This is section my personal mea culpa to my acquaintances in the open source movement -- Linux (Jon Maddog Hall of GNHLUG,  Eric Raymond (of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" fame and the libertarian Reason Foundation circles where I met him) and Alan Kay et al of Squeak fame (who I say hello to every year now at the Squeak "Learning Lab" week at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire.

As explain elsewhere on my site, I have just personally changed geographic locations from Peterborough NH (in the Monadnock region, 70 or so miles from Boston MA) to western NY's Monroe County, the Rochester NY area twenty or thirty miles south of Lake Ontario, a few miles south of the Erie Canal,  70 or so miles east of Buffalo and Lake Erie.

My immediate focus these days is on creating content at the least possible cost.  In consultation with my brother Peter,  who uses both Microsoft and Linux tools for various aspects of his software experiments,  the quickest way for me to start looking at the creation of a WWW site is to purchase a "black box" that has widespread use and therefore plenty of documentation both on line and in book form -- and which will play with my personal several year old HP Pavillion 783C with MS XP as its operating system.   Inside of a week or so (interrupted by a trip to California) by the last week of April I had an initial stab at a site using these Windows XP based tools...

I have been through earlier less than polished phases of Linux land.  I first achieved a personal Linux system circa 1995 when I loaded a Slackware CD.   I personally got very intimate with gory details of making "X" work on my PC class 80X86 machines of the time.

Using these Microsoft mass market tools is the only cost effective way to achieve what I have done here so far so quickly... an example of what economists call "barriers to entry" -- being familiar with the way one Microsoft Product works (Word) makes it easy to adopt another such product (FrontPage.)   This customer familiarity with Word as well as Excel is a barrier to entry that all open source products face as well.  (Though I still long for my Emacs editor of Unix and Linux phases in my life... and may use that as an excuse to get back into Linux and ultimately Squeak/Smalltalk)