Wine's been around for awhile, but when I first tried it a couple of years back, I couldn't get it to work, so I abandoned it as an idea whose reach exceeded its grasp. Wine isn't an MS Windows emulator so much as a Linux program that imitates Windows' system-calls and attempts to run them natively in Linux. The idea was that eventually, it'd be possible to use those pesky Windows-only apps without having to reboot into a Windows partition.

When I tried it, it was a pain to install and a nightmare to configure. In the end, …

Last year was an odd one for music. Politics reared its ugly head during an election year, and musicians, who we all know are the real experts on foreign policy, seemed to come out of the woodwork to denounce "the war," falling back on rehearsed soundbites and incoherent vitriol. The whole thing was made all the more disappointing by the fact that there simply wasn't anything very good coming out from the major labels. U2 did an okay record with a ponderous title, but it traded mostly on nostalgia, and it appears that R.E.M. is just a …