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I make blogging too hard. I always think I have to be writing something important and that’s just untrue. So here’s a small collection of thoughts since I last blogged.

Yaketystats 2.1 is out. I feel like we’re floundering exposure-wise. I really think we have the best product out there, but no one seems to care. We’ve talked about writing an article for a Linux mag and doing an OSCON presentation, so maybe that’ll help.

Firefox in Ubuntu has been driving me crazy for the last several months. My work machine is an 4CPU 8G atom-smasher and FF is still crazy slow. Like you’d laugh and ask “how is that possible?” slow. I don’t have many extensions, and it seems like my box should be able to handle tons of extensions, but I regularly find myself waiting several seconds for a new tab to be usable and I’m always waiting for text boxes to catch up to my typing. It sucks.

I’m also really frustrated with Ubuntu in general. Coming from Debian where in-place upgrades are the norm, it’s really weird and sad to read that reinstalling come upgrade time is the norm in Ubuntu culture. Sure you can upgrade in place, but it’s fraught with peril and things often don’t work right. For instance, I finally got my laptop wireless working in 8.04, but it didn’t survive the upgrade to 8.10 and I can’t make it work at all now, so I’m living in Vista. Don’t get me started on Vista.

There are a lot of cultural things about Ubuntu that just rub me the wrong way. I guess I’m getting old. As much as they do to make it all work together and feel cohesive, to me it feels very tenuous and fragile. If NetworkManager (for example) doesn’t work for you, well sorry, you’re just fucked because that’s the Ubuntu way to do it and you’ll be swimming upstream the rest of your Ubuntu-life if you try to do it another way. PulseAudio is another example of this.

BTW, when did “for example” cease to mean anything? It’s like banner-ad blindness; people don’t even hear it anymore and immediately start arguing the details of your example ignoring the point you were trying to make by using the example. It’s one thing to say “Well, I see the point you’re trying to make, but I don’t think your example supports your point and here’s why,” but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about “Oh, since you brought up X, let’s argue about that now and I’ll completely ignore any point you were trying to make when you brought X up.”

I started twittering but I don’t expect it to last. Having not grown up with Twitter, it seems like they make finding your friends overly difficult. Searching by invite/email address? Really?

I recently bought a Greg Bailey Custom guitar. The guitar used as his horrid background image, in fact. It plays and sounds great. It’s the second aluminum instrument I own and is very very different than my Travis Bean. Maybe I’ll put some experiments with my new ElectroHarmonix Hog on youtube sometime. The Hog is an extremely fun device.

I wish I could find an acoustic that’s as nice as my Travis Bean. I’ve got a $2k Taylor. After a few years it’s not holding up very well and my initial annoyances with it are only magnified now. I got really lucky in that I have a friend who owned a Bean enabling me to find out how fantastic they are. I lack friends with kickass acoustic guitars (vintage or otherwise) so it’s hard to even know what’s out there and what I’d like. Acoustic guitar shops are usually far too uptight for me. It’s almost as if you’re supposed to buy the guitars w/o playing them.

I’m reading Steve Pinker’s The Blank Slate and enjoying it very much. It’s one of those books that really makes you examine yourself and your dogma. In some ways, though, it’s a bit of a motivation killer. I have enough problems with motivation/feeling like part of the machine/etc without feeling like my identity isn’t even cohesive. :)

I guess that’s as good a thought as any to leave on. UNTIL NEXT TIME!

Tags: browsers, guitars, life, music

In case WordPress unhelpfully strips the embed code from my feeds, here’s a link to the video.

The video stands completely on its own, so I’ll just say: go buy the latest Harvey Milk album. It’s great! For a more substantial taste, you can listen to the full track on their website.

Oh and Beck is still derivative crap.

Tags: funny, music, video

Nobody told me there was yet another digital display interface standard. HDMI is so last year I guess. It’s cool that it can do native fiber though!

The Wii has been hacked and someone ported mplayer to it so that it’ll play DVD’s now and do other cool home-brew stuff. Cool. See also.

They’re triple-dipping another Lebowski with a 10th anniversary … DVD(?!?!!). WTF? Why not Bluray? Oh and your site sucks. You’re welcome.

If you know me, you probably know that I LOVE me some Boris. Well Boris are good buddies with this band Sunn O))). One of the Sunn O))) dudes plays a Bean (like me) and I’d heard some of their stuff on Skreemr (beware the popups!) so I thought I’d pick up one of their records. Bzzt. Not so great. Some cool drone stuff, but too much demon-voice (as Ed calls it) for me.

My big project release is inching closer. Don’t forget to breathe!

A while ago I picked up an HP dv2845se (laptop). I’ve had an HP workstation (from the workstation, not desktop line) at work for years and love em. The laptop, however is a piece of crap. They keyboard loses strokes. The trackpad falls asleep randomly. The soundcard is a soundcard in only the most academic sense of the term. It’s completely useless for doing any kind of recording even with a fancy mic hooked to it. The video card over-heats all of the time. The wireless is a bit flakey and was somewhat of a pain to setup in Linux. It’s almost enough to make a guy buy a mac. Ha! I’m kidding of course.

I have to imagine someone makes a decent laptop. I wonder if I’ll be forced to buy a gaming laptop just to get something capable of doing real work.

I keep meaning to do my youtube savant documentaries post, but wonder if folks actually watch the vids I post especially when they’re long-ish. If you do, post a comment! These docs are great!

Audio-surf claims to make a video game from analyzing your music. Seems like a cool idea.

Thanks wordpress for losing a huge chunk of my post!

Tags: dvd, lebowski, music, tech

I finally got Jose Gonzalez’ new album and it’s mostly great. I was lucky enough to find a couple of completely kickass videos of my two favorite songs on youtube. I embed them here for your pleasure.

Man, I wish I could have Jose come to my house for a personal show! I haven’t been playing as much lately, so my playing/learning The Nest tonight has my right-hand fingers quite sore. I need to get back into it.

I picked up I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski (the book from the LebowskiFest guys) recently and it’s really a funny and informative companion to the movie.

Another post, another cool TED talk. This time on the intelligence of crows. Who knew?

A tip: Just as seeing someone wearing a visor at a party (male or female) should be your cue to leave; reading or hearing the phrase “quiet desperation” should be your cue to stop reading/watching. Perhaps you never thought of that, but that’s what I’m here for. Sam Rowe: Lifecoach.

Tags: lebowski, music, ted, youtube