The joys of monthly journalism: my column on Sun and Linux finally got posted online today (I wrote it over a month ago). As it posts, LinuxWorld is winding down, and Sun is down again to $3.46 a share.

My boss, the mad genius, still is taking entries from the staff for the Sun-goes-out-of-business and the Sun-gets-bought-by-IBM pools (closest guess to date of transaction wins). I'm not ante-ing up yet, though–I don't think Sun is history yet, no matter how stupid they've been about the software side of their business. And I don't think IBM has enough spare cash left to buy them outright.

For Christmas, I bought my kids a PC–a Compaq 1.2 GHz machine from Sam's Club. They needed a PC to play their favorite games (Roller Coaster Tycoon isn't available for the Mac) and to do school work on–both are now doing school projects in PowerPoint. We set the shiny new system up in our finished basement, which acts primarily as the kids' playroom.

My oldest son (just turned 12) also wanted to be able to instant message classmates about homework (yeah, right). So I set him up with an AIM account. Soon, we discovered an interesting side benefit to this arrangement:AIM has become our own little intercom system. Now, I don't have to strain my vocal cords shouting through two floors to get him to take the trash out anymore.