Robert Love posted a link to this on planet gnome. It’s a (video of a) ridiculous touchscreen interface similar in concept to the movie Minority Report.

Just finished reading an article by a guy who’s been using Microsoft Windows Vista for nineteen months. I’m inspired. Here’s my official list of reasons to upgrade to Vista:

1. less annoying sounds
2. searching that might actually compete with everyone else (mac & linux)
3. it’s pretty… most of the time
4. desktop in 2.5 dimensions
5. sounds suck less
6. fonts are now legible
7. programs take even longer to load, because they haven’t been updated yet
8. spend $600 (or more) on new hardware: video card, RAM, processor, motherboard
9. it’s faster, but only if you spent that money for new hardware
10. last, but not least, all of this is yours for just $250 (not including the aforementioned hardware upgrade)

No really, I’m serious. While reading planet gnome (I forget who’s blog it was actually on), I came across Jamendo. All the music is licensed under the creative commons (licenses vary), which gives you a variety of options. At the very least, you are usually allowed to share the music. You may even use it for commercial purposes, or make derivative works depending on how the artist releases the music. This officially gets the award for best site of the millenium (so far).

I sent this email recently to urlblacklist.com and have received no response. Obviously, I don’t have to use their service, no one is forcing me into anything here, but I feel their current and potential customers have a right to know what’s going on. Read more

One more geeky feature for my website. Look to the right and see the beautiful ‘Now Playing’ section. Courtesy of tijs via last.fm, audioscrobbler.net, and rhythmbox.

For those who are interested in the gory details, please continue. The faint of heart should close their eyes and walk away (please open your eyes again once you are walking away). Rhythmbox is a music player for linux. It has a nifty plugin that reports the songs you are playing to audioscrobbler.net. Last.fm allows you to view this information online, and gives you recommendations, etc. The last piece of the puzzle is a plugin made by the above mentioned author which fetches that information and drops it into the sidebar on my website. It’s probably pretty trivial, as last.fm makes the information available in about 50 different formats (I may have exaggerated slightly), but I’m glad someone else did the coding instead.

You may now move about the country (hope that’s not trademarked…).

In other news, I got four more ghost shrimp over the weekend, so now I’m back up to a whopping eight shrimp. The lady picked out the four biggest ones she could find, so they are most likely females (not being mean, that’s just the way the female shrimp are). One of them was very pregnant.

Today, I noticed one of the pregnant shrimp looked a bit smaller. It would appear that maybe some of the eggs hatched, but it still looks like there are some there. I’ll have to do a bit of observing to be sure.

Recently, my aunt Debbie put together a VCD (video CD) and a CD full of family photos. Being the nerd that I am, I thought it would be neat to post them on my website, so here they are. I haven’t finished uploading them quite yet, but it shouldn’t take me too much longer. There are many more to be scanned also, but this is certainly a very good start (around 700 photos total).

I’m also working on putting compiling as much of our family history as I can. There are several documents found on the CD (which will also be posted) that will help, and hopefully I can find more info online. If anyone has any information that can help, please let me know. Even the smallest tidbits are welcome (birth dates, birth places, wedding dates & locations, etc.).

I’ll eventually find a mechanism for displaying the data online. Hopefully, I’ll find a piece of software that will take the raw output and format it for me.

I’ve added something new to my website. It might be interesting, or you might roll your eyes and think I’m crazy for adding yet more clutter. If you look to your right, you will see the new section titled ‘Of Note…’.

I’ve been subscribed to several sites via RSS (really simple syndication) on Google Reader, and I usually star anything that is particularly interesting. I just noticed today that you can share items as well. So now you can see those items too. Enjoy!