I’ve been meaning to write this post for a month now. Or maybe two months. Well, let’s make it a month and a half. And what it centers around is a topic that most normal, average “any-collars” (i.e., blue or white, if you have a collar at all) wouldn’t care too much about. In fact, I’m finding that I don’t care too much about it either. And for those who know me… well, that’s a big deal.

The catch, the trick, the surprise — the all important lady behind the curtain and the thing behind door number three — is that recently I made a simple switch. I switched — are you ready for it? From Ubuntu to Windows 7.

Now I know there was a gasp in the back of the crowd, and a kind mother who covered the ears of her darling three-year-old. But I will say this: I’m impressed with the changes they’ve made, and I have no intention of switching back.

The main motivation for switching was simply because A) my new computer came with it, and B) Windows is simply an easier platform for consuming media. Two years ago it would have been a religious war: Freedom, hope, and such and such, and an attack against a corporate conglomerate. Now I’m simply switching to what works better for me on my home computer.

But I can’t write this post without hitting on that religiosity I once had, where, for a while… maybe a week… I was a bit torn. I mean, how do you define freedom? Freedom for the programmers, or freedom for the user? At home I want to be a user. I made that decision. So I’ll take the freedom that lets me more easily do what I want even though, theoretically, that means there’s a Schwarzschild radius. (I learned that from a YouTube video!)

So.

I didn’t want to make this long. I didn’t want to compare two different operating systems. And I didn’t want to conquer or ridicule a religion. That’s unimportant. Instead, I wanted to focus on the value, and that something I once called “bad,” (Microsoft, Windows, etc., etc.) is now the foundation of my home computing experience. Pretty cool huh?

Alright. I’m done with this post. It’s time to get up and go do more important things, like eat cereal.

Update: As I was editing this post, my computer had a hard crash. I mean, a REALLY hard crash. Not even a blue screen. I didn’t like it at first, but then I thought for a second: maybe that proves the point. Maybe you take your good with the bad, and the freedom is just choosing which ones you want. Hmm. Good to know.