhere, and the program that runs when you connect is…

is…

I can’t even believe how awesome it is…

Star Wars episode IV… rendered entirely in ASCII characters.

Oh.
My.
God.

Awesomeness beyond all that has ever been awesome before.

*At least until I get tired of being a Mac user and decide I want to be a Windows user again… or a Linux user.

I love this whole living in the future thing.  Today I installed Parallels onto my Mac.  I then installed Windows 7 into Parallels.  I then installed a 3rd party VPN client that the company I work for uses and connected to their network.  I then remote desktop connected to the Windows machine sitting on my desk at work.

So I was sitting in Methuen at a Mac, running Windows 7 on a Compaq computer that sits on a desk in Framingham via a network that is set up in Westwood.

If I was actually working from home I could have then used the remote desktop program on my work computer to connect to other machines on various customers networks all over North America.

As I write this I have shut all of that stuff off and I’m just running my Mac on our home network.  It seems so simple now.  Yeah, living in the future kind of rules.

Camp chairs and cheap fishing rods.

I guess I was having a programming dream last night. My wife, Jen asked me to roll over in the middle of the night and I told her I had to zero out the list first.

Stupid dreams about programming.

I had to take a four day course for work.  In Canton.  Yesterday’s drive home from Canton to Methuen took 90 minutes.  Today’s drive from Windham to Framingham on route 495* took 65 minutes.  Canton to Methuen is a touch less than 50 miles.  Windham to Framingham on 495 is a touch more than 50 miles.

Our group is dangerously short handed.  There are two people doing five people’s work.  I wasn’t able to contribute much during my four day class.  My task count has doubled in the last four days and it was ridiculously huge to begin with.

This sucks.

*People in Eastern Massachusetts know that the phrases, “route 495” and “the really long way” are interchangeable.

Just when you thought you were finally safe from all of the Clockwork Angels fanboydom…

I’m burning a copy of it.  I’m not sharing it or giving it away.  We have two cars.  Both cars need a copy of their own, don’t you think?

I’m making both cars’ CD players very happy.

This is why we don’t go shopping at Barnes & Noble very often.

I took these during my evening commute.

I had a weird dream. I was at the polls to vote for mayor of Methuen. I took my ballot and walked into a large, dark, cavernous room to fill it out. Imagine a very large gym in a long abandoned high school with only one small light shining and signs of recent flooding.

There were only two other people in the room and they were standing at the same voting table. One of them was one of the mayoral candidates. He was telling the guy he was with some secret story about some shady back room political dealing. At one point he said, “now I told them straight out, ‘I am a liar.'”

The liar of a mayoral candidate was Newt Gingrich. The man he was telling the story to was Al Gore.

Please don’t let this turn out to be some weird political omen. Please?