DC

OK, I have spent a substantial part of the past three days in bed. For those new to my journal, I have ME, which a lot of people don't know when they meet me (which suits me). This is because I tend to pace myself so that when people see me, I'm not too bad. If I am too bad, I generally can't make it out, so it's easy not to spot I have it. It is also not, mostly, as bad as it was at the start, but just lately it has taken a serious turn for the worse. Partly this is the effect of my having had a few months of other health problems (asthma, chest infection, weird dietary problem), partly having had to expend a lot of my spoons on helping out my parents (my father has been ill, in hospital a couple of times, and my mother's mobility is very limited). Except that I have had rest and things should have been on an improving curve, but in fact things have been been inclining to be worse. I can't help wondering if some of my other medication is having a bad effect on the ME. The past three days I have had almost no energy, had problems moving around the flat, and have tended to feel so exhausted I was on the point of collapse while I was lying down.

I am quite pleased this didn't hit earlier, because it would seriously have buggered up Friday. I spent a chunk of the day with banhe, whose birthday it was. There was photography involved, and food, and the giving of presents. It was excellent getting the chance to catch up with her.

Since she's vegan, we ate in the Note. I decided not to take the risotto cakes (which are delicious and I can tolerate them) because I always take them lately, and instead decided to have the lasagne. It was nice, and I had no catastrophic effects, but there was definite unpleasant bloating for several hours afterwards. I recently also tried some beans (since I like beans on toast) and it wasn't too bad — not the catastrophically bad effects I was getting with fibre a few months ago. However, definite discomfort and bloating, enough to suggest eating more fibre would be a bad idea. So, it looks like it is going to be a while yet before I get back to being vegan.

My father's is not too well again; in exactly what way, who knows? He will not describe his symptoms. He's been put on some new medication which looks like some fairly potent antimicrobial, and he's going to be reassessed at the end of the week, and possibly admitted again to hospital. This is going to be fun.

I have been pleased to discover that there's now a BBC iPlayer which works properly with Linux, using Adobe AIR if I recall correctly (I installed it just before the ME thumped me at the weekend). Not sure how long that has been available, I haven't even looked at the iPlayer page for several months. It's about time, whenever it was implemented.

The other night wibbble and I were passing some time by discussing the relative merits of the OSes we use, he advocating the wonderfulness of MacOS and I proclaiming the superlative goodness of Linux. (It’s something which helps pass the time when you are installing software.)

It was interesting to come across this article in Akregator (the RSS feed software which comes with KDE) about the art professor who wiped MacOS X from his digital media lab’s Macs and replaced it with Ubuntu, a Linux distro.

I began seriously planning this change last school year, when I realized how fully the current feature sets of free software programs could satisfy the technical needs of the students in my classes. I decided that the time had come to teach our undergraduate art students about free software programs such as the GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of proprietary programs such as Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Dreamweaver.

How did it work out?

The students’ reactions to all this was inspiring. They felt empowered by the quality of the software and their ability to upgrade, share, and customize it freely. They also appreciated the immense array of additional GNU/Linux multimedia software available to them. And I found it inspiring how many of the students took enthusiastic advantage of other applications, not only by installing software via Synaptic from the Ubuntu repositories of more than 16,000 packages, but in some case by compiling source code from elsewhere....

I found that Photoshop and the other proprietary software packages we had been using for years generally had more polished interfaces and more advanced features than the free software we chose. But the free software had more than enough of the core capabilities we needed in my classes, and also often featured desirable capabilities missing in the proprietary software.

The switch saved thousands of dollars in software upgrades. As a result I was able to dramatically lower the lab fee for each class, and require instead that the students purchase additional textbooks.

I’m not, BTW, knocking MacOS (whether X or earlier), which is a nicely designed OS (and X has a lot in common with Linux), but this does illustrate how useful open source software can be, without the enormous cost of some proprietary software, and that the transition need not be painful.