I asked my Twitter friends today “What computing tech/hardware/software apps are the bane of your existence & make your life *harder*?” Here are the results:

lucidquiet “I hate Windows and I hate Java and I hate all programs that FORCE me to use Windows” — @linuxchic (”ditto” — @lucidquiet, me).

feedback87 @linuxchic lol oh man windows. you cant live with it but you cant live without it

zemote @linuxchic you can’t forget active X, that is the bain of my existance

beaker133 @linuxchic I work on a win98 box. enough said

beaker133 @linuxchic plus barracuda firewall, and in house test machines that i fix before fixing customers crap :)

Penguin @linuxchic Internet Explorer, and anyone who uses it as a primary browser.

techpickles @linuxchic Windows, and most things Java (I’m looking at you Eclipse!)

RaggedEdge @Linuxchic: Siemens APT, it’s a DOS program, it sucks, it runs in 640K low memory with a special graphics driver loaded high.

RaggedEdge @Linuxchic: Can only use the serial port to download programs to a special controller, takes 45 to 50 minutes for big programs.

RaggedEdge @Linuxchic: During about half of the downloads, it locks up, thus requiring to start over. Fun when a whole brewery is waiting on you.

btn @linuxchic - Anything that requires me to fire up Windows in VMware - even worse if it requires me to actually boot the machine into Windows

feedback87 @linuxchic got to be twitter so far lol you?

vgan @linuxchic I nominate Altiris and Iron Mountain Connected Backup (Server and Clients). Citrix Metaframe XP would be a runner up.

linuxchic My most hated? Windows is my default answer. Most hated software varies depending on the day. :P

nikolaidis @Linuxchic: Symantec Antivirus (now known as Endpoint Security).

HighDef @linuxchic No doubt about it; MS Windows is definitely both a standard AND the crappiest piece of crap hindering technological advancement!

danielho @linuxchic Are you goading me into saying that I hate Windows? OK OK, I do!!! Esp. Vista and MS’s idiotic server software. Go certify that!

PodCamp MidWest has begun and if you are in the Kansas City area it’s not too late to head over. I am posting photos to Flickr, SnapFoo, and updating Twitter live. Twitter friends lunch meetup today, check out the tweets to find out where.

• Flickr Photos
• SnapFoo Pics
• Twitter

Read the blog post covering all the sessions I attended at Alternageek.com.

Last.fm announced today that users in the US, UK, and Germany can now stream full length tracks as well as entire albums straight from the Last.fm social music service. They state they will be paying artists directly and have the support of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner as well as independent artists.

According to their announcement:

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

If this service does well it could help push the major labels into a new service model that serves the customers and the artists. Last.fm was acquired by CBS last spring.

Every so often I get all kinds of sidetracked here at linuxchic.net and wander away from tech and nix and wind up posting stuff like blog tips and such… well, no more (blog tips anyway). I’ve decided to fully utilize my blogagory.com domain and dedicate it to the topic of blogging. This is a pretty big topic so I suppose it will end up encompassing such things as social networking and new media as well, but only as it applies to a blogger. To make a potentially long blog post short, head over to blog(a)gory.com and read about blogging (the URL doesn’t actually have the parentheses in case you are confused) . Stay here or listen to the alternageek.com podcast to read/hear about tech, gadgets, nix, and open source. Want to hear random life rants of mine? That’s what my Twitter and Vox blog is for. Why so many blogs? Because sometimes you just don’t give a crap about my issues with pajamas in public or my opinion of the blogosphere (there it is, I used the word!) and you are visiting linuxchic.net just for the ‘nix stuff.

In episode 19 of the Alternageek podcast we talked about a new early beta of a service called SnapFoo.com. SnapFoo allows you to post pictures to an account much like text to Twitter. I have written a more robust writeup at Alternageek.

If you would like to get an invite to SnapFoo.com’s early beta, send me an email or a direct message on Twitter with your email address and I will send one your way.

The competition to win a trip to BlogHer 2007 from Scrapblog is over and unfortunately I was not a winner. Not even so much as a lousy t-shirt. Another gal won the trip thanks to her 4000 pageviews and it is pretty obvious that she has a much larger network that I do. I’m not bitter about that (though I am impressed) because I learned that I do indeed have a ton of friends on the social networks I have joined and participated in and what I lack in quantity I surely make up for with quality. Most of the people I communicate with on a daily basis are on more than one social network and because of that I have gotten to know them as more than just voices… they are pretty neat people.

I hear about their daily adventures, emotions, thoughts and frustrations on Twitter. I see little moments of their lives thanks to the photos they share on Flickr. I read more detailed posts about interests, causes and hobbies on their blogposts at Vox, Virb and privately owned domains. I know what music moves them thanks to their Last.fm streams. They share small excerpts of things the find on the web through the Tumblr and Pownce shares and del.icio.us tags. With Facebook apps I can even find out that they too are members of LibraryThing and some of their books are pretty darn interesting so I might add their selections to my library as well.

It was these total “strangers” on the internet that clicked on my Scrapblog and graciously put up with my cheesy slideshow and listened to the silly (and some thought more than slightly annoying) music repeatedly in order to help me earn entries into a competition (thank you!!). It is these people who let me know when my website has taken a crap or give me tips on improving my podcast. It is these total strangers, many of whom I share my life with in 140 characters or less and that for the large part have never met, that I can now consider friends all over the US and even the world.

These were more than random pageviews, these were clicks from people I have gotten to know and that I communicate with everyday. I must come to the conclusion that my life has been enriched by social networking because of the positive impact these “strangers” have had on my life already.

I think my toddler’s upset stomach has subsided enough that we can safely return to bed and dreamland with minimal discomfort and I can stop writing posts at 3 am. Please excuse the podcast release delay for Alternageek.com; the podcast is recorded but I have some editing to do and being in VMware training this week has slowed me down a bit.

YourOnRamp is a new community designed for women looking to re-enter corporate America.

For women that have taken time off of work, often to raise children, many find that coming back to the work world is difficult, and is often hard to find companies that are family-friendly, and equally as difficult to find a balance between work and family. YourOnRamp is looking to be an online resource for these women, offering news articles and other editorial content, along with a career coach and a social network for the purpose of getting women back on track. Most of the basics are present for typical social network functionality, including personal profiles, blogs and forums.

Read more about this at Mashable