The news aggregator has become wildly bloated.  Some of the feeds were storing over 5000 entries.  I am deleting several feeds that were the worst offenders.  So if you don’t find some of your favorites be patient.

If there is a feed you really want to see, use the feedback link to let me know.

Thanks 

Google Video is a wonderful thing.  Friends who would fake a lottery winning are not so wonderful. 

 And yet, it has some strange appeal doesn’t it?

 As I have patiently explained to many tech type friends and colleagues, open source does not mean no revenue.  PHP, MySQL, Linux and Firefox are all tools that can be worked into a business model for both vendors and clients alike.

Here’s hoping for a great 2006 for open source goodness. 

Looking Back at Open Source in 2005 – bhmit1 writes "BusinessWeek is reporting on the open source progress in 2005. Their conclusion: "in 2005, the software movement finally gained traction in Corporate America and saw a new influx of VC cash." Has the shift in corporate america really occurred or are activities like the profitability of Red Hat signalling that the CEO’s are still holding on to the old way of business?"

(Via Slashdot)

It’s the summer of 2002, and after much deliberation I have decided to make a trip to the Virgin Islands for the wedding of two close friends. The bride, in particular, is quite dear to me and has asked me to stand in for one of her bridesmaids, who was going to be unable to attend due to illness and family obligations.

(A note here on why there is "much deliberation" required rather than "You fool, of course I’m going – it’s a beautiful island, a wedding on the beach and, you know, pretty girls on the beach to look at afterward." At this point my ex wife and I are not yet officially exes, though we haven’t lived together for going on 18 months. Within that time I have finally gotten out from under a budget-crushing rent payment, only to lose my consulting gig and spend the better part of a year doing temp work followed by a job ticking in at about 20 grand less than I had been making. The expense of the wedding was no inconsiderable amount to me, despite the fact that I was paring expenses (and the duration) down to a minimum. Still, these are good friends, really the first ones I’d made locally since I realized with a start that all of my local friends rather belonged to my ex, and as I haven’t been on a vacation in some time…well. As said before, after much deliberation, I elect to attend.)

(Another note, since we’re on the subject of notes and only vaguely on the subject of anything else. Yes, the bride asked me to stand up at the wedding. No, there was no dress involved. No, there wasn’t. Yes, it would have been funny. And I prefer the term "bridesperson", thank you. Or, "The one in the tie".)

 So. It is a wedding on a tropical island and my only suit is gray wool. This will not do, and I must go shopping. I demand assistance from the bride, particularly as there are Wedding Colors to contend with. We go to fine clothing stores (much finer than the ones I usually frequent) and argue over who will pay for what. First is the tie, which would require a second mortgage if I actually owned property worth more than my computer. But, you see, it is the perfect shade of teal, and therefore will match the bridesmaid’s dress and will be the centerpiece of my outfit. I take this with due grace and reiterate to myself that I will eat Subway three times a day while on the island. (This turns out to be only partly true – the day immediately following the wedding, I take a taxi over to the resort where the bride and groom are staying and am treated to the evening buffet there. I somehow ingest enough food that I am not actually hungry again until roughly October).

Armed with the tie, we move on to other quarry – pants and a shirt. The shirt must be off-white and breathe, and the pants should be sand colored. This combination differs from eggshell and taupe, or beige and khaki in important ways which I cannot at this point in time call to mind. After visiting a couple of places, we happen upon the local Mark Shale. (Since this visit, I have received approximately 296 mailings from them inviting me to shop there again. If this continues at the same pace, the postage costs will cause them to begin to lose money from my original purchase in approximately 2210 AD.) After showing the lovely sales consultant the tie, we are ushered to the Sand and Off-White Section and presented with a myriad of choices. My knowledge of pants has been stretched beyond caring long since, but I dutifully listen to the benefits of an A pleat versus a double pleat versus a flat front. Or, rather, I dutifully pretend to listen whilst imagining the lovely sales consultant saying breathy things like "Oh, you’re one of the bride’s attendants? I think it’s so sexy when men are comfortable enough with their identities to hold flowers."

I am snapped out of this lovely reverie upon being shoved into the changing room with at least 11 pairs of pants and corresponding shirts, all of which look largely the same. I do not look at any of the price tags, having already decided that I could probably get by with eating Subway twice a day while there, and drinking lots of water. After trying on several combinations that all look precisely the same, I am standing in front of the mirror-surrounded dais and turning around like a runway model for the short, pale, not-thin fashion show. I rather like the pants, and say something hopeful like, “I rather like the pants.”

There is a pregnant pause and I look up in trepidation to find the bride-to-be and the salesperson exchanging looks. “What’s wrong?” I ask with a sense of dread, looking down to make sure I’ve pulled up the zipper. There is a pause as the women do that silent communication thing, and then my friend says, “Well, the other ones make your butt look nice.” The lovely sales consultant nods in agreement.

Five minutes later, I am signing the credit card receipt for the most expensive pants I have yet purchased, and I am reflecting on two things. First, that freedom (and dinner, purchased by my friend) is nearly upon us. And second, that human nature is often a very complex thing – but not when it comes to pants. I resolve at this moment to become a better man, the sort of man who remembers that honesty is the best policy, and that one ought to be open with one’s opinions. The sort of man who understands that immutable, universal truth:

The perfect end to any trip where you are trying on pants is to hear “Those make your butt look nice.”

So I spent the holiday weekend getting my new PC squared away with a copy of Ubuntu Linux.  For my first serious foray into non MS operating systems I have to say I am very pleased.

Ubuntu comes with a healthy complement of apps including Firefox and Open Office as well as a chat client that works with Yahoo AIM and others.  I was also able to connect to the shared folders on the Windows PCs in the house and connect to my scanner and the shared printers.  In addition, Ubuntu sports a wonderful package manager that lets me install or uninstall aplpications from Linux repositories.  Thanks to this I have added some great widgets like a CD/DVD burning program, Tomboy (which should prove to be wildly useful) and some excellent HTML and PHP development tools.

While I have a lot to learn about Linux, the wonder that is open source software combined with Google has been a lot of fun.  I found detailed instructions for installing Java, upgrading Firefox and getting the proper codecs to  play DVDs on my system.

All in all a weekend of geekery well spent.  I’m looking forward to many years with this machine carrying the load.  I still have a desktop and laptop running XP since there are too many MS specific tasks to get rid of them, but I am slowly whittling those needs away.  Next on the list is figuring out why the codecs for Windows Media aren’t working on the Linux box. 

So I wrote my dad a letter last weekend. Not an email, or a fax or a telephone call or a telegram (as if I’d even know how to go about sending such a thing). No, a real honest to goodness handwritten letter. With a 37c stamp and everything. It’s the first one I’ve sent him in years – maybe since I was 22 or so. I’ve sent him countless emails and the like, but no trees have been harmed in our correspondence in a very long time. It got me thinking as I wrote it. I included some of the following thoughts in the letter, but of course they’ll turn out a little different here – after all, I can’t check my Sent Mail and copy it over here!

The thing is, writing by hand is so different from typing. When I compose an email, I’m typically doing something else at the same time. More importantly, though, it just…feels different. Email is immediate, but at the same time it’s perfect – or it can be, at least. You can pick the exact word you want, or even look it up if you need to check the spelling (I do that more often than I’d like to admit). You can do the same thing with a handwritten letter, but it interrupts the flow of the writing. An email is immediate, and that is well, but it is also sterile.

When you have a pen in your hand, conversely, it’s a very different thing altogether. It takes longer. Longer to write, longer to read, longer to send. It lacks immediacy, to be sure. But what it lacks in efficiency, a handwritten letter makes up for in other things. Tone, for one. You read an email and you see what you were meant to see, nothing more. But ink (or lead) on paper conveys truth, not just fact. A misspelling, or a line that trails downward toward the corner of the page or a word that’s crossed out in favor of a better one, or a safer one, these things are almost like the nonverbal cues we get from a face to face conversation. They tell us not just what the writer chose, but what she considered. They demonstrate state of mind, almost. Ultimately, a written letter is less immediate, but it is more intimate. It is more true.

And in the end, maybe that’s why I haven’t written a letter to my dad in so long (well, that and the laziness. I am, after all, very lazy). I love my dad, and I tell him that, and I’m pretty sure he knows it. At the same time, I can’t say that I actually know him all that well. I can point to a lot of reasons why that may be so, but it really comes down to something simple. I don’t know him because I haven’t taken enough of an interest in doing so. That makes me sound like a real jackass, doesn’t it? If so, then I think I’ve done my job here – I sure enough feel like one.

 Ok, this is simple brilliance at its best.  And the Treehugger folks are right.  Why didn’t anyone think of this before?

I am going to have to root around in the templates tonight and see if I can implement something like this. 

Treehugger’s new navbar – Mark Frauenfelder: The Treehugger blog has come up with a nifty new navbar that makes it easy to read blog entries one by one without scrolling.
Link

(Via Boing Boing)

 I am not opposed to dress codes in the work place or even at school but the fact is that common sense must prevail in all cases.  In this case I think common sense took a flyer.  If it had been an African American male student showing up in traditional African robes (someone help me with the name, it escapes me) the pricipal would have been fired by now for his behavior.

Kilt-Wearing Teen Seeks Dress Code Change (AP) – AP – Nathan Warmack wanted to honor his heritage by wearing a Scottish kilt to his high school dance. Then a principal told him to change into a pair of pants.

(Via Yahoo! Top Stories)

 Excellent article on Internet systems like Google and Wikipedia.  Lots of interesting links to lead down the path of knowledge.  Also posted is a link to the counter argument that is thought provoking as well.

The Probabilistic Age –

Q: Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing?

A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.

Q: Huh?

A: Exactly. Our brains aren’t wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there’s a wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google’s results. We want to trust what we read.

(Via Unmediated)

Damn, I love Full Frontal Nerdity. Check out this week’s installment – a holiday strip that is freakishly appropriate.