As many of you might have noticed, I’ve been sick lately. Normally, that’s not blog-worthy, even if it is a rare occassion. However, this morning was the first time I had been to church in three weeks. I was up front playing guitar with the worship team and started to sing along with one of the songs (sometimes I’m concentrating on the guitar too much to sing), and that’s when it struck me. I missed this. Yes, I missed church, and yes, I missed playing guitar for worship, but the thing I missed the most was just singing to God. My throat had been so raw for the last two weeks, that I hadn’t been able to sing (I tried once, and it was a pathetic sound).

Then something else struck me. I wasn’t the only one. God missed it too. The ruler of the universe; the creator of everything; the omnipotent God who controls everything. He missed my worship. God wants, desires, even longs for the worship and adoration of his treasured creation, mankind. And yes, I know, worship is more than just singing and music, but for me, that’s the way I worship God best. When I lose that, I feel like a part of me has died. This morning, though, it was revived, and wow, did that feel amazing. Yes, it even drove me to tears as all these thoughts came rushing at once. I just had to share that with all of you.

A bunch of my family members use Multiply for posting blogs, book reviews, photos, and links. It’s kind of like Facebook or Myspace, but slimmed down, and geared more towards blogging. Several of them have recently joined Facebook, and yesterday, my aunt asked me an interesting question. Is there any way to integrate the two sites? I knew there had to be, but it took me a while to think of how to do it.

So, here it is: On facebook, go to your Profile, and make sure you are on your Wall. Right below the ‘Write something…’ box, there is a Settings button. Click that, and the top section will say ‘Stories Posted by You’. As you can see, Multiply isn’t listed, but there is one called ‘Blog/RSS’. Click this, and it will ask you for the Public URL of your blog. For my Multiply site, it would be nosilver4u.multiply.com. Fill in yours, and click the Import button. Now it will automatically post anything from Multiply on your Facebook page. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any way to go the other direction. This will also work for any other blogging site like blogspot, livejournal, or wordpress.com.

The other day I found out about earth hour. You can go read about it, but I’ll give you the short version. At 8:30 P.M. turn off all your lights for one hour. They are aiming for one billion people participating this year (last year was 50 million). I’m not huge into all this ‘global warming’ stuff, but I do think we need to do a better job conserving energy, and this is one way to help make that happen.

Some things just beg for a blog post. Like the stupidity of telling malware and virus writers exactly how to load their programs in safe mode. Thanks, McAfee. That was brilliant. Safe mode is typically the last resort for removing stubborn viruses, and I’ve only ever seen one that did this. Expect to see a whole bunch of new malware with this ability in the future. This makes me glad I only run ESET’s NOD32 on my computers.

Many of you probably already know that I use Linux. One of the awesome things about linux is choice. It was also the mantra of the first Linux distribution that hooked me on Linux–Gentoo. One of the choices that I made early on, was to use GNOME for my ‘Desktop Environment’. Of course, this begs a definition of ‘Desktop Environment’ for anyone who doesn’t use Linux.  It consists of the icons, toolbars (dock, taskbar), wallpapers, desktop, widgets, menus, etc. Perhaps the best way to explain this is by comparison. The biggest noticable difference between Windows 98 and XP (or between XP and Vista or even Mac OS) is the Desktop Environment. It’s what allows you to launch programs, and manage your files, and even determines how it all looks to some extent.

Now, back to linux. For those of us that use Linux, we get to choose between a hundred different Desktop Environments (and that’s probably underestimated). To the less eccentric, there’s typically only two choices though: GNOME and KDE. As I said before, I’ve chose GNOME pretty early on, but I actually tried KDE first, since it was what I had used when I bought my SuSE 7.2 discs back in the day (I subsequently sold those discs on eBay, and gave up on Linux for about 2 years). KDE has always been the eye-catching option, but as I’m a bit of a minimalist, GNOME struck my fancy. It seemed easier to customize, and had a leaner feel overall.

Every once in a blue moon I’m tempted by the allure of KDE once more, and today was one of those days. I’ve been sick, and bored, so I started installing Gentoo (I’ve used Ubuntu for the last 5 years) in a virtual machine (it’s like taking a chunk of your hard drive and making a spare computer out of it). I wasn’t going to do much more than that, but then the bug bit me. So once I had everything else working, I started preparing to install KDE on Gentoo. It was going to install 3.5.9, but I had already tried that version, and wanted to check out version 4. I found a nicely done tutorial, and wanted to see everything that would be installed. That’s when it happened. It smacked me right in the face. I almost fell over. It wanted to install MySQL. MySQL is a full-fledged database application commonly found on servers. This is a Desktop system, running Desktop applications. What could possibly require MySQL?

It turns out that Akonadai, part of the PIM (personal information management) set of packages is the culprit. Apparently, some people have so much personal information (contacts, calendar data, email, etc.), that SQlite (the former choice) doesn’t cut it anymore. That just boggles my mind. Of course, it shouldn’t, when I’ve seen college presidents that have over twelve thousand emails (just in the Inbox), several thousand contacts, and calendars that could choke a hippo.

In KDE’s defense, at least they don’t require you to actually setup the mysql server. However, KDE will have to be pretty slick to convince me that the extra little bit of fat is worth the switch this time. I’ve always found it to be bloated, and adding extra icing just adds more calories.

Dear FedEx,
The lovely country selector you’ve implemented is broken. See, not everyone has the Arial font (yes, I use Linux, and Arial is a proprietary Windows font, so I’m out of luck there). This causes my browser to choose a different font that happens to be slightly larger than Arial. What happens next, is that the selection box doesn’t fit in the container you’ve made for it, and it gets hidden behind the map.

Oh, the map. Let’s click on that. So I did, and then the country selector for North America has a similar issue.

Ah, but I’m resourceful, and notice the link at the bottom that says, “If you are having trouble viewing this page, click here.” I’m from the United States, and it defaults to that since I’ve already tried North America from the map on the original page. Fantastic, except that there is no submit button, because your web designers were too smart for that, and made the page accept whatever value is chosen, except that you can’t select United States when it’s already selected.

Since I’d like to be able to use your website, I decided to try and give you some feedback. However, there’s no readily apparent way to do so. So I clicked the Customer Support link. I particularly like the part on the Customer Support page that says, “Just e-mail, write or call us at 1.800.GoFedEx 1.800.463.3339.” Hmm, I can call that, but I’m not sure how to send email to your phone, or especially how to get postal mail to your phone. I do realise that if I keep going down the page, I will find ‘Call or Write Us’ links for each department. If I’m lucky, I’ll pick a department that has an email address listed. But if I pick the relevant one (FedEx Ground), I’m out of luck right there.
All that to say, please fix your website so that I (and the growing number of linux users) can use it. Lest you think I’m a nut on the fringe, think of all the poor netbook users running Linux that can’t use your web site. Think of them, and repent of your ways…

Respectfully Yours,
Dissatisfied Customer

Earlier, I was reading how Facebook almost bought out Twitter. I know I’ve seen some people adamantly proclaim ‘Facebook is not Twitter’. Sure, but have you looked at the two side by side? Facebook is organized tweets. That said, I’m still not quite sure how it makes sense for Facebook to acquire Twitter, except that they can expand their already-established advertising network to another venue.
Otherwise, it seems a bit random for one social network to acquire something they already have. It makes even less sense when you look at how poorly run Twitter is. It seems like everytime I go to check on twitter, it’s broken in some way or another (like right now). Not that my preferred micro-blogging tool is perfect, but at least identi.ca is open-source, and that counts for quite a bit. I’ve also never seen it completely down like Twitter is right now, and it integrates nicely with Facebook status updates. Just in case you’re totally hooked on Twitter, Identi.ca even will cross-post to Twitter as well.