Jefflog

I finally made the plunge and purchased a new computer. I settled on the HP d220 MiniTower with Mandrake Linux, which saves me about $50 over buying Windows XP. I should mention that Mandrake Linux doesn’t come installed, but does ship with two CDs that you can install yourself. That’s just as well, since I probably wouldn’t want their pre-selected partitioning scheme anyway.

I haven’t gotten to play with it much yet, but Gnome 2 is incredibly smooth-looking, a much better improvement over the 1.x series. I like it more than the Aqua OS X look, which is a bit more eye-candy than I really want. I’ll stick with Mandrake for the time being, although I’ll probably install Debian “sarge” when it gets declared as stable. Or, I might experiment with Gentoo, who knows?

The system doesn’t come with a modem, but I managed to configure my PowerMac to serve as a router to my PPP connection, so I can dial up through Mac OS X and access the Internet through an Ethernet connection between it and the new computer. I haven’t yet figured out how to establish a PPP connection from the command line in OS X yet. I’ll really want to do this soon, because right now I don’t have a monitor switcher for the two machines, meaning that I switch a lot of cables around each time I want to switch computers. I may take the plunge for a switcher box, but unfortunately, the HP comes shipped with PS/2 keyboard and mouse, not USB! Meanwhile, my Mac keyboard is ADB, so I can’t share them. Grrr.. I guess I’ll have to buy a PS/2 to USB converter as well.

Now that I’ve got an Intel-based Linux setup, I will probably install Mono and play with it a bit…

Apple Computer has finally removed the “Switch” ads from their website, and all I can say is, it’s about time. I hated those commercials; yeah, they definitely had a “look” to them, but in the same way those “Gap Swing” commercials had a unique look — the kind that made me want to change the channel.

On a related note, this “Switch” for Linux animation had me busting a gut. (Flash required.)

I rode my bike into work like normal today, took a shower at the office, and while putting on my new change of clothes, I realize: I forgot to pack a shirt. Lucky for me, I chose to wear jeans and broughy a gray-colored undershirt, so I still look decent. We’ll just call it a very casual Friday.

It’s not as bad as one time, on my last job, where I forgot to bring all of my clothes. I worked that day in a T-shirt, bike shorts and socks. (I took off the bike shoes because they have cleats, and not very good to walk around in.)

Just in case you missed it, a recent policy from the Transportation Security Administration says that airport screeners cannot force you to take your shoes off prior to entering the security checkpoint.

On my recent trip, I pointed this out to the screeners who were telling us all to take off our shoes. They didn’t look amused, but I walked through with my shoes on anyway. Unfortunately for me, they decided that this warranted a more thorough search of my bodice, and I had to take off my shoes anyway after I went through the detector. Turns out, there was a piece of metal in the heel of one of my shoes but not the other. Is Land’s End intentionally trying to annoy people passing through metal detectors or something.

Maybe next time I fly I’ll wear slippers to the airport.

In keeping with the theme of hassling airport screeners, you can now buy a metal copy of the Bill of Rights. When you beep through the metal detector, you can smirk in self-righteousness when the screeners “take away your Constitutional Rights”.

John Gilmore: I was ejected from a plane for wearing “Suspected Terrorist” button.

Another story about John Gilmore: Suspected Terrorist.

Check out John Gilmore’s Homepage to find our more about his background. You’d be hard pressed to find a guy working to preserve our freedoms more than him.

As I was reflecting on my recent trip to NYC, I realized that most of the things we saw were pretty uninteresting. Here’s a brief recap of what we saw:

• The Museum of Natural History Big, but disappointing in that most exhibits are just replicas. It’s like going to a zoo where instead of live animals, they’ve just got statues of animals.
• Times Square Not much to it, but at least we can say we’ve been there.
• NBC Studio Tour Somewhat interesting, but not that interesting. We got to see the rooms where NBC Nightly News, Saturday Night Live, and Dateline NBC are filmed. Otherwise, it’s pretty ho hum.
• United Nations Building Probably the highlight of our trip. Very informative as to the operations of the U.N. and what they can and can’t do.
• Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum A tourist trap if I’ve even seen one. Some pretty amazing likenesses of people, but once you’ve seen a few, you’ve seen them all.
• The Guggenheim Mueseum A disappointingly small museum. They had a lot of works from famous artists (Picasso, Calder, and Kandinsky to name a few), but no works that I immediately recognized, and most of the collection was very modern, not to my liking at all. Besides, I was in a bad mood that day.

All in all, a fascinating city, but pretty mediocre as far as the “tourist” things to do. I think we had more fun wandering through Chinatown in search of a good restaurant than we did at many of the official stops.

(For the record, we did find a good Chinese restaurant at XO Kitchen.)

Using the subway was pretty efficient for the most part, although we rode it way too much, staying in a hotel by the airport instead of in Manhattan. We would have had a better time if we ponied up the extra dough and stayed on the island proper. I would love to live in a place that had a subway system like New York’s, although I don’t know if I would like to live in New York per se. I can’t put my finger on it, and maybe it’s just reflected from the mediocre destinations I mentioned above, but something about New York didn’t sit well with me.

I’m probably just too picky.

I’ve made more than 700 entries on this website, and allow comments on each one, but there’s only one which has had significant activity, and that’s the entry for Dale’s Den. (Actually, it should be Dell’s Den, it’s hard to tell through his Southern accent.) Dell has a small cult following now.

I was a bit disappointed but not surprised to read the news today that AOL has killed off it’s Netscape division. To be honest, it’s amazing they kept it around for as long as they did, considering the Mozilla project has had a working, mostly bug-free browser for over a year now, and yet AOL never even bothered to incorporate it into their products (the Compuserve Windows client and AOL client for Mac OS X notwithstanding.) The announcement last month that AOL settled with Microsoft over the Netscape anti-trust issue must have been the final nail in the coffin.

If Mozilla was a closed-source project, that would be the end of the cycle, but because it’s open-source, and has been for a number of years, it’s not going away any time soon. The Mozilla Foundation has emerged with a new webpage, and even got a $2 million grant from AOL. The community can expect to see Mozilla to continue to improve, very possibly as quickly as it has so far; what we won’t see is releases of Netscape branded browsers based on the Mozilla code. That’s fine by me, since Netscape 7.x was just a bloated version of Mozilla 1.x anyway.

I feel sad for the 50 or so Netscape employees who were laid off today; hopefully AOL will be generous with them or offer them new jobs within the AOL division. And who knows, maybe the Mozilla Foundation will be able to move even more nimbly now that they’re not under the control of AOL. Whatever the case, more power to them.

I got back from a four-day trip to NYC last night. I really hate coming back home after vacation and having to go to work the next day, because there’s so much to catch up on…refrigerator is empty, four days of mail, personal e-mail, and work e-mail to go through, not to mention the news stories posted while I was away. I should really try to give myself an extra day to return home to catch up with everything else.

Pictures can be found here.

America’s Most Literate Cities tries to rank 64 U.S. cities from most to least “literate”; Seattle is listed as No. 2. Maybe that’s why I fell in love with it, after having lived previously in Fresno (No. 56) and New Orleans (No. 40), and currently living in Indianapolis (No. 37).