What Excites You?

[Greg Rundlett]

I love grip.
Insert CD, auto-connect to freedb.org, burn to ogg in two clicks, 
dumping files into my netjuke directory.

I love Apache, PHP, and MySQL which allow me to play said music using 
any computer connected to the internet.  Which, by the way, lets me 
share my music collection with my family that live far away just the way 
that telephones let us share communication that previously was 
restricted to telegraph or paper.

Oh yeah, I do the same thing with digital photo albums too.  I can just 
drag and drop the photos into my gallery to publish them complete with 
EXIF data.

I love The Gimp
Photoshop (plus Kai's Power Tools [script-fu], plus all the other 
filters and you could want) for free.

I love KRuler and all the other indespensible tools / applications that 
I have spent years finding for Windows that are included with Linux and 
just keep getting better.

I love OpenOffice, and how it lets me setup ODBC connections to remote 
MySQL databases that I can edit via a Microsoft Access-style interface 
without the deficiencies that I've experienced with Access.  Then I can 
easily save data into spreadsheets that I can share with Excel users 
(for the less enlightened), and I can create reports from queries to 
easily do analysis, and I can print it to PDF with another click.  Oh, 
and this is all included, for free.

I love NOT having to suffer all the pains, privacy invasions, complete 
waste of time, money and penalties that I've suffered for years using 
proprietary software.  I love not having to fear that some company is 
recording everything that I do on my computer as if it were their 
computer, or as if they owned me.

-- 
Greg Rundlett
Sr. Internet Systems Architect
FREePHILE
"Free Software on Linux"
greg at freephile.com
(978) 270-2425