I was sufficiently perturbed by the typographical error in the version that I most recently submitted of my paper on indecision that I decided that, were it not bounced back to me before the first mensiversary of its submission, I would offer a correction. (My thought in waiting a month was that I should limit the frequency with which I pestered them.) I did so, and the journal accepted that with perfect helpfulness.

I am still wrestling with Sprint over charges to my account for mobile broadband service.

On 11 May, I opted to switch my principal operating system to Fedora. (I had been considering Scientific Linux as well.) I've since had some problems with installing fonts for all users, and the system has been a little bit flakier, but on the whole the new operating system has been a satisfying choice.

I am scheduled for some non-trivial dental work on the mornings of 26 and 27 May. Two fillings that I have had since childhood have eroded to the point that they should be replaced, and there is to be a deep cleaning below my gum-line.

The Woman of Interest and I will be visiting my parents for a few days at the end of the month. (I plan to stay-on for some time after she has flown away.)

My most recently activated license for RHEL expired within the last two or three days. I may have an unused license stashed somewhere, but I've been planning to migrate to some other distribution of Linux when this one expired, because I've been so unhappy with Red Hat's past ill-preparedness for demands upon their servers at times of new releases.

Gaal once suggested that I try a flavor of Linux, such as Ubuntu, that used a more-advanced package-management system, but I've been fairly comfortable with the package-management system (as such) used by RHEL, and I'm inclined to stick closer to familiar forms. (It is not the quality of Red Hat's released code that has alienated me.) I think that my decision will be one between Fedora and Scientific Linux.

Fedora is the source from which RHEL is derived; Fedora is bleeding edge. Scientific Linux and CentOS aim to be very close derivatives of RHEL. Scientific Linux seems to be the most effectively maintained; unfortunately, when last I checked, the developers of CentOS hadn't got a stable clone of RHEL 6.0 out the door yet, and some of the changes from RHEL 5.6 to 6.0 have been meaningful improvements for me. (StarCom Linux, another close derivative of RHEL, lags even further behind.)

I downloaded a live CD of Fedora and a live DVD of Scientific Linux, so that I could try each. There seemed to be no non-trivial difference in either case from the look-and-feel of RHEL.

Anyway, the choice would seem to be one of functionality (Fedora) vs reliability (Scientific Linux).

[Up-Date (2011:05/23): On 11 May, I installed Fedora. I've had a few mishaps with fonts, and the system has been a little flakier, but so far the marginal benefits have seemed to out-weigh the marginal costs. I've also been giving some thought to installing a larger hard-drive, with one or more additional partitions, for other *nixes.]