I just got home from the “Zappa Plays Zappa” concert/show at the NorVa tonight. Astounding. Simply amazing. They covered a lot of material. Uncle Remus, Peaches en Regalia, Wind up working in a Gas Station, City of Tiny Lights, Dumb All Over, Yellow Snow, Cosmik Debris, The Illinois Enema Bandit, He Used to Cut the Grass, Joe’s Garage, Packard Goose, you name it. If the show is coming to somewhere near you, go see it.

Yes, I know. I have ranted and yakked on and on ad nauseum about Linux. Blabbering is one of my strong points. Ok, so while I pulled the virtual plug on my own Linux efforts (for now, not forever), I decided to victimize my helpless kids once again with techie experimentation. In this lab experiment, I place the kids at one end of the maze and put a game at the other. In between, Ubuntu. As you can see, the kids rapidly hit a few walls trying to figure out why it doesn’t smell like Windows anymore. “Where is AIM?!” I show them GAIM. “Where is PAINT?!” I show them Gimp (ok, it took a little longer than just showing it was there). “This is weird” I replied: “You’re weird. A perfect match” They figure out Runescape, Club Penguin, Google, our family web portal, and all is good… except for…

Skkreeettch!!!! Breaks lock up.

Daughter says “what’s this gtkPod crap?!” “What’s this Floola stuff?” “Where the (#*&@#) is iTunes?!” So I show them how to synch their iPod with gtkPod and Floola. I thought all was good.

Wrong.

“I want to shop for songs to download, you can’t do that with this trash!” They’re right. There so far is nothing to replace iTunes for shopping the iTunes store on Linux. Doh!!!!

Well, at least my 8 and 11 year olds are fine, for now. Once they start hitting their iPod Nano’s I’m doomed.

Then second-eldest daughter chimes in from across the house: “The photo upload and editing features suck. I want Vista back!”

I’m not giving in yet. Ubuntu 7.04 is still in their face for now. If they keep up the whining I’ll cave in. If they quiet down, I’ll leave it. Check back in a few weeks.

Blah blah blah blah Linux, blah blah blah Windows. Blah blah blah OSX blah Java blah AJAX blah blah blah blah. Blah blah .NET blah blah Web Services blah blah iPhone, iPod, blah blah Apple TV, blah blah TiVo, blah blah Sony, blah blah HP, blah Dell, Symantec, blah blah blah.

That pretty much sums up 99 percent of the tech magazines and web sites these days.

Check out this video on YouTube from Top Gear (Episode: Killing a Toyota, Part 1). Almost brought tears to my eyes, reminiscing about my old 1985 Toyota 2WD that I had for 15 years and 120,000 miles. It ran like a champ the day I traded it in for a 2000 Geo Metro. The Metro ran great also, but the Toyota had the most hard-earned miles on it. Multiple trips to New York City, Michigan, Richmond, DC, North Carolina. Moving from place to place. It was the vehicle I drove to Michigan to move my sweetie-baby down to Virginia and marry her. Ahh, the memories…