Just a real quick note here...as a subscriber to the Red Hat Network I received advance notice of the release of Red Hat 9; subscribers will be able to download it March 31st while it will be released April 7 for commercial sale and general download. Also, Mandrake 9.1 will be out very soon, I believe tomorrow. I plan on grabbing it and doing a comparison.

Last Wednesday I did a public session at work on "How to Upgrade Your Computer". We had about a dozen folks there (I didn't count) and even though we were supposed to wrap up at 9pm, we went on to about 10:30 looking at all kinds of things. They really liked my PondscumandLawyers.com Web site, which I don't get to show off much. I focused on the three most important upgrade tasks: more memory, more hard drive space, and upgrading the operating system--in this case, from Windows 98 to Windows XP. Just like everything I teach, I did a Web page to go with it, although it wasn't done when the class met (sorry). Anyway, it is now, at http://www.itm.iit.edu/resources/. Next week on Wednesday, March 26 , I'm doing “Free Yourself from the Microsoft Treadmill with Linux” and I think I'll see some of the same folks back. I actually get excited about this stuff (I guess I'm just an unusually articulate geek) and it is very cool when I can get other folks excited too. I had fun, they got to learn something, and a good time was had by all!