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Monday, July 21, 2008

Friday, July 18, 2008

  • Social Netgherkin...

    ... anyone here on Delicious or Plaxo?

  • Double Latte with Ubuntu

    I know, I bore some of you to tears with techno blogs. Settle down. Settle down. See, just for you, I am going to split my blog in half, right down the middle... the left half is for the techno heads (me) and the right is for the rest of you. How good is that?
    Think of the following scenario: You want to buy a house, but the real estate agent insists that you have to buy a car with it. You just cannot buy a house without having to buy a car. Sure, it hikes the price up by a fair bit, but everyone buys houses like that these days, so you just have to bite the bullet and buy the house with the car. Sure, you can choose a bigger car or a smaller car, you can select the colour and decorations but in the end you are locked into buying the car.
    It's not a very good car either. You try to load your golf bag into the boot and it won't fit. Not a problem, the car company can supply you with a new, bigger one. That game your kids travelled on the way to grandma's last year? Sorry, that doesn't work in this new car either, so you have to buy an upgrade to it. And your iPod won't plug in? Don't worry, we have an upgrade for that, too.
    The car keeps breaking down, so you have to make sure it's always connected to the manufacturer so they can iron out any bugs. Any extras you have to pay for of course. And naturally, after about 3 years the car needs to be completely updated, but the new car they give you won't fit into the house anymore. You need to buy a bigger house to fit the new car, and guess what? The new house comes with a new car and the cycle begins anew.
    Sounds silly? Sure. But 85% of people do this over and over again. Not with a house and car, but with their computers and Windows. You buy a new computer and it comes with Windows. You have to pay extra to have Windows. You want to write or do spreadsheets, off you go and pay a few hundred dollars for the Office suite. Want to touch up photos? No problem, here is Photoshop for hundreds of dollars. And then the computer runs slow, so it needs to be upgraded to the latest version, which comes with the latest version of Windows, and of course your Office Suite and Photoshop are no longer compatible with the new version of Windows.
    Why do we fall for this over and over and over? Why do we let Microsoft dictate what we can and can't do with our computer?
    		There are some songs that I could listen to over and over and over... no matter how long they are. "Transfatty Acid" by Lamb is one of them. I've got about half a dozen different versions of the track, including one that's 29 minutes long. It's jazzy, it's aciddy, it's kinda acidjazzy without being intellectually conflated...

    No one said it would be easy
    Did anyone tell you the road would be straight and long
    Relax your mind and give it all to me
    cause you know and I know our love is strong enough
    To weather the rain
    To weather the snow
    To weather the storm
    To weather the rain
    To weather the snow
    To weather the storm

    Often I see fear in your eyes
    And sometimes I know, your heart is full of little arrows
    But trust in me and no one can do you wrong
    cause I know and you know our love is strong enough
    To weather the rain
    To weather the snow
    To weather the storm
    To weather the rain
    To weather the snow
    To weather the storm

    To weather the rain
    To weather the snow
    To weather the storm
    To weather the rain
    To weather the snow
    To weather the storm

          Gives me goosebumps every time.
    We have an alternative. Linux. I know, most of you will cringe and think of geeks and nerds and hours spent trying to make the machine work. But that's a myth. Take Ubuntu for instance. It comes as a live CD, so you can actually try it before you install it. It costs NOTHING. It's free! Complete with an Office Suite, that is compatible with Microsoft Office, so you can still swap files with your friends. Complete with the GIMP, a graphics program with the same feature set as Photoshop.
    Installation is easier (and much quicker) than Windows. And once it's installed it runs a gazillion times faster than Vista. We have a laptop that runs both Ubuntu and Vista and the difference is amazing.
    Think about what you do on your computer at home... I challenge you to find me one thing that cannot be done as well if not better in Linux. Prove me wrong.
    Free, more stable than Windows, more features than Windows, faster than Windows, better graphics, no viruses, no spyware... why would you be sucked into using Windows? Just because everyone else is?
    Did I mention just about everything under Linux is free? Break the cycle. Free yourself from Microsoft.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

  • Pirates, Scribes, Fires and Red Pandas. How to blog without xtools.

    The other day the Pirate pondered a long lost feature of Xanga: eMail blogging. Some of you may remember the days when you could send an email to your blog to update. It made me reminisce about the ways I used to write blogs. I did use the email feature once or twice, and tried other add ons. Once upon a time there was the xtools button and I seem to remember the xanga toolbar. For the longest time, xtools wouldn't work properly in Netscape or Firefox.

    I've always preferred to use an alternative to Internet Explorer. For me, most software written by Microsoft is repulsive. Microsoft assumes that a) every user needs every feature and b) every user is dumb. In the beginning I used Netscape and then Opera, and finally ended up - and swear by - Firefox. The neat thing about Firefox has always been the dozens of add-ons you can use to customize your browser to exactly do what you want it to.

    For example, I've got an add-on called iMacros (which is also now available for IE), which allows me to record the most common mouse clicks and keystrokes in my browser. It's a god-sent when I need to set up machines via a web interface. I used to spend a lot of time going through menues and clicking items. Now I run a macro and have a cup of coffee instead.

    One thing I always wanted was an add-on that let me blog on Xanga. Preferably one that allowed me to change my username right there without having to log in or out and do all the stuff I normally need xtools for.

    The other night when I read the Pirate's entry, I started hunting again, and happened to come upon an entry by the Xanga Team. In it they show how to setup live-writer and scribefire. So, here I am tonight, typing happily away in ScribeFire before I need to decide on which site or blog to post it.

    So, if you do have multiple blogs, possibly on multiple sites and are sick and tired of the different user interfaces and the log ins and offs... try this: Install Firefox 3.0, install the ScribeFire add-on, and set it up according to the instructions on the Xanga Team's blog. It will take you less than 30 minutes and is very very easy to do, and you'll have a better browser, and an awesome way to enter your blogs from now on.

    Of course, if you want to, you could give up on Windows completely, and install Ubuntu 8.04 --- but that's a blog for another time.

  • 4:11am - 2 minutes to go...

    It's called "Controlled Crying". I did it with my first daughter and it worked. And now, we're trying it with our youngest. If you've never heard of it, it works by gradually increasing the response time to crying.

    The first time they cry, you go in straight away and make sure they are ok, change his/her nappy, give them what they need, settle them to sleep. I used to make sure I got out of there before they fell asleep completely so they got used to falling asleep alone, and weren't startled when they woke up a few minutes later to find that Mum or Dad had disappeared.

    The second cry gets a 5 minute delay. Face it, you've already changed the nappy, they are ok, there is no reason for him or her to cry other than the fact that you are not in the room humming lullabies anymore. After 5 minutes, we go back in, calm him down. The third time we wait 10 minutes, then 15.

    With my daughter we had one whole night of crying, and she only settled after we were up to 55 minutes. That was the one and only night we had to do that. Since then, she's slept like a rock, and even these days she can wake up and go back to sleep by herself with no worries.

    With our little fellow, we did it for the first time tonight. He lasted to the 15 minute wait, and that was that. It's been almost an hour since I've been in there last, and all I heard was a short sigh after about 5 minutes.

    The alternative has been to take him into our bed or for Teck to take him to the lounge room, put a DVD in and sleep there. In the past that was the only option, because Zack slept in the same room and couldn't sleep if Quinn was screaming at the top of his lungs. Now, that they're in separate rooms it works.

    Of course there are a million studies to prove that this method works, and another million studies to prove that this makes us bad parents and that our children will now all have a tendency to mass murder. Stuff theories. This works for us. At least tonight.

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