Home for the Holidays

We haven't been able to be home for the holidays since the year before I took my kids and rented a condo on Maui for 2 weeks for Christmas 2005. I found it is actually more reasonable (for 2 weeks or more) to rent a condo than pay at big ticket hotels. I like this better because it is more like living there with veranda, beach and swimming pool and the place we stayed we found that Jack Nicolson had stayed there too. I think the little area was called Kahana, north of Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii. From there we could see all the sunsets in December and across the ocean we could see from our veranda the Islands of Molokai and Lanai.

So this means we haven't all been here on the ocean on the Northern California Coast since 2004 at least. My wife's father has been too frail since then and so we spent most of those Christmases with him, several hours south by car on the coast. He passed away last summer and my mother this fall. So at least they are out of their misery. There is at least peace in that for them even if we all miss them both.

So to have all my kids in the same place for a week or more is great since one is now 34, one is 19 and one is 12 who lives with us full time still.

My 19 year old is supposed to drive down from Oregon in the next couple of days. Everyone else is here already until at least the 1st of the year. So, as my son demonstrates his latest favorite open source operating system, UBUNTU, which is based upon a linux krnl. The family also loves Firefox too. Anyway, he is showing me a Beyonce-Shakira music video with really great graphics on an UBUNTU system. It is about as high a level of graphics that I have seen yet in a computer anywhere. It will operate PC or an intel based Imac or intel based macbook. He says you can run it in parallel, I believe he called it with a microsoft operating system so you can come up in either windows or ubuntu and decide when you boot up. Though he says you can run World of Warcraft on Ubuntu on a PC, he says you almost need to be a tech to set it up.

But for internet, or text editing or text composing and printing it is one of the best he's seen. So if you have an extra computer try and intstall it off the web and play with it like it was a beta. Also, like Firefox it is being constantly improved and updated and best of all it is free and available in many many international languages.