snotface

that’s all of us right now.

Technology Amazes Me

Tonight was really cool. Normally the New York Linux Users Group (NYLUG) has its monthly meetings on Wednesday nights. But due to schedulling issues in the new venue, we got pushed onto tonight. Tonight was also the first meeting of the Ubuntu New York LoCo Team and since I have been pining for so long for there to be an Ubuntu Linux advocacy team here, I’d be crazy to miss that! So I took my handy-dandy notebook computer to Google’s Headquarters in Manhattan and sat in the auditorium which was pratically drenched in bandwidth and tuned into the LoCo meeting on IRC channel #ubuntu-ny. While NYLUG was haveing Googl-d’ourves, LoCo was doing business [dividing the kingdom and all that.] While NYLUG was doing Announcements, Ubuntu-NY was getting ready for the next meeting. While Chris Blizzard was presenting One Laptop Per Child, Ubuntu-NY was finished and having a little bullsession after the meeting! Perfect timing! OLPC is an awesome idea, and it looks like it is going to be well execueted! I am so stoked by this!I am so stoked by our first little group of New York Ubunteros and to use something Chris said tonight, “If you have five people who are dedicated, you can change the world.”

Tags: Ubuntu

Our Family

I was going to write a seething post blaming Cousin Joe for Steph getting sick over the weekend, his wife Kat had the same thing when we were down in B-More, but I decided that if Steph did get it via those guys it was completely accidental and hopefully Kat has gotten better by now. Steph had a virus over the weekend that made it nearly impossible for her to speak. Now, EJ has a bit of a fever so she is staying at home with me all day.

The snowstorm yesterday cancelled the flight for one of Steph’s friends she we had company sleep over, which was quite fun actually. Steph and her and EJ had a little slumber party of girls chatting and doing nails and such, while I wrote my first computer program. It was really a very simple problem but I solved it and am so happy!

Just now, I went to go find out what the Bubster was up to, and found her in Steph’s closet, sitting on top of the drawers with the doors closed. Her and Wanda were just sitting quietly in the dark together.

LoCo Empire

Thanks to Christer finally pushing me over the edge, I have trotted over to the Ubuntu wiki to see where I can give the LoCo Teams some love. I found out that finally there is a team forming up here in the Empire State, so I joined and expect that we’ll have New York City all Open Sourced in no time flat! Not to mention the rest of the state, think about it Albany needs to make some inroads towards adoption, Buffalo too! So if you are in New York, or plan to move there in the near future, come and join us as we spread the humanity!

Tomorrow night, Tuesday 27 February 2007, at 6 PM EST, we will be having our first meeting on IRC, join us in #ubuntu-ny on irc.freenode.org.

Tags: Ubuntu

Welcome New User

I bought a computer two years ago. It was the very first one that I owned and I got it used from craigslist.org. It was nice, an old Titanium Powerbook G4 and it came loaded, as the advertiser put it. Then when half the programs expired and quit working about a month into it, I realized i could not afford the thousands of dollars of licenses that were require to legally use them.

As someone showed me the Firefox WebBrowser, I had become somewhat aware of the term “Open Source” and began using that in my searches at that really famous search engine whose name has become a verb. This resulted in my finding tons of applications that were free to use and I liked that.

Then one day I stumbled upon this article and everything changed. I read the essay at least four times in quick succession, took notes and set out a little list of things to do. Because I was on a Powerbook which uses the PowerPC architecture, when I went looking for a Linux distribution, I had to take that into account. Ubuntu Linux satisfied that requirement. Then when I read some more about it, including the philosophy as stated,

that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

I was hooked.

Fast forward, I have been using Ubuntu in some form or another on most of my growing collection of machines for eighteen months now and have been advocating that more people and businesses use it for nearly the same amount of time. So it is with great pleasure that I welcome our newest user and congratulate everybody who contributed to the successful Ubucon in New York last week.

Tags: Ubuntu

Not such a baby

EJ can now

• touch the bottom row of buttons in the elevator, including the bell
• run
• throw really good tantrums
• smirk
• use the mouse to point and click
• say “Oh No!” “Wow!” “I love you” “Thank you” & more that I can’t remember now
• be understood by someone other than her parents
• recite the periodic table of elements

Ok, so I made up the last one, but it is quite amazing to see the rapid development of skills as we get closer and closer to the end of two revolutions.

From Steph:

Apparently, someone is listening

Never one to be ahead of the news but is keenly interested in the way things play out, I have been tracking the Dell Idea Storm on my Doppler Radar. It is quite fascinating that the top five customer requests that are being made have to do with less Microsoft and more alternatives. the number one request, which has twice the comments for number two is for Dell to offer machines with Linux pre-installed.

Today, it was reported that Dell is paying attention to the changes brewing and is at least considering it.

Tags: Ubuntu

New Tricks

I have been subscribed to a large number of mailing lists for quite some time now. This puts me at an unfortunate feeling of necessity to read them as soon as they come in. I have been able to relax this Palovian reflex somewhat over the last couple of weeks but still find myself struggling with the impulse. Today, I found a possible cure, maybe it will work.

On the Kubuntu Users list there has been quite a bit of discussion about Kmail and the finer points of some of its quirks. During the course of the discussion it was pointed out that one of our fine members does not read the list through Kmail, rather Derek Broughton uses Knode, the Newsgroup reader which comes packaged in Kontact. He was kind enough to supply the server address and important information.

>> BTW, I’ve notice you’re sendind from Knode. Could that make the
>> difference, I wonder…
> How would I join this list via knode? Gmane?

yes. gmane.linux.ubuntu.user.kubuntu on news.gmane.org

And I jumped all over that lickety-split. Now, I have moved all my subscriptions into the newsreader, Knode, which I hope gives me more control over when I go and look at that stuff.

See, I really wish to be a contributing member of the FLOSS community however, I feel that when I say yes, I’ll do that to every request that pops up, I detract that much more from my schoolwork. Ultimately, as my schoolwork is beginning to lay out the groundwork for being able to contirbute code, which seems to be so much more valuable to the community than if I were to change three or four lines of documentation to be slightly more ledgible to someone who already has a decent grasp on the English language.EDIT: and with spelling and grammar like this who really wants me to write documentation?

So, what this all means is right now, I have rolled back my participation to moderating several lists for projects, and occaisionally lending a hand at support in IRC. While, my usage of Kubuntu is still a constant, I am doing so, mostly to go to school via the internet.

Tags: Ubuntu

The Blizzard of ‘07

We thought that there was going to be no snow all year long, and then during the week that we went on a family vacation to Maryland, a huge storm swept across the nation. Well, not really that huge, I have seen worse, much worse but enough of the old man stuff. What made this storm really neat, at least for me, was the amount of ice and freezing rain which was included with the snow. The result was a layer of ice on the ground, with snow on top of that, and covered by a crust of ice; sort of like a candybar with the creamy nugget center. Once all the energy had passed by and we were left with the results it became quite easy and fun to get around by walking on top of this confectionery delight.

Our visit to the nation’s capital was made easy to tromp about because we did not have to slip and slide in the slushy footprints of others, but were able to easily walk across the surface of the National Mall. There were even moments of skating and sliding just to have some child like glee in our day. Yesterday, we went sledding on the hills of the farm in Darlington. EJ went down first in a cardboard box, with me running after her. She was quite happy until the very end when she got a greater distance away from me. Sixty seconds after she stopped, I was able to trot up and scoop her into my arms and everything was just fine then. The majority of the ride down she was quite happy, it was just the last thirty meters that she got a little upset.

After that, Oma broke out the real sliders and EJ didn’t ride down anymore because we were dealing with real speed at this point. A Plastic toboggan on a sheet of ice over rolling hills can gather quite a bit of speed, so that we had to bail out at the end in order to stop. It was major fast and way cool and I can see the excitement of the rush that luge sliders must feel as they go down a run. EJ really warmed up to the conditions at the top of the hill and even tried to head down the hill to catch up with Steph, as her Mommy hiked up the hill.

We did not play outside for a long time, but it was quite fun - the hardest part was coming back up the hill at the end. Now, I can hear water dropping off the eaves as everything melts away. Perfect time to take a vacation, if you ask me.

Too Tired to Gloat

I saw this while reading some stuff on the Interweb, thought I’d blog about it and point my finger into the middle of all this, but really, I’m too tired and sleepy to get into it now.

Tags: Ubuntu