The 5-year-old PC in my daughter’s room, her PBSKids.com and “Daddy, I want to watch a movie you ripped from my DVDs I’ve since destroyed because I can’t put anything away properly and they’ve all become scratched beyond repair” computer, pissed me off for the last time last night.

All I wanted to do was open up the E: drive, an external hard drive where I have all of her DVD movies backed up, a practice I highly recommend if you've got a child.  They WILL destroy their DVDs so if you don't want to be out the $20 each, make an .mpg backup of them!  For whatever reason, this simple task of loading a movie for her caused Explorer to freeze (not responding) and it was like pulling teeth trying to get it to quit being a pain in the neck with CTRL+ALT+DEL repeatedly.  After a few minutes of fighting with it, I actually pulled the plug out of the wall in disgust.  I have never been so angry attempting to do a task (start a movie) that should literally take 15 seconds (Click drive, click folder, click sub folder, click movie to launch VLC and play) as I was last night after minutes of angrily fighting with the idiotic, frozen XP box...  My poor daughter, who was looking forward to some Wall-E, was instead stuck watching the 50-year-old "Snow White" on VHS as her settle down for the night movie.

I am officially moving my iTouch to my Macbook this coming weekend (currently on my daughter’s XP box)…something I’ve been holding off doing but now will make it official.  I am putting the kid on Linux full time.  Installing VLC should handle all of the .mpg and .avi file formats http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ so I should be good to go.  It’ll even handle the DVDs she hasn’t yet scratched beyond repair.  She can have her PBS kids, she can watch her backup .mpg movies while using the original DVDs as coasters for her sippy cups, and if she does want to stream some Netflix, I am going to figure out how to get Safari to run on WINE and stream that way (as Netflix only works with Safari on a Mac and IE in windows).  http://phorolinux.com/how-to-run-safari-in-linux-using-wine.html

That's right, my 4-year-old daughter is switching to Ubuntu Linux.