Off-Hand

My challenge for this month is to do menial tasks that I would normally perform with my right hand, with my left. Brushing my teeth, shaving, buttering bread, opening doors, cutting my nails; it hasn't gone as far as writing or moving mice around, but the activities listed above have become much more difficult.

Okay, opening doors with your off-hand isn't particularly difficult, but other things become much more awkward. You feel like a prepubescent child trying to coordinate clumsy gestures and unfamiliar movements, imitating actions that seem to come so easily to the grown ups around you. Go ahead and try brushing your teeth with the hand you don't normally use.

Over the Christmas holiday I also rebuilt my PC and then installed Ubuntu on a virtual computer thanks to Sun VirtualBox.

After what I can only describe as friction between myself and SUSE, I have been pleasantly surprised by Ubuntu. It's pretty quick, it's smooth, it's not at all ugly, it's easy to use, and so far I haven't had any problems doing what I want to do with it.

Part of the good vibe must thanks to VirtualBox since I can just fall back to my native PC at any time if Ubuntu doesn't behave in the way I want it to. I haven't done much with the OS apart from explore the command prompt (sorry, terminal), play Mines, check out its audio/video player, and browse the web; so perhaps I should refrain from gushing before I've tried to run and install some programs, set up a web server, tested for bugs or security holes, and investigated the limits of the Open Source software available for Linux.