Posts Tagged With ‘books’
Updated: 02 Nov 2009 07:06 am by Ron
Filed: Books & Reading • Geek Stuff • Life in General • Linux
Tagged: books • firefox • Halloween • Linux • Movies • Pat Conroy • soccer • ubuntu
More to come on some of these as we get our lives at least marginally back under control as soccer winds down for the fall…
- We’ve got Halloween pix coming; you’ll want to keep an eye out for those in the next couple days!
- On the Linux front, Ubuntu 9.10 is out as of late last week. I pushed one of my older boxes to it with reasonable success. Not much more there to say other than the startup and shutdown times are impressive, even on old hardware. Brown hasn’t done much for me lately.
- The time change is wreaking havoc on our mornings at this point, particularly with Li.
- The first pre-release of Firefox 3.6 is out, but I haven’t had a chance yet to pull it down and give it a try. At least on the surface, the only interesting aspect is the return of some eye candy regarding switching tabs. Also on the browser front, Google Chrome continue to progress, but the continued absence of the ability to control default font sizes on Mac OS X is mystifying.
- Ian wrapped up his high school soccer career with a trip to the state tournament in Boise in late October. Odd to think that’s over and done with; odder to think that I am going to be saying that more and more over the next few months as he works his way through his senior year.
- Done a bit of reading, although little of it was worth noting aside from “South of Broad” by Pat Conroy. I haven’t read anything by him for several years and this was a great reminder of how much I love his writing.
- On the movie front, go see “500 Days of Summer” if you haven’t yet and can still find it in a theater. Best movie we’ve seen in a very long time.
Updated: 01 Aug 2008 06:08 am by Ron
Filed: Books & Reading • Geek Stuff • Linux
Tagged: Arch Linux • books • Ian • Linux • william gibson • xkcd
A few miscellaneous short geek items:
- I’ve been looking at Arch Linux lately as a possible distro to try for a bit, and took the plunge last night on an older Dell Latitude laptop. I’m still partway through the installation even as I write this (in the middle of installing the GNOME desktop, actually). The basic OS install went smoothly, but I got stuck for a bit trying to get the nVidia video drivers configured; got past that hump and it’s plugging away at this point. More to come on that… if it looks like it will be worth hanging on to. It’s a bleeding edge rolling release distribution, meaning they don’t release new versions every x months with no updates to new versions of the applications (generally only minor patches and security updates are made available) between releases; their model feeds updates to apps as they become available, as as long as one periodically updates stuff, they are always current and there’s no need to re-install a version of the OS every six months or so. Maybe better, maybe not, but different. Part of what has impressed me is the level of polish on the documentation available for the distro, particularly for someone looking at it as a potential new user (see their beginner’s guide as a good example).
- Being restricted to the touchpad on a laptop is slow and painful; my mouse is dangling off the back of the in-progress Arch box at the moment. Note to self: buy a second USB mouse to have hanging around for times like these.
- Speaking of Linux, Wednesday’s xkcd Web comic strip struck a chord with me, having watched Ian over the past few years. See for yourself.
- Speaking of Ian and geek stuff, today marks his 16th birthday. Happy Birthday, Ian!
- I finished re-reading William Gibson’s Count Zero a week or so ago and I’m part way through Neuromancer right now; I keep forgetting how much I like his writing. And having gone back and started rereading these two classics of the cyberpunk genre, I am amazed at how often I find references to things from them.
Updated: 03 Jul 2008 06:56 am by Ron
Filed: Books & Reading
Tagged: books • reading • science fiction • william gibson
I saw William Gibson’s “Spook Country” in an airport bookstore on my recent trip to Dallas (notes to self: let’s skip Dallas in late June in the future, and sushi in Dallas just seems like a bad idea on second thought) and couldn’t resist. Let me qualify this a little by saying I don’t read much science fiction, but I’ve always like Gibson’s writing and I’m not even sure I’d really bin him as SF in the first place. In short, this is a great read, and just what I needed this summer: darkly funny, insightful, very engaging, a little edgy, and some food for thought about how blurry the lines can get.
Makes me want to go find my copy of “Count Zero” and start re-reading some of his earlier work…