Happy Holidays? I Think Not!

I had a realization yesterday, the day after Christmas, that the use of the term "Happy Holidays" is both dishonest and disingenuous. Yesterday was also the day that a small number of weird (yes, people have never been to Africa who recognize a holiday created in the 60's that celebrates the ancient traditions of Africa are weird in the same way anyone who celebrates Festivus is weird) people celebrated Kwanzaa but nobody offered me a "Happy Holidays!" New Years day is also coming up in a few days and that is also a holiday but it does not generate a "Happy Holidays!"

No, "Happy Holidays" mysteriously disappeared at 12:01am December 26th. Liberals in this country hate Christmas because of Christ. They realize however that they cannot ignore Christmas altogether because the huge majority of people celebrate Christmas. What they have done though is spread the lie that we celebrate all holidays, not just Christmas, so we must use the generic term "Happy Holidays" but people know better. They have done this in the same way that two men or two women who have sex are no longer called homosexuals but rather they are called gay. People who have sex with lots of partners are not longer called sluts and womanizers but liberated instead. The murder of unborn babies is called women's rights, reproductive rights, or choice.

With "Happy Holidays" retailers like Target and Walmart finally figured it out and started using "Merry Christmas" again. Everyone knows that the "Holiday" that we are wishing to be happy is Christmas. That does not mean people aren't free to celebrate Ramadan, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and yes even Festivus but it is Christmas time. If you went to Israel, I would not demand that they stop forcing Hanukkah on me and if I went to Jordan I would not demand that they use a generic term during the season of Ramadan. This is a nation founded in Christian roots but allows everyone to practice their own religion freely. We must remember our roots in Christianity and be proud of it.

People need to be honest and start saying "Merry Christmas" during the "holiday season" because that is the Holiday of the season we are celebrating as a nation. Individuals can celebrate anything they want but America celebrates Christmas.

You can even celebrate Christmas and leave Jesus out if you want. Enjoy the reindeer, enjoy Santa, enjoy Frosty but quit your whining about being offended. Relax and remember, just because most people include Jesus in Christmas doesn't mean you will all of the sudden become a" Fundy." People do things in the country that attack my beliefs and could easily offend me on a daily basis but I am ok with who I am and what I believe. I don't fake greetings and manufactured acceptance to live and be happy.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

My Own Ubuntu Linux Review

The transition is finally complete. I convinced my wife's aunt to let me tinker with her old system to see if I could make it work a little quicker. She had an old HP Pavillion with a Celeron Processor and 192K of RAM. The old thing was "running" Windows ME and it was basically unusable. You could not do anything when you turned it on because it was couldn't handle everything that was installed on it.

After doing a lot of reading on the different Linux distributions and downloading a few of them (including Mandriva One, Fedora 6, SuSE 10.1, Debian, and Ubuntu) I started with Ubuntu. I liked the Gnome desktop right away. I thought it was easy to use and personalize. Ubuntu was easy enough to install and almost all of my hardware worked right away.

The only major problem I had was well announced going in. The internal winmodem did not work. I did read that it was possile to make them work but found this to be very difficult and not worth the trouble. I found an external modem on ebay for $10. After a couple of setup adjustments it worked without any trouble. I was even able to use my username, password, and dial-up number from a Netscape dial-up account to connect with gnome-ppp. It obviously isn't as nice as my DSL account but hey, it is not my computer so if they are happy with dial-up, I am happy to get it working for them.

The best thing I found with Ubuntu is the online help available. There are a ton of websites dedicated to discussions on how to use Ubuntu as well as the Ubuntu sites themselves. Overall, I would say Ubuntu is definitely worth checking out if you are interested in Linux. It has everything you need for free. I am not ready to get rid of Windows altogether but I will keep Ubuntu around and run a dual-boot system.

As far as the other distributions go, Mandriva was the only other one I looked at extensively. I did like it and probably would have kept it if it was the one I had used first. It was also easy to setup, personalize, and navigate.

With regards to the old HP I was messing around with, it runs much quicker. I bought another similar HP for $50 from craigslist and combined the two systems. This gave me double the RAM, a Pentium III rather than a Celeron, two hard drives and a better video card. I am now running on a 500mhz Pentium III, 320K RAM, 40GB hard drive, external v.92 56k accent communications modem with Netscape dial-up, on-board video, and cheap sound card. It all runs very well and should give her a decent computer for her needs for a few more years until they spend the money on a new one.

The software that comes with Linux is great. It uses Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and Gimp as its browser, email, document creation, and graphics. You could make the argument that MS Office and Paintshop Pro (or other) are better but hey, OpenOffice and Gimp are free. You can't beat that.

If you like messing around with computers, give Linux a try. Get a second hard drive (they are very cheap now, I got one for $19 after rebate) and put one of the distributions on there.