Started a long book called Coders at Work.

I started a long book that interviews famous computer programmers. Seibel, Peter. Coders at Work: Reflections on the craft of programming. (New York, NY, Apress, 2009). The first programmer interviewed is very abrupt and says, he burned out programming. There were some lessons I took from his interview so far, and I am not done. His name is Jamie Zawinski and he programmed mostly in Lisp, helped with XEmacs and also worked at Netscape and Mozilla.

I have been buying laptops from Dell with Ubuntu installed by Dell.

I used to look all around for laptop suppliers who sold laptops with Linux already installed. I did not turn up much in those days. This lead to exploring UNIX laptops like Tadpoles on eBay. These were very expensive. I did do some Linux installs myself on various Thinkpads and a Toshiba. Eventually I became a Dell Canada customer being lead by Bell Sympatico to checking out their netbooks. I think netbooks are cool still and have given some to young kids in the 7 to 9 year old range. I noticed Richard Stallman uses a netbook, when I was in his company at a talk he gave. I have bought two very inexpensive laptops, one costing about 320$ brand new with Ubuntu already installed. This laptop is still working quite well and has never had any issues. On both of these laptops, I upgraded the Linux or changed to different Ubuntu flavours like Edubuntu, Kubuntu and more recently Ubuntu Studio.

This past month I have arranged a business lease from Dell for an XPS13 laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 installed. While usually these Ubuntu laptops have been cheap this one is more expensive. Yet this high end model is still much cheaper than low end laptops were 20 years ago.