Author: Bob Martens

Today marks five days until we close on our first home. To say that we are excited would be a gross understatement.

However, I currently have a complete lack of nervousness about everything. I’ve been reading up on purchasing a home for quite a few years and I’m ready to get into the house and see what we can do. We purposefully went with an older house because both of us liked a house with a little more character than you can find today and both of us grew up in older houses. Nothing like a 100+ year old farm house to get you ready for owning a home and having to do work on it.

The house we are purchasing, however, is in great condition. We will have an electrician in on Tuesday to replace some wiring in the attic, otherwise everything should be set to go for us to move in, unpack, and start to make something of our life after eight months of decisions, moving, more decisions, more moving, more decisions and some more moving. We will be able to take a box, unpack it, and then leave that box unpacked for months, maybe even years! That’s a good thought.

We will be able to have friends again and start to get involved in the community for the first time in a long time. We will be able to make changes to the house, paint rooms, update fixtures, plan for the future and just live our lives as a family! When you live with others for a long enough time you start to lose your own family identity a little, and the idea of being able to open the door to our own home and be our own family is quite exciting.

One exciting thing for me is that I will have the opportunity to set up my Cave. I haven’t had a Cave for a little while and even when I did it was sometimes used as a guest bedroom quite a bit as well. Even when I did have my own Cave, it was hard to get settled in because we didn’t own the property where the Cave was located. You can’t do a lot to a place when you don’t own the property or know how long you are going to be there.

One thing I am missing is a desk worthy of my Cave. This desk will need to be found, but for the time being I will be using a temporary one to get me by while I search or build what I will call The Desk.

The Desk will be large and plain in order to accommodate the amount of technology that my Cave will contain. It will also be used exclusively for computing while a workstation will be built for all client machines and for taking apart computers. The workstation will be standing height so that I can work easier and The Desk will have a chair for me to sit on.

There will be three different computers at The Desk. The Mac Mini, a Linux/Windows workstation and a Linux laptop. It will (hopefully, in the future) hold up three monitors, two for the Mac Mini and one for the workstation. Storage will be an issues but will be dealt with in the future. Internet will be served to the room via a cable modem … and I still need to figure out where that is going to go.

My Cave still needs a plan, and that plan will be revised but it will happen … some day.

I’m doing it again, but with a little bit of a twist this time around.

I’ve toyed around with using Linux as a desktop operating system at different times over the past five years, and Ubuntu was the distro that allowed me to take the plunge at different points. I’ve been using Ubuntu since 5.10 and it has matured very quickly for its considerable youth. The latest release, 10.10 (see, five years there) is a very capable and quite good-looking operating system that (in my opinion) can fulfill the computing needs for a good portion of users. Two of my brothers would be great examples.

However, I have usually (for better or worse, depending on your perspective) gone back to using Apple’s Mac OS X as my operating system of choice. However, as my wife and I prepare to close on our first house (YAY!), money has once again reared its ugly head. Not in the sense that we have none, but in the sense of prioritizing where money needs to go. As such, I’m giving Ubuntu another test run as my main development platform. It allows me to purchase cheap hardware and use it effectively for my needs … hopefully.

If it works, I’ll be extremely happy. If it doesn’t to my satisfaction, then I’ll be saving up for another Apple portable for the future. I’m not pushing one way or the other and we will see where the chips fall.

Two “wrinkles” this time around:

First involved where I am starting this test: at work. My desktop was acting very strange using Windows 7 and I think I’ve nailed it down to faulty video drivers or video hardware. What I’m waiting for is to see if Ubuntu fails as well. Sadly, it has been rock-solid so far and I have had no issues at all. Using Ubuntu at work enables me to do some script testing at my desktop instead of needing either a VM or to log into a server environment. It also means not as many people use my machine when I’m not around. That’s nice.

The second is that I will still have a Mac Mini in the house that my wife will be using. It works so well for her that I’m not going to be getting rid of it. So, I’ll need to find a cheap laptop and scrounge together the parts for a beefier desktop soon after we move into the house. That’s less than two weeks away!

So, there you have it. Another experiment and we will see how it goes.

I should add that the procurement of a laptop and desktop is completely dependent on extra money coming in at the moment. With the Mac Mini and my work laptop I am more than capable of completing the work that I need to do. This is more a wishlist than anything else.