I come in from raking the leaves and Scarlett is standing there with one remote in her hand and the other two in front of her. She’s pushing buttons and asks me, “Daddy, what button do I need to push to watch a video?” I told here there were a lot of buttons to push. “But which one do I push first?”

I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.

I’m trying to see if Scarlett knows her five senses.

Me: what do you use to hear? To listen?

Scarlett: headphones!

Me: OK, what do you use to see?

Scarlett: telescope!

At that point I am thrown off by both the inventiveness and incorrectness of her answers and give up for the time being.

It’s nice for once to see an innocuous use of all the data these sites collect about us. Goodreads.com creates an infographic based on what user data tells them about gender and reading in 2014.

I went with Backblaze first because they were highly recommended by LifeHacker. Then I chose Crashplan for my main Linux computer because Backblaze doesn’t do Linux. Crashplan offers a family plan that covers 2-10 computers, but I only need to cover 2 computers (my laptops don’t have anything that needs backing up). Covering two computers on Crashplan is more expensive than doing one computer on Crashplan and one on Backblaze. So the less efficient and more complicated setup is the cheaper one; oh well.

The Forbidden Knowledge of Enoch by R.J. Von-Bruening

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I got this book for free as part of Good Reads First Reads

I asked for this book because I find it interesting that it’s actually mentioned in by canonical books in the New Testament, but the book itself did not make it into the canon - at least not in the Protestant churches I attended growing up. So I thought it would be interesting to see what’s in there. Instead I got something much, much larger.

Vagina Mundi by Wol-vriey

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: Got this book free as part of Good Reads First Reads

You can take something horrible and push it so far that you move into the realm of absurdity. Some of my favorite media do this. Kill Bill takes violence to such ridiculous levels (with blood spurting everywhere) that it’s become no different than the cartoon violence of Tom and Jerry. (Which, if you forgot, has Tom being diced up, pumped full of bullet holes, blown up, and pretty much everything shy of decapitation) Or look at Mel Brooks taking something horrible like the Spanish Inquisition and making it OK to laugh at in History of the World Part 1. But you can push something so far that it goes back around to offensive again. I feel like that’s the problem with this book.

The basement bathroom needed some new paint and repairs for reasons I’ll get into in another post. But it got Danielle in a renovation mindset. So she decided to paint the master bathroom. And, in the course of examining the bathroom she found out that the vanity lighting was rusting and needed replacement. So we ended up replacing nearly everything metal in there from shiny Chrome to Nickel. So here’s how the bathroom looked before she painted and I replaced the metal pieces:

I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): They were awesome at Warped Tour - I can’t wait until they go on the Projecet Atma tour. Manufacturing delays at the vinyl plant meant that the album was delayed. Still don’t have it - should be in my hands in December.

Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and others – Code Monkey Save World (music and comics): Still missing the new music and The Princess Who Saved Herself. To be fair, the latter wasn’t promised until early 2015.

I know I’m late to coming across this, but I found a presentation where someone was explaining the idea behind Fedora.next where there are 3 core products: Fedora Server, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Cloud. But I also think it works rather well if you think of Gnu/Linux distros as LEGO sets and Windows/OSX as Playmobil. (Also, I’m now at the point in my life where I realize the benefits of each system, although I still think people should have the right to explore code they run)