Moving towards integration–a done list and a to-do list.

I want my operating systems to like one another.

I want my Thunderbirds to be just as sexy and useful in Windows as in Linux. No mismatched signatures, profiles, accounts, or preferences.

I want Trillian to be chirpy, sleek, and transparent. I want CenterICQ to be silent, simple, and easy to ignore.

I want XP’s bootloader to manage the operating systems and LILO to manage my kernels.

I don’t want to be pissed when I have to boot into Windows to do Thorn work, fit an equation to a trendline in Excel, catch a glimpse of a layout in Internet Explorer, or do work on SQL Server. I don’t want to be pissed when my files are in Linux on an ext3 partition, and I need to edit them.

I want to read RSS files without having to syncronize my subscriptions and my subscriptions everytime I reboot. (If this makes no sense, then, well, just imagine a list of things that automatically update; but wait–that list is redundantly stored on your hard drive, and additions to one of those lists has to be done manually to the other! Grr.)

So I re-installed Windows today. I gave up the security of NTFS for FAT32 and am working on getting basic apps installed again, like InDesign, Acrobat, and Photoshop. I hate Adobe. Bloated, complicated *mumble, mumble*…

I also just need to take a day and get things running the way I want them to in Linux. I can’t get PPP working with my 2.6.* kernel, meaning I can’t sync my PDA; no one else that I’ve been able to find online has been having this problem. I’m also tired of IceWM, and want to try something new, like Blackbox. I want to go ahead and patch my 2.6.5 kernel for APCI (power management for my laptop), and I want to get the wireless drivers installed and working with PPTP.

Next on my list of things to do? Download PDFs of the articles from Social Psychology and Human Sexuality (Roy Baumeister) and flagrantly break copyright laws to post them here. Some of the articles are actually more interesting than the “No shit, you mean men tend to have more of a short-term mating strategy, while women, who have a higher parental investment, tend to focus more on long-term strategies? Wow…” articles. Not to slam on Buss, because his ideas seem to have merit, but his was undoubtedly the longest, most painful read of the whole book. But these are good things to know. Knowledge is power and all that.