I’ve been busier than usual working on my leadership practicum and rebuilding computers destroyed by worms and trojans. I’m empathetic for the folks whose units have been destroyed. In at least one case it was older people on a dialup line. They have a Dell with Windows XP Professional and there is no way you can get your Windows updates and antivirus updates on a 56K modem. I made some money which will pay for my classes at St. Bonaventure but I really want to recommend Ubuntu to more people like those folks because if you’re going to be on dialup and you cannot afford a Macintosh or don’t want to then Windows is not a realistic option for you.
I don’t listen to the news everyday and get most of my updates on current events at Huffington or from colleagues on Twitter and Facebook, but the news from Washington, Baltimore and Dallas is snow storms. I live in what used to be called the “snow belt.” We live about 50 nautical miles from Lake Erie and we usually get large amounts of snow. I’ve noticed too in the last twenty plus years that we no longer get the bone numbing cold we got when I was younger. We used to get -20 and -30 degrees fahrenheit in the winter months and that doesn’t happen anymore. We also don’t get the huge snowfalls we used to. Right now there is more snow in the Baltimore-Washington area than there is in my backyard. I read “Inconvenient Truth” about four or five years ago. A Franciscan friar recommended it to me and since he usually is a reasonable voice I read it and what Al Gore described in the book is the type of weather we’ve been experiencing in the past few years. In the summer our rainstorms have been more violent and in the winter, well, we don’t get as cold nor do we get as much snow. It may be an inconvenient truth for politicians who are owned lock stock and barrel by oil companies to admit that there is something called global warming and that if something isn’t done about it there won’t be a planet nor consumers left to feed their greed.
