Seven Sons

Fucking Krauthammer. Apparently the results of our glorious liberation of Iraq didn’t work, so why not get involved in Iran? Is he seriously this stupid? “The entire trajectory of the region is reversed?” Where have I heard that before?

Fucking moron. We keep our mouth shut because otherwise the reformists are tarred as being in league with foreigners, aka the Great Satan. Anything we do openly would undermine what we want to achieve. The Bush team learned this the hard way. Apparently K can’t follow the lesson. We’ve got techies here helping the Iranians communicate through the internet, but for the US gov’t to get involved directly would be sheer idiocy.

Most of us have had to deal with the “last day of school.” How much are you going to learn when you’re brain has already checked out for the summer? This has to be the best way ever to blow off the last day of school.

There is a great “aside” in this bike blog about the “race to the bottom” concept. I have been thinking about this a lot subconsciously lately, I never really had a name for it. Each day recently we have made the boy pick up the 18 toys he has managed to leave lying around the house and simultaneously shop for his birthday next week. I think our family is above-average when it comes to intelligent consumption, social consciousness and conservation… but boy, do we still have a long way to go. We’re taking a stab this week at putting  a bunch of stuff on craigslist, including my 8′6″ long board that I break out every 3 years. It’s mostly just taking up space.

In January, I bought a Dell Mini 9 netbook with Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows through the Dell Outlet for ~$200. It’s a pretty stripped version, with only a 4gb SSD, but I was tired of lugging my 7lb Inspiron through airports and I’d been inclined to try a Linux machine anyway.

It has worked out pretty well, though a bit sluggish. The Dell version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron, a Long-Term Support version) included a quick launcher bar broken down by category:

I found it generally more useful to go into the “classic desktop” view, however, since the quicklauncher wasn’t particularly suited to finding files. Dell recently started updating the version through their repositories (Linux sponsors provide “central” locations for updates) rather than the Canonical one, and I was hit with two updates in one week. The first seemed primarily about the battery manager and was welcome. The second sped up the machine, but somehow reorganized the “classic desktop” that I’d been using into something much more like the quick launcher, with a single drop-down menu (Windows-like) rather than the Apps/Places/System trifecta that traditionally rules Ubuntu. Furthermore, the power button disappeared from the screen, hidden (again) in the drop-down menu.

Trying my limited patience, I initially searched for a way to undo the “improvement” on the Dell boards. Time to try the “Netbook Remix” edition that is directly available from Canonical. It took about 20m to install off a USB key, and what a visual improvement:

It’s smaller (on the drive) than the Dell version, it’s faster, and it uses the limited screen size much more efficiently. I should have done this months ago. All the software is more up-to-date (Open Office 3.0 rather than 2.1, the latest version of Firefox, etc) and it’s overall prettier.

I’m not a hardcore Linux nut, but I appreciate the open-source software movement and use a variety of open-source programs already on my Windows work machines (Firefox, R, 7-Zip). The Ubuntu flavor is improving quickly, with new releases every 6 months. I don’t know that it will ever be as big as Windows or Apple, but for those willing to try it out, it’s already “there” in terms of usability, and it will make you start wondering why anyone pays for operating systems currently. I’ll probably upgrade the SSD in the near future.

” Effective Jul 13, 2009, your plan will change to the new eMusic Basic plan which gives you 30 downloads for $11.99 every 30 days.

We’re sorry that we’ve had to retire your current plan, but we’re confident that you’ll find even more music to love among the many new additions to the music catalog.”

Grrr. The eMusic selection of reasonably-priced, non-RIAA sponsoring, indie-only music tracks is coming to an end. I don’t doubt that the other majors will follow soon, but this feels like the end of your local college record store to me.

Yeah, it wasn’t your neighbor’s cable line when three black SUVs turn up within minutes of you saying “That wasn’t suppose to be here.”

Classic move on AT&T’s part to try and stiff the construction company with the bill for the repair bill for a line not on the map.

No idea what I’m talking about?

Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line’ via Wired.com

Note to Ford: Give Us the Focus RS: “Why should Europe have all the fun?”

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Seriously, in the grand scheme of all that Ford is doing right (in comparison to the rest of the U.S. carmakers) why can’t they simply bring over the good cars they already make. No, not just the über-rare Focus RS, but the rest of the Foci over in Europe are cars that people might actually want to drive and would give them a nice jump on the future CAFE standards.

European MINI Commerical. Scratches a lot of itches. Design, cars and all around cleverness.

So the media, being handed a scientific breakthrough story, are falling over themselves to call this thing the missing link. But since evolution is a slow, incremental, and continuous process that really isn’t a great term for the primate skeleton that was unvieled this week. My favorite comment on this story so far has to be one by user DeafDumbBlind on slashdot… “Great, 2 more gaps created in our fossil records.”

If you’ve made the host break down laughing, I think you’ve won already.