Last night I had the opportunity to deliver yet another technical speech to my Toastmasters club; the goal of this speech was to “persuade with power”.
Like all my speeches, I delayed my efforts until the very end because I couldn’t think of anything to persuade the crowd with. Just hours before my deadline, I decided that I would persuade them to consider open source software.
My speech was a hit with a few members of the audience, and lasted almost 10 minutes, a new record for me!
Although I didn’t use any visuals during the speech, one of the suggestions I received was to include a nice visual representation of the topic; so I put together a quick timeline to point out a few milestone in open source. This might come in handy for another speech.
I downloaded the latest Ubuntu bits last night and burned them onto a DVD. I am very impressed by the user experience Ubuntu creates for its users — its very simple. This morning I only spent a couple of hours configuring my dual-screen setup and everything else seems to be working just right.
I especially like the way it recognized my network storage server, so that i could retrieve files that I had backed up. Now i can get to my real work
Hard drives have increased their storage capacities while prices have dropped dramatically. I usually keep a couple of spare hard drives to backup my personal data (e.g. photos, music, documents) from time to time; This technique works fine as long as I can remember where i put my spare hard drives and where to find the cables that go with it. Wouldn’t it be great if you could connect to a spare hard drive over a network or wireless? That’s exactly what a NAS does. NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and I just got one with 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of storage.
I am tired of seeing hardware advertisements that say something like “Supports Windows Vista & Mac”. wait a minute, what about Linux?
I ended up purchasing the LaCie Ethernet Big Disk mainly because they proudly say they support Linux on their website, “Supports Linux 2.4 or higher”.
This device is also capable of streaming audio and video over WiFi to other plug-and-play devices in your home. This is awesome!
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