Archive for May 2009
Updated: 31 May 2009 06:58 am by Ron
Filed: Books & Reading • Life in General
Tagged: GTD • Ian • Li • life • reading • soccer
Our spring soccer season wrapped up this past week with the State Cup tournament in Pocatello over Memorial Day weekend and with our end of the season party on a weekday evening. Life feels like it is slowly returning to normal, and as is usually the case by the end of the season, it is with a mixture of sadness and relief that I view this passing.
Our friend John got some really good pix of both Li from the windswept steppes of the soccer pitches in eastern Idaho this spring — we had almost uniformly lousy weather for the season until the final couple of weeks — and of Ian playing. I’ll post a few of those in the next few days as I begin to get caught up on stuff around here.
It has been nice to have evenings back, so that I get a little more time with family and dinner has seen a welcome return to our schedule. Ian and I spent some time yesterday working on stuff in the garage — long overdue, in a couple cases — and we’re enjoying a weekend with Deb’s folks visiting, playing a bit of pinochle with them, and watching them get reacquainted with Li.
I’ve been doing a little reading, working on and almost done with Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, and just starting “Getting Things Done” (for obvious reasons). I did manage to squeeze in a couple of other books over the season but aside from Alex Garland’s “The Tesseract”, none struck me as extraordinary.
On the subject of “Getting Things Done”, if you’re a follower of GTD or have tried it and found it didn’t help, I’d like to hear from you; post a comment… I’m curious to hear your opinions and experiences with it. I’m just starting to factor some of its ideas into how I try to keep track of everything I’m supposed to be doing…
Updated: 31 May 2009 06:42 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff • Linux
Tagged: Linux Mint
Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” was released a few days ago, and given what I’d seen about from the comments posted in response to its release candidate the past couple weeks, I was anxious to give it a run. I updated one of my laptops (not the netbook) to it yesterday morning, replacing the Ubuntu 9.04 installation. Being based on Ubuntu, I didn’t expect any problems. The installation went smoothly, as expected, with just one minor hitch: the Mint install image doesn’t seem to include the needed Broadcom driver for the wireless card in this particular laptop so I had to briefly put it on a wired network connection here at home to go grab the needed third party driver. (This is the one significant difference I saw, compared to both previous Mint releases and Ubuntu’s release; given that it wasn’t a big deal to get past, I didn’t do much digging past that. For someone without a wired connection using a similar box, it might be more challenging to get past.)
Mint's default dark GNOME theme with contrasting greens is very attractive, and the most polished Mint to date.
This version continues the Mint team’s obvious emphasis on a polished initial experience with the distro. It is, in my opinion, the most polished of the Mints to date, with a dark GNOME theme and an emphasis on green for highlights, screen background, and icons. It is very attractive, even though I am generally not a big fan of darker themes.
Total time to back stuff up, install, and then get all of the usual stuff installed and configured was less than two hours. That includes the initial installation, along with getting Apache, PHP, MySQL, Eclipse (I went with the Galileo RC1 package this time) along with the AFAE plugin, Songbird, and Railo installed and configured, along with getting WordPress installed locally and running a development version of this blog, and hacking the default GNOME theme to squeeze the scrollbars down a skosh to a more efficient and attractive width.
YMMV but I’m very impressed.
Updated: 18 May 2009 06:02 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: asus eeepc • netbook • ubuntu
A new toy made its appearance at our house: an Asus EeePC 1000HE. I’m just starting to play with it; I’m posting from it this morning. It comes with WinXP pre-installed on the hard drive, but my plans are that it will never run Windows. I’m running Ubuntu’s 9.04 netbook remix from a USB stick right now, and I’m planning to install that to the disk after updating to a solid-state drive. It’s an amazing little box and I’m very impressed with it so far. Great screen, decent keyboard (even though it’s small, I believe I can easily get used to the spacing and I like the feel of it), and everything just seems to work under this version of Linux (sound, wireless, webcam, multi-touch trackpad, compiz).
I popped out the stock 1G of RAM and replaced it with a 2G stick before powering it on the first time and it recognized it without problems. Performance and responsiveness is pretty good, even running from a USB stick and for stuff like the GIMP (I used it to scale down my test snapshot from the webcam).
I will probably switch the normal GNOME desktop once I switch out the drive for the faster SSD and will definitely tighten down fonts, etc., in the UI to maximize screenspace. I’ll post a screenie when I’ve got it set up in a more typical (for me) configuration.
So far, I’ve very impressed. It seems to be well-designed, feels solid, and works great.