1) Ubuntu Feisty Fawn isn't ready for the general masses. I hope you understand I write this for geeks. There are plenty of quirks and weirdness here to make me mark it a green or blue.
These guys had a few things to say that I didn't run into myself.
2) Umm...that's about it. I recommend anyone get the LiveCD and play with it. I wouldn't try installing it if you aren't comfortable working with your windows partition. If you don't know what I just said means, then don't try to install it. Or do, but be very very careful and read, read, read! about the options you choose during install.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
There can be more than one...
Okay, I admit it. It finally happened to me. I'm converted, I've seen the world in a whole new light. It happened yesterday morning...reading through a number of my blogs I found a number of references to Ubuntu's new release 7.04 aka Feisty Fawn.
They had a handy LiveCD and I had a spare machine... One thing led to another and now I'm running it on 3 machines here in the house and planning how to migrate the other 9 or so.
I've been hollering at Microsoft to strip down their OS and sheer off the bells and whistles and give me a lean, efficient and stable OS. Charge me a reasonable amount for it and sell a lot of subscriptions for updates, applications and upgrades. Let the open source community go nuts on the source code and start cranking out competitive, inexpensive and community supported competitors for those services. You'll still make a buck when you sell the OS...but it's too late now. See how easy it is to get me started?
So, for the first time in about 3 years I sat down in front of a shiny new OS and said "Very nice." and "Well done!" or "Ah, that's how that's supposed to work..."
Maybe the shiny newness will wear off this weekend when I start digging deeper into apps but for right now I'd really suggest you get a copy of the LiveCD and give it a test drive.
I started off with a clone P4 3.0 with 1GB and a Gigabit LAN connection to the network and my 1.5Mb DSL (I know, but I really do live in the boonies.). 40GB Seagate SATA screaming away and a fairly advanced dual head X600 ATI card on the PCI-X bus.
The LiveCD came down in about 20-25 minutes, burned up in 5. Booted to the installer less than half an hour after I'd gotten the inkling.
I was gritting my teeth for the 80 column installs I'm mostly familiar with. But, they put on a nice show. The OS boots from the CD in a pretty full format you can fiddle with. The install is hand-holdy and doesn't really tell you what's going on, or why - but it gets it done.
I'm still feeling nervous that I don't have the latest and best drivers, but that's just my Windows hangover, I hope.
The install only took about 30 minutes from the first boot of the LiveCD - maybe an hour before I got back up to my first completed install. It seemed fast, then I realized it had pretty much skipped at least one, perhaps two restarts before getting me to that first full login. I guess that's one of the clever beauties of the LiveCD format - that fairly long load allowed it to figure out what to install without having to ask me a lot of questions...or any.
On the first install I tested out the XP boot, it was freakin' simple, it found it already, labeled it correctly - damn near everything. It worked, I knew what to choose to get where. XP came up quick as ever. Restarted and went back in to Ubuntu. Startup is fast and seems fairly efficient.
The first thing it does is look for updates, which it finds. I'd rather have some than none anyday - none means nobody is supporting it any more. I was expecting a long wait but it was a good 20 minutes. While those were loading up I started digging through the GUI controls and looking at system resources.
I'm not too fond of the default colors, and one of my biggest beefs with most Linux desktops was the need to edit lots of little .conf files to change the resolution, wallpaper and look and feel settings. The Feisty Fawn has a very nice slick desktop interface that's easy to navigate and I found fairly direct and straight forward. Sure there are quirks, and there are fewer options out of the box. Guess that's why it installs so quick!
And there, to my astonishment is my 40GB NTFS drive on the desktop! And I can totally use it. Nice! My XP Boot is intact on the drive and totally accessible. Okay, it's scary too, but good to know.
The network configured just right and I'm able to browse the network and access computers on the AD with my AD credentials. Out of the box...I just went to them, gave it my credentials and made some choices about how to store them locally. Boom - I'm browsing my XP workstation drive.
Firefox comes by default and runs well. Went ahead and installed my base set of plugins and extensions. Runs good...That's where I usually am anyway.
I'm still a little worried about stepping away from MS Office. It's still the business standard. I haven't been more than 85 or 90% with Google Docs. I'll see how much difficulty I have getting everything the way I like it in the pre-installed open office.
Some apps are loaded by default, a fairly nice selection, and there is already a nice library of applications available and lots more to be found searching the internet. Though, most of the non-debian packaged apps delv quickly in to .conf files and command line hacking (which I've kind of been missing, not enough in 2k and XP). This could be a breaking point. If I can't get my apps up and running the way I want I'll be going back to XP.
I've been enjoying it. It's hard to be intimidated by something called Feisty Fawn. I guess that was maybe the point. But I'm fairly impressed. It seems to fill a lot of the gaps MS has left out of their recent OS's and managed to build a good solid base of technologies to support the user and the developers. It seems solid, now. I'll let you know how it goes.
I think my next convert will be the AVServer - looking at MythTV and some others...more soon!
They had a handy LiveCD and I had a spare machine... One thing led to another and now I'm running it on 3 machines here in the house and planning how to migrate the other 9 or so.
I've been hollering at Microsoft to strip down their OS and sheer off the bells and whistles and give me a lean, efficient and stable OS. Charge me a reasonable amount for it and sell a lot of subscriptions for updates, applications and upgrades. Let the open source community go nuts on the source code and start cranking out competitive, inexpensive and community supported competitors for those services. You'll still make a buck when you sell the OS...but it's too late now. See how easy it is to get me started?
So, for the first time in about 3 years I sat down in front of a shiny new OS and said "Very nice." and "Well done!" or "Ah, that's how that's supposed to work..."
Maybe the shiny newness will wear off this weekend when I start digging deeper into apps but for right now I'd really suggest you get a copy of the LiveCD and give it a test drive.
I started off with a clone P4 3.0 with 1GB and a Gigabit LAN connection to the network and my 1.5Mb DSL (I know, but I really do live in the boonies.). 40GB Seagate SATA screaming away and a fairly advanced dual head X600 ATI card on the PCI-X bus.
The LiveCD came down in about 20-25 minutes, burned up in 5. Booted to the installer less than half an hour after I'd gotten the inkling.
I was gritting my teeth for the 80 column installs I'm mostly familiar with. But, they put on a nice show. The OS boots from the CD in a pretty full format you can fiddle with. The install is hand-holdy and doesn't really tell you what's going on, or why - but it gets it done.
I'm still feeling nervous that I don't have the latest and best drivers, but that's just my Windows hangover, I hope.
The install only took about 30 minutes from the first boot of the LiveCD - maybe an hour before I got back up to my first completed install. It seemed fast, then I realized it had pretty much skipped at least one, perhaps two restarts before getting me to that first full login. I guess that's one of the clever beauties of the LiveCD format - that fairly long load allowed it to figure out what to install without having to ask me a lot of questions...or any.
On the first install I tested out the XP boot, it was freakin' simple, it found it already, labeled it correctly - damn near everything. It worked, I knew what to choose to get where. XP came up quick as ever. Restarted and went back in to Ubuntu. Startup is fast and seems fairly efficient.
The first thing it does is look for updates, which it finds. I'd rather have some than none anyday - none means nobody is supporting it any more. I was expecting a long wait but it was a good 20 minutes. While those were loading up I started digging through the GUI controls and looking at system resources.
I'm not too fond of the default colors, and one of my biggest beefs with most Linux desktops was the need to edit lots of little .conf files to change the resolution, wallpaper and look and feel settings. The Feisty Fawn has a very nice slick desktop interface that's easy to navigate and I found fairly direct and straight forward. Sure there are quirks, and there are fewer options out of the box. Guess that's why it installs so quick!
And there, to my astonishment is my 40GB NTFS drive on the desktop! And I can totally use it. Nice! My XP Boot is intact on the drive and totally accessible. Okay, it's scary too, but good to know.
The network configured just right and I'm able to browse the network and access computers on the AD with my AD credentials. Out of the box...I just went to them, gave it my credentials and made some choices about how to store them locally. Boom - I'm browsing my XP workstation drive.
Firefox comes by default and runs well. Went ahead and installed my base set of plugins and extensions. Runs good...That's where I usually am anyway.
I'm still a little worried about stepping away from MS Office. It's still the business standard. I haven't been more than 85 or 90% with Google Docs. I'll see how much difficulty I have getting everything the way I like it in the pre-installed open office.
Some apps are loaded by default, a fairly nice selection, and there is already a nice library of applications available and lots more to be found searching the internet. Though, most of the non-debian packaged apps delv quickly in to .conf files and command line hacking (which I've kind of been missing, not enough in 2k and XP). This could be a breaking point. If I can't get my apps up and running the way I want I'll be going back to XP.
I've been enjoying it. It's hard to be intimidated by something called Feisty Fawn. I guess that was maybe the point. But I'm fairly impressed. It seems to fill a lot of the gaps MS has left out of their recent OS's and managed to build a good solid base of technologies to support the user and the developers. It seems solid, now. I'll let you know how it goes.
I think my next convert will be the AVServer - looking at MythTV and some others...more soon!
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
The sharpest tool in the drawer...
I had a frustrating time last night. Mrs. Rex's dad had his main drive partitioned up into a 4GB C: drive and a 26GB D: drive and was having problems with C: filling up.
I'd recently gotten a new SimpleTech 1GB USB Flash Drive and had loaded it up with all the tools of my trade. The software and applications I most frequently use. This was to make me a mobile computer repair commando with everything I needed at my disposal dangling from my keychain.
I typically carry around a little 2.5" USB hard drive enclosure with a 40GB IDE notebook drive in it for this task but was making an attempt at reducing the size and weight of my portable.
Well, over the course of three days that I've been trying to use the flash drive it's been nothing but problems. I spent a goodly amount of time reformatting it, creating a "Flash Backup" folder on my desktop so when the thing cheesed out and gave me a "file is corrupt or unaccessible" error I could just wipe it and reload it in a jiffy. What a pain in the ass. The flash drive now lives in my trash can until Wednesday when the garbage man comes.
I took it over to my in-laws with the intention of installing partition magic from the flash drive and resizing his partitions. When it cheesed out and wouldn't let me. Piece of shit. I'm going back to the 2.5" USB enclosure. So, instead of driving home and getting the old standby drive I took a stab at finding a nice Open Source Alternative.
I cruised over to osalt.com and looked up alternatives to partition magic. It looked like the tool for the job was a utility called gparted - they had a live CD version so I downloaded it and burnt it to CD. Booted to it and took a look.
I really like the smooth, clean operations of live CD's in general. It's a great way to move around applications and make them portable and compatible. It loaded right up and I started in trying to figure out how to resize the partitions. It was simple to figure out how to use the app, it's real similar to partition magic. Only it wouldn't let me queue up expanding the 4GB C: partition. I could resize D: to 15GB but not expand C: to fill the space left.
I verified it was an NTFS partition, sure enough. Weird. So, I figured It probably just wouldn't let me do it until after the space was available. I kicked off the D: part resize and waited...and waited...and waited. It ran through some file and directory verification okay then started a 20 minute resize operation. 20 Minutes??? What the hell? Partition magic would do it in like 30 seconds...oh well.
20 Minutes later it kicked off ANOTHER 20 minute task. The same task, again. What? Was the first one practice? At this point I called in the calvary. Typically I'd have to take care of it my self but since I was working on her Dad's computer Mrs. Rex agreed to pitch in.
I called her up and walked her through burning partition magic from my PC to a CD and she brought it over...before gparted had completed the resize.
Just for giggles I then asked gparted to try and resize C: again. It wouldn't. Even with the space available on the disk it refused to resize the primary boot partition, even though it was NTFS.
I restarted the PC, win2k came up and ran a scandisk on the new newly modified partition and windows came up normally. Disk manager showed the new D: size and the big empty space I'd created. Everything looked fine. I loaded the PM cd and installed it, fired it up.
PM was now reporting the drive was "BAD" - what the hell? I scheduled another scandisk and restarted. No errors. PM still shows the disk as bad. Fired up the Partition Info tool from PM - it's complaining about geometry errors on the disk. Basically saying the new D: partition was not configured correctly.
Luckily PM has a little command line switch /ipe which tells it to ignore errors.
PM quickly and easily resized C:, Fixed D: and got us rolling in about 2 minutes.
So, the flash drive went in the trash and the gparted CD went in the microwave.
Oh, and by the way. A quick note about Partition Magic. Symantec bought it a while back and I'm not as fond of the newer versions. If you're looking for the best partition manager out there see if you can't find yourself a copy of PowerQuest's Partition Magic 8.0.
It's been going on for over a decade and I'm still pissed at Symantec over what they did to Norton Utilities, Ghost and now PM. Why do they feel so compelled to buy great, efficient well designed utility applications and turn them into bloated crapware?
Oh well...
The hammer hanging in my garage is older than I am, it's not as swanky as a new fiber-glass handled techno hammer, but it gets the job done.
I'm still looking for a good flash drive, something that will be more reliable. I guess that shows me for buying the cheapest one I could find on froogle. But for the time being the 2.5" USB enclosure with an IDE drive and a three year old version of partition magic on it still gets the job done faster and more reliably so it's what I'll continue to reach for...the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I'd recently gotten a new SimpleTech 1GB USB Flash Drive and had loaded it up with all the tools of my trade. The software and applications I most frequently use. This was to make me a mobile computer repair commando with everything I needed at my disposal dangling from my keychain.
I typically carry around a little 2.5" USB hard drive enclosure with a 40GB IDE notebook drive in it for this task but was making an attempt at reducing the size and weight of my portable.
Well, over the course of three days that I've been trying to use the flash drive it's been nothing but problems. I spent a goodly amount of time reformatting it, creating a "Flash Backup" folder on my desktop so when the thing cheesed out and gave me a "file is corrupt or unaccessible" error I could just wipe it and reload it in a jiffy. What a pain in the ass. The flash drive now lives in my trash can until Wednesday when the garbage man comes.
I took it over to my in-laws with the intention of installing partition magic from the flash drive and resizing his partitions. When it cheesed out and wouldn't let me. Piece of shit. I'm going back to the 2.5" USB enclosure. So, instead of driving home and getting the old standby drive I took a stab at finding a nice Open Source Alternative.
I cruised over to osalt.com and looked up alternatives to partition magic. It looked like the tool for the job was a utility called gparted - they had a live CD version so I downloaded it and burnt it to CD. Booted to it and took a look.
I really like the smooth, clean operations of live CD's in general. It's a great way to move around applications and make them portable and compatible. It loaded right up and I started in trying to figure out how to resize the partitions. It was simple to figure out how to use the app, it's real similar to partition magic. Only it wouldn't let me queue up expanding the 4GB C: partition. I could resize D: to 15GB but not expand C: to fill the space left.
I verified it was an NTFS partition, sure enough. Weird. So, I figured It probably just wouldn't let me do it until after the space was available. I kicked off the D: part resize and waited...and waited...and waited. It ran through some file and directory verification okay then started a 20 minute resize operation. 20 Minutes??? What the hell? Partition magic would do it in like 30 seconds...oh well.
20 Minutes later it kicked off ANOTHER 20 minute task. The same task, again. What? Was the first one practice? At this point I called in the calvary. Typically I'd have to take care of it my self but since I was working on her Dad's computer Mrs. Rex agreed to pitch in.
I called her up and walked her through burning partition magic from my PC to a CD and she brought it over...before gparted had completed the resize.
Just for giggles I then asked gparted to try and resize C: again. It wouldn't. Even with the space available on the disk it refused to resize the primary boot partition, even though it was NTFS.
I restarted the PC, win2k came up and ran a scandisk on the new newly modified partition and windows came up normally. Disk manager showed the new D: size and the big empty space I'd created. Everything looked fine. I loaded the PM cd and installed it, fired it up.
PM was now reporting the drive was "BAD" - what the hell? I scheduled another scandisk and restarted. No errors. PM still shows the disk as bad. Fired up the Partition Info tool from PM - it's complaining about geometry errors on the disk. Basically saying the new D: partition was not configured correctly.
Luckily PM has a little command line switch /ipe which tells it to ignore errors.
PM quickly and easily resized C:, Fixed D: and got us rolling in about 2 minutes.
So, the flash drive went in the trash and the gparted CD went in the microwave.
Oh, and by the way. A quick note about Partition Magic. Symantec bought it a while back and I'm not as fond of the newer versions. If you're looking for the best partition manager out there see if you can't find yourself a copy of PowerQuest's Partition Magic 8.0.
It's been going on for over a decade and I'm still pissed at Symantec over what they did to Norton Utilities, Ghost and now PM. Why do they feel so compelled to buy great, efficient well designed utility applications and turn them into bloated crapware?
Oh well...
The hammer hanging in my garage is older than I am, it's not as swanky as a new fiber-glass handled techno hammer, but it gets the job done.
I'm still looking for a good flash drive, something that will be more reliable. I guess that shows me for buying the cheapest one I could find on froogle. But for the time being the 2.5" USB enclosure with an IDE drive and a three year old version of partition magic on it still gets the job done faster and more reliably so it's what I'll continue to reach for...the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Oh my GOD!
So, just to figure out how it all works I stuck a google adsense box down there on the right hand banner of this here blog.
It's been "Help Hurricane Katrina Relief" and other stuff for months now. This morning I noticed it says "Dual Core - Improve Efficiency, Performance and overall Infrastructure. www.amd.com/dualcore"
HA!
There's a pretty good reason why some webvertising doesn't work. When you base it on keywords like that you might not get what you bargained for.
Have fun.
It's been "Help Hurricane Katrina Relief" and other stuff for months now. This morning I noticed it says "Dual Core - Improve Efficiency, Performance and overall Infrastructure. www.amd.com/dualcore"
HA!
There's a pretty good reason why some webvertising doesn't work. When you base it on keywords like that you might not get what you bargained for.
Have fun.
The Greatest Book In The World...
Outside of work I would say I probably read as much from paper as I do from cathode ray nipple (Or I guess the liquid crystal nipple nowadays). But, it's actually true. Once you add in work to the mix it's no contest, I spend most of my time hammering away on a keyboard staring into a monitor.
It all started about a year ago when I started working this new job. Back, before, in the dark place - the horrible place - the evil place - I spent my lunch hours curled up in the fetal position under my desk in my cubicle or standing on the sidewalk sucking down cigarettes. We only got 30 minutes for lunch. Then, I got laid off. Lucky me, actually.
Now I work in a much higher grade office. We get an hour for lunch and there are no mean-hearted stubborn ignorant people looking over my shoulder to see how many times I pee during the course of a day. I get my work done, I get more work done than most of my peers, I can do pretty much what I like...which I like.
So, after a couple of weeks of working here I found myself with about 40 minutes of my lunch break un-used. I would scurry off and wolf down my lunch, power smoke a few cigarettes and find myself with free time on my hands.
Being a father of two little boys, this is a rare occurrence. My first thought was to nap, but I find it hard to restart the dynamo for an hour or two after I wake up. So, one day I swung into a book store nearby and picked up a couple of books.
I was an avid reader during jr. high, high school and college. I even did quite a bit of reading early in my career but it tapered off as I took more and more challenging positions. Since the kids came my reading has pretty much consisted of reading a few Dilbert or Bloom County comic strips from big compendium books while I pooped.
Now I find myself back in a position where I can read 40-50 minutes every day. At least! I've even gotten so engrossed in some books that they follow me home and climb into bed with me. It's been a joy to rediscover reading. There's a nice little park just a block away from my office and I mosey over there with my lunch. I'll sit, read, smoke and just relax.
I started off catching up on some missed sci-fi classics. I went out and found the "Top 25 Sci-Fi Classics" list somewhere and made sure I had read all, or most of them. Then I went on an Orson Scott Card bender following through all the Ender books, and a couple of his other series which were pretty good. I started digging into some of the Cabal of Masonry books (The Widow's Son and a few others...).
I'd read quite a bit of cyberpunk stuff in my day, a lot of it so cheesy that the major pizza chains can't afford to use it as "cheese" on their "pizza". One day whilst wandering through the used book shop near my office I came across Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It had been on my list of things to read for a long time, I'd read it was one of the best cyberpunk stories of all time.
It was pretty damned good. The first few chapters just totally blew me away. Stephenson had the balls to name his lead character Hiro Protagonist of all things, it was a wonderful, sweeping adventure.
I'd picked Snow Crash up with a few other books that I found on a list of "Bad Movie, Great Book" (The Postman, Starship Troopers and the like) so it took me a while to get around to digging into some more Stephenson books.
When I went up to the counter with Zodiac and Cryptonomicon and set them on the counter I felt like I was being sized up by the Book Store Guy. Funny thing about Book Store Guys (and Gals) - It must be a very tedious job, selling bad books to stupid people all day, but when someone walks up and lays something on the counter that you actually respect and enjoy it's probably a good feeling.
This particular Book Store Guy had been impressed with my delvings into the "Post Apocalyptic Fiction" and had even pointed out a few books I'd enjoyed (Canticle for Leibowitz and a few others) when he saw some I'd chosen myself. "There's some pretty hard core math in this one..." he said as he scanned in the bar code on Cryptonomicon.
"Cool." I said...which appeared to be the right answer.
789 pages later I realize that I've been nothing but a hack geek poser for my entire life. I have no idea how I got to be who, where and how I am without having read this book. A lot happened during those years while I was raising my babies and reading Opus n' Oliver cartoons on the can. Some really, totally amazing stuff. Then I read Zodiac.
I now peer frequently over my shoulder wondering if this guy Neal has been following me around. It's almost creepy. But, the stories have been delightful, the characters compelling and the plots are an exciting ride on an out of control horse through the thickets of a very creative imagination. Thanks Neal!
I'm glad I've gotten back into reading. It's been a great pleasure. It's strengthened my resolve to continue spending time reading to my own kids, to help them discover the love of words, not just to hang on the bells, toots and whistles that come out of the liquid crystal nipples that seem to surround us in homes, schools and offices.
Okay, back to work (and Quicksilver, the first tome of the Baroque series...by Neal Stephenson).
It all started about a year ago when I started working this new job. Back, before, in the dark place - the horrible place - the evil place - I spent my lunch hours curled up in the fetal position under my desk in my cubicle or standing on the sidewalk sucking down cigarettes. We only got 30 minutes for lunch. Then, I got laid off. Lucky me, actually.
Now I work in a much higher grade office. We get an hour for lunch and there are no mean-hearted stubborn ignorant people looking over my shoulder to see how many times I pee during the course of a day. I get my work done, I get more work done than most of my peers, I can do pretty much what I like...which I like.
So, after a couple of weeks of working here I found myself with about 40 minutes of my lunch break un-used. I would scurry off and wolf down my lunch, power smoke a few cigarettes and find myself with free time on my hands.
Being a father of two little boys, this is a rare occurrence. My first thought was to nap, but I find it hard to restart the dynamo for an hour or two after I wake up. So, one day I swung into a book store nearby and picked up a couple of books.
I was an avid reader during jr. high, high school and college. I even did quite a bit of reading early in my career but it tapered off as I took more and more challenging positions. Since the kids came my reading has pretty much consisted of reading a few Dilbert or Bloom County comic strips from big compendium books while I pooped.
Now I find myself back in a position where I can read 40-50 minutes every day. At least! I've even gotten so engrossed in some books that they follow me home and climb into bed with me. It's been a joy to rediscover reading. There's a nice little park just a block away from my office and I mosey over there with my lunch. I'll sit, read, smoke and just relax.
I started off catching up on some missed sci-fi classics. I went out and found the "Top 25 Sci-Fi Classics" list somewhere and made sure I had read all, or most of them. Then I went on an Orson Scott Card bender following through all the Ender books, and a couple of his other series which were pretty good. I started digging into some of the Cabal of Masonry books (The Widow's Son and a few others...).
I'd read quite a bit of cyberpunk stuff in my day, a lot of it so cheesy that the major pizza chains can't afford to use it as "cheese" on their "pizza". One day whilst wandering through the used book shop near my office I came across Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It had been on my list of things to read for a long time, I'd read it was one of the best cyberpunk stories of all time.
It was pretty damned good. The first few chapters just totally blew me away. Stephenson had the balls to name his lead character Hiro Protagonist of all things, it was a wonderful, sweeping adventure.
I'd picked Snow Crash up with a few other books that I found on a list of "Bad Movie, Great Book" (The Postman, Starship Troopers and the like) so it took me a while to get around to digging into some more Stephenson books.
When I went up to the counter with Zodiac and Cryptonomicon and set them on the counter I felt like I was being sized up by the Book Store Guy. Funny thing about Book Store Guys (and Gals) - It must be a very tedious job, selling bad books to stupid people all day, but when someone walks up and lays something on the counter that you actually respect and enjoy it's probably a good feeling.
This particular Book Store Guy had been impressed with my delvings into the "Post Apocalyptic Fiction" and had even pointed out a few books I'd enjoyed (Canticle for Leibowitz and a few others) when he saw some I'd chosen myself. "There's some pretty hard core math in this one..." he said as he scanned in the bar code on Cryptonomicon.
"Cool." I said...which appeared to be the right answer.
789 pages later I realize that I've been nothing but a hack geek poser for my entire life. I have no idea how I got to be who, where and how I am without having read this book. A lot happened during those years while I was raising my babies and reading Opus n' Oliver cartoons on the can. Some really, totally amazing stuff. Then I read Zodiac.
I now peer frequently over my shoulder wondering if this guy Neal has been following me around. It's almost creepy. But, the stories have been delightful, the characters compelling and the plots are an exciting ride on an out of control horse through the thickets of a very creative imagination. Thanks Neal!
I'm glad I've gotten back into reading. It's been a great pleasure. It's strengthened my resolve to continue spending time reading to my own kids, to help them discover the love of words, not just to hang on the bells, toots and whistles that come out of the liquid crystal nipples that seem to surround us in homes, schools and offices.
Okay, back to work (and Quicksilver, the first tome of the Baroque series...by Neal Stephenson).
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Time for a quick "googlepc" update...
For the most part I've been satisfied using Google Docs as a replacement for word/excel. But there have been some deal breaking issues.
First of all is availability of service. A couple of nights ago I was sifting through email looking to print out a couple of forms I needed to complete to bring to an interview I had scheduled the next day.
I kept getting errors that "Oops, the service isn't currently available" and "There was a problem, the good news is it's been submitted as a bug so we can fix it" and other such babble. Basically, I couldn't get to my docs, when I needed them. I went back and forth for several minutes and did finally get them opened up.
Not so much a deal breaker as a nuisance but when I tried to print these documents I of course got all the default header and footer stuff printed from the browser. Typically, I like this stuff, it gives me a date and a URL where the document can be found for future reference. But, when printing a form they screw up the page alignment and for job applications and such just isn't in good taste to have them on there.
I have no intention of reconfiguring this every time I print. Google Docs needs to get a decent printer interface worked out so I don't need to use different page configurations for printing when I try to print one of their docs.
The other deal breaker I've run into was the personalized home pages. I've been using a my.yahoo.com page for about 10 years and it's always been stable and reliable. Monday morning I log in to my personalized google home page via my google apps site and all of my news feeds are missing. Just gone. I had about 12 RSS listings in there and they have now gone away. No email, no notice, nothing. It lost all my customization.
I spent a lot of time configuring the look, theme and content of my personalized home page, you don't just go wiping it out on someone with no explanation...unless you're google, of course.
I'll rebuild it and try and keep using it, but one more fumble and I'm going back to Yahoo guys.
Oh, if the title of this post doesn't make any sense - just Google it. Or Yahoo it and spread it around. Then ask yourself why we're letting these idiot no-brains influence our government. Did they really believe this was their silver bullet? Have the guys developing their content control ever actually read anything about encryption, code breaking or digital security? Is "pathetisad" a word?
Actually, don't Yahoo it - I'm currently boycotting Yahoo for ratting out a pro-democracy Chinese national. Read all about it here. I'm so torn. Maybe I'll just write and host my own personalized home page on my own server on my own url and then when it crashes I'll have no one to blame but myself.
Oh well.
For the most part I've been satisfied using Google Docs as a replacement for word/excel. But there have been some deal breaking issues.
First of all is availability of service. A couple of nights ago I was sifting through email looking to print out a couple of forms I needed to complete to bring to an interview I had scheduled the next day.
I kept getting errors that "Oops, the service isn't currently available" and "There was a problem, the good news is it's been submitted as a bug so we can fix it" and other such babble. Basically, I couldn't get to my docs, when I needed them. I went back and forth for several minutes and did finally get them opened up.
Not so much a deal breaker as a nuisance but when I tried to print these documents I of course got all the default header and footer stuff printed from the browser. Typically, I like this stuff, it gives me a date and a URL where the document can be found for future reference. But, when printing a form they screw up the page alignment and for job applications and such just isn't in good taste to have them on there.
I have no intention of reconfiguring this every time I print. Google Docs needs to get a decent printer interface worked out so I don't need to use different page configurations for printing when I try to print one of their docs.
The other deal breaker I've run into was the personalized home pages. I've been using a my.yahoo.com page for about 10 years and it's always been stable and reliable. Monday morning I log in to my personalized google home page via my google apps site and all of my news feeds are missing. Just gone. I had about 12 RSS listings in there and they have now gone away. No email, no notice, nothing. It lost all my customization.
I spent a lot of time configuring the look, theme and content of my personalized home page, you don't just go wiping it out on someone with no explanation...unless you're google, of course.
I'll rebuild it and try and keep using it, but one more fumble and I'm going back to Yahoo guys.
Oh, if the title of this post doesn't make any sense - just Google it. Or Yahoo it and spread it around. Then ask yourself why we're letting these idiot no-brains influence our government. Did they really believe this was their silver bullet? Have the guys developing their content control ever actually read anything about encryption, code breaking or digital security? Is "pathetisad" a word?
Actually, don't Yahoo it - I'm currently boycotting Yahoo for ratting out a pro-democracy Chinese national. Read all about it here. I'm so torn. Maybe I'll just write and host my own personalized home page on my own server on my own url and then when it crashes I'll have no one to blame but myself.
Oh well.
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