Glass Panes That Separate

Last week, a little birdie dropped into our lives (literally). We found him outside our back door, and he looked pretty pathetic. Couldn’t fly yet, and couldn’t walk very well either. My wife is a sucker for poor helpless animals, and I’m a sucker for my wife, so together we attempted to take care of it until it could get around on it’s own. I was quite pessimistic, since the last bird we tried to rescue died overnight. But, lo and behold, this birdie survived the first night, and even the second. The third morning, he was gone. We hope that he learned how to walk better, or that his family found him. There’s been a group of birds just like him this week in the backyard, so it’s possible he made it after all. Wahoo!

Yesterday might have been my favorite Independence Day ever. It started out fun enough: riding 12 miles while my Dad & Brendan ran 10. I had stopped to chat with my cousin Afton, and then wasn’t sure which direction they had gone (silly me, ought to have asked what route we were taking). So I went up the highway back towards my parents’ house a mile, and they weren’t that direction. Turns out they had gone into town towards the church, and I finally caught back up with them right after they turned around.

I got home at around 9, and Scooter got all excited again, because he saw I still had the ‘running shorts’ on, and I felt bad for leaving hime before, so I ran a mile with him while Amanda got ready to go to the parade which started at 10. Made it home just in time to shower, and off we drove to the parade. It was nice and long, and while we got no candy (I’ve heard it’s not ‘cool’ for adults to scamper after candy), we did get free root beer and hot dogs afterwards.

Soon as we were done, I took Amanda home, and went over to the fireworks stand to help Pastor Curt for the rest of the day (until 10). I got around $175 worth of fireworks, and then won 4th prize, which was a couple of the smallish finale-type displays. After we closed up, we went to blow up our stuff along with the rest of the church folks. P.C. brought along a bunch of bigger displays and between all of us, we had a very nice show. The ‘Gone Fishing’ tipped over, and shot at my wife and mom. A bunch of us got hit by smaller pieces, but I found out later, that it had hit them with a couple shots. Had a blast lighting everything off, and even more fun watching it all.

All in all, a pretty fantastic day, even with a few mishaps along the way.

Ok, so a combination of crazy things happened way too close together, and Dreamhost ended up having to disable the Mysql account for Wordpress. Firstly, I was trying out whoisi.com and added several friends and family, along with myself. I then reported a bug to the author, who then happened to mention it on his blog, which happens to be syndicated on Planet Gnome. In the middle of all this, I was finishing up migrating that last of my photos from Gallery to Wordpress. It just so happened that yesterday, I finished the last in a series of 10 ‘gallery’ posts that included around 700 photos of my family history. I then proceeded to make a final post that included links to all 10 of those galleries.
So, a word to the wise: Don’t write a post that links to ten other posts which include over seven hundred photos the day after you get mentioned on Planet Gnome.
As before, you can get to the Gallery via the link at the top of the page, and shortly, I’ll have the random image block back on the sidebar too.

Over the last several weeks, our one female guinea pig had been having some health problems. We took her to the vet, and he gave her some stuff to make sure she was getting her nutrients. After a long struggle, she finally died on the morning of Saturday, May 24. There has been much sadness in our house as a result. We will miss her dearly.

We just moved into a new house (rental), and the view is nice. Quite.

Yup, you guessed it, this post is all about syrup…of the maple variety. I went to the store today to buy some maple syrup for pancakes. Simple task one might think. Find the ’syrup section’ and you have at least a dozen different choices. Then, something caught my eye. Western Family (the generic brand at this particular store) had a ‘premium’ syrup with 2-percent real maple syrup. Of course, then I was curious what percentage of real maple syrup some of the spendier brands contained. I checked them all, because I was incredulous at what I found. None. No other brand had any real maple syrup in them. One actually contained a little artificial maple flavoring, but that was as good as it got. That amazes me. Only the generic brand even bothered to sell a single bottle with maple syrup in it.
So, what did the others put in their syrup instead? They all contained the same exact two ingredients at the top of the list: corn syrup, and high fructose corn syrup. Needless to say, I don’t need that junk in my body (recent studies indicated that hfcs is linked to diabetes and other disorders), so I found the one sugar-free variety and bought that (it still has 12g of sugar-alcohol, however that works).

Well, it’s been a couple weeks since I started my new job, and even longer since I wrote my last real blog post. The new job has been fun, with a few new challenges, and lots of new software to learn about. We had rented a small house originally that turned out to be a bust. The landlords don’t keep the place up real well, and aren’t too picky about who they let in, so it had a lovely cigarette smoke smell, and several other quirks here and there. At any rate, they were gracious enough to let us out of the lease, since our eyes were burning, and my wife wasn’t even able to spend the night there due to associated sinus problems.
Since then, things have been looking up. Amanda got a job at a flower shop last week, and today was her first day. We also received an offer on our house, which puts us in the same boat as my cousin, oddly enough. It was kind of funny to read her post, and say, hey, me too! At any rate, it’s very encouraging to have received an offer on the house, and there has been a lot more interest in it than we really expected, which is very nice.

Today marks four years since my first blog post. That is all. I do have more to write, but that’ll have to wait for a bit.

In three days, m-day hits. ‘M’ as in moving. We’re moving back to Glendive (scroll down the page to see more) and I’m super duper excited.
Today was also an m-day of sorts. This time, ‘M’ as in mobile. Canonical, (the backers of Ubuntu, arguably the most popular linux distro) announced Ubuntu Mobile today. Now some people are saying, “who cares?” But seriously, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve got to realize where mobile technology is heading. Apple is supposed to be opening (or may have already) their iPhone SDK, so you’ve got a semi-open platform there. Nokia has been working on their Hildon platform for several years, and it keeps getting better and better. Google just launched Android recently, and has several companies with semi-functional prototypes. And now Canonical releases a Mobile version of a Ubuntu. In case you didn’t know, Ubuntu is Debian-based, which means it inherits a massively large package repository, second to none.
But now that I’ve gone crazy on you here, let’s get down to the real business, and that’s our poor ignorant friend Russell whom I alluded to previously. Does this release really matter? I’d like to take this moment in time to debunk all the junk that Russell would have known if he wasn’t a severe pessimist. I’m convinced Ziff Davis only hires cynics, and that an optimist wouldn’t last three days over there. Have you read any recent columns by John Dvorak lately? That guy is always good for a laugh. But I digress, again. I truly am sorry for that, so I’ll get on with it.
In his article, Russ says, “Unless the device manufacturers and the carriers come on board and truly open up their networks and UIs to these applications, we’re looking at nothing but niche, hacked applications from coder fanboys.”
Hmm, that’s interesting, because Ubuntu already has a test platform. Even better than Android, which has semi-functional prototypes, Samsung already makes a device that supports Ubuntu Mobile. And last I checked, AT&T already has an open network. Apparently, Russell still believes that the only folks who work on OSS (open source software) projects are ‘hackers’ and ‘fanboys’. Well, I suppose most of them probably are ‘fanboys’, but he puts it in such a negative light, it’s disgusting. One would almost be led to believe that there are no high-quality OSS projects anywhere. Never mind that 2 of the projects I just linked to have NO KNOWN BUGS. Even though the author has offered cash to anyone that could find one. But he’s just a ‘hacker’ that doesn’t know what he’s doing. The Apache folks are apparently incompetent as well, even though they own the web server market.
And then he has his example. His one, lousy, lame example that isn’t even an OSS project, it just happens to be a very popular app that runs on linux. His thoughts: “wouldn’t it be easier to just download and install Skype from the Skype site?”
Well, no, actually it isn’t. If you had used Ubuntu for any period of time, you’d know that installing apps is easier than going to a web site. I can open one program from my menu, type ‘apt-get install skype’, press ‘y’ to confirm, and it gets installed. And for those who can’t navigate the command line, you open a different application (synaptic), search for skype, check the box, and press Apply. And it’s that simple for over 23,000 different packages. Try that on Windows, and have fun with it too. Then when you want to get rid of it, you never know if it actually is gone. “Whoops, we missed a couple files, and some registry entries, but you’ll never notice, until after the twentieth application has come and gone, and your computer runs at half its original speed.” No such uncertainty on linux. Remove the program, and it’s gone. Worried about some dependencies it had to install? Alt-F2 and ‘apt-get autoremove’. There, it’s done. But again, I digress too much.
His last stab at a pathetic argument is this, “please understand that enthusiasm for your apps ain’t gonna bubble up from the mobile device user base.”
Oh, that’s right, all the publicity that companies put out to generate user buzz is not actually for the users. But of course, these are the ‘mobile users’. No one ever tries to get enthusiasm out of them, cause all they want is txting, and the ‘basic features’. All this time, companies have been making them web-accessible, and adding cameras, and music players, but the ‘mobile users’ don’t want any of that, so stop it. Just give them a keypad, a 2 line display so they can see what they are typing, and the numbers they are dialing, and they’ll be happy.
My bad.