For my birthday, my mother got me a Garmin Swim watch. The watch uses an accelerameter and gyroscope to figure out how many laps I’m swimming and what strokes I’m swimming. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough that it was able to allow me to focus on my strokes instead of counting intervals on the first day I used it. I’m not sure what I am doing wrong with breaststroke, but it made it add 2 extra laps to my third set of 400 IM. Even with those issues, (and the fact that something I do with backstroke is so wrong, it thinks I’m doing breaststroke) I was able to confirm some things I’d supposed, but didn’t want to waste time confirming with a less feature-full stopwatch. For example, I confirmed that, on average, I swim 25 meters in 30 seconds with freestyle. I also confirmed that I do my 400s in slightly less than 10 minutes, but slower with each set as I get tired.

Yesterday I saw the new Star Wars trailer. I told my wife I was disappointed that if they were going to have a black Storm Trooper, they didn’t pick Donald Faison. His Storm Trooper on the Robot Chicken Star Wars specials is my favorite part of the specials. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this sentiment.

Other thoughts:

• I’ve seen images from the trailer along with the quote from Spaceballs (which did have black storm troopers) “We ain’t found shit”
• So are Storm Troopers no longer Fett clones? Or is he just dressed as a trooper like Han and Luke did in Ep 4?

Civilization V (1 hr) - Dan, Dave, and I didn’t play too much because life got in the way and then the GMR servers went offline. We hope to play some more in the following month.

Poker Night 2 (30 minutes) - Testing out Steam’s internal streaming from Windows to Linux.

Homeland by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow - you upset me so much. Your books continue to rock. But, recently, you’ve gotten too real with your stories. They are still awesome stories. But they upset me because they make me feel impotent. All the ideas in Little Brother, For the Win, Homeland, and even Makers just remind us how stuck the system; how our momentary wins are usually negated within days and months.(eg The Occupy Movement) Please take a break and write something like DAOINMK or EST again.

The Intern’s Handbook: A Thriller by Shane Kuhn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a meta-fiction work of art. It is told from two perspectives - that of an assassin writing a guide book to future assassins at his firm, HR, Inc and that of an FBI investigation into our main character. The premise is that the firm takes advantage of interns being unnoticed, but key to any business to allow them to assassinate some very powerful people. Our main character, John Lago is on his final mission because he’s 25 and, in his words, “that’s the oldest someone will accept that you would work for free.”

Can you erase us from the Mr. Do! Top scores? AAA is me from when I didn’t know how to change the letters.

It’s a week and a half after the last time I looked at the Fedora 21 and about 2 weeks away from the final release if there aren’t any showstopping bugs. I just did an update and it appears that Fedora 21 will start out with KDE 4.x instead of KDE 5. I spoke to someone in IRC and it appears that KDE 5 is in no state to be included in Fedora. That’s fine with me. It appears we have learned from the KDE 4 fiasco. I’m OK getting KDE 5 later on in Fedora 21’s life or even Fedora 22. After all, if you really want it, there are ways to get it like COPR repositories or self-compilation. Fedora 22’s less than a year away, anyway.

He’d have made Bee and Puppycat, Natasha Allegri’s latest surreal cartoon masterpiece. I think there’s something great about Allyn Rachel’s mumbling delivery that really sells it. I love this amazing world we have that allows for experimentation - I hope we don’t lose it through bungling of Net Neutrality issues. (I like eps 1 and 2 from the Kickstarter [second video] more than the pilot [first video])

http://youtu.be/lOG_UtLxh58

http://youtu.be/3-oweoj9G30

I really enjoy the anime-like music cues. Also, Puppycat’s voice makes me think of the turrets in Portal.

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.