One more of us…
Changing someone’s mind about something is often difficult. Even if you manage it, you can be left wondering if you did the right thing…
I’ve been using free software for ages and have been trying to encourage family members to do the same. Even if they haven’t been able to use it directly, they have used our CentOS server, shared files and printed through our Samba server, listened to music encoded with lame or ogg viewed digital photos managed using free software, and so on.
Lately my sons have been using Firefox. J has been using Thunderbird (because Outlook is such a dog) but has stuck with IE. For a while that was as far as my efforts had succeeded in spreading the open source word. You could say advocacy starts at home.
Recently though, J has got interested in blogging and has started to delve into the mysteries of HTML and CSS. Now I know this is home ground for free software. All the best tools are available for people who don’t mind getting their hands dirty with real code; conversely the paid for tools rarely give you the level of control you’d like, no matter how glitzy they are.
So I found myself in the local Borders looking for their last copy of O’Reilly’s Web Design in a Nutshell – not for myself but as a present for J. Later on we had a conversation about how RSS works. Now she’s moved to Firefox becuase her elderly version of IE was buggy for blogger’s editor. J watched keenly as I selected images for the blog, and using the Gimp cropped them, adjusted levels, brightness, contrast, resized them and so on…
I can’t wait to show J Chris Pederick’s excellent Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox…
I’m thrilled that we have another thing in common now, after all I was still getting over the shock of finding that she had walked out of a screening of Alien (how could I marry someone who did that!?).
This gives me the optimism to finally embark on the project of re-coding all our CD collection to ogg (J and I both have proper mp3 players, not those nasty little iPods). And I’m looking forward to not having to investigate the foibles of Windows and IE so often!