This quarter my listens were a bit lower than they would otherwise have been because a lot of time I would have spent in front of the computer was spent with my new daughter. But, as she grew and now spends time in her “baby gym”, I sometimes put on music for her both so that she can hear complex music and for my sanity. There are only so many times I can listen to “itsy bitsy spider”.

A few months ago I took a look at KDE-Telepathy from within Fedora Rawhide. I said I would check it out after upgrading to Fedora 16 and then I got busy getting ready for the arrival of my daughter. (my first kid) So I just kept using Kopete for my multi-protocol IM needs. It’s the only way I keep up with anyone on Gchat or Facebook chat because I refuse to have to keep any specific tab open on my web browser for chatting. Also, it tends to be more annoying to chat - instead of chatting in a small window that I can put off to the corner of whatever virtual desktop or activity I’m in, I’d need my entire web browser.

[caption id=“attachment_5482” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Mass Effect 2 Space Graves”] [/caption]

Mass Effect 2 (19 hrs) - I knew my wife was getting close to delivering our first child, so I was rushing as quickly as I could to save the galaxy.  I got to it with one week to spare.  Phew!  I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Mass Effect 1, but the gameplay was orders of magnitude better.  For one thing I didn’t have to worry about having too many guns.  (A frequent problem in the first entry)  I also enjoyed the characters a little more (some of them, anyway).  I ended up doing a lot more side missions and I felt they were well designed.  If too much time doesn’t pass between when I finished the game and when I get free time to blog, I’ll do a writeup on Mass Effect 2 and how I liked it vs the first one.  However, it would mostly be a long-winded version of what I said above and with the baby…. well, don’t hold your breath.

See the site here to create your own.

I had two reasons for starting this project:

1. my wife and I like to collect Disney movies from our youth.  These movies are most likely to be watched by kids and kids are likely to damage DVDs.  I’ve heard lots of anecdotes on the net from parents who are on their fourth purchase of the same movie.  That’s just silly!  Also, Disney’s always putting their movies “back in the vault” so if your kid messes up one of THOSE movies, you could be SOL for up to a decade
2. Let me tell you a story of how ridiculous things have gotten in my house thanks to Netflix Instant.  My wife owns all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD.  However, she does not watch these DVDs.  She watches it on Netflix Instant.  Why?  Because it’s easier for her to go on Netflix and find the episode she wants than to try and remember what season has what episode and go get that, take it out of its case, and put it in the DVD player.

If I can go off on a quick tangent - the movie studios might read #2 wrongfully conclude (as I’ve seen WB do before) that this means they should keep their stuff off of Netflix instant.  No, what it means is that people want the convenience of Netflix Instant with the movies they buy.  We would NEVER go look for a CD to play music anymore.  It’s all on our computers in Amarok or iTunes or Rhythmbox and we can easily search for an artist or a song and not have to worry about what CD it’s on.  This is what people want in their homes!  Yet the movie studios have killed every company that’s tried to do it.  Well, no wonder people are using Netflix vs buying movies nowadays!  Sheesh!  OK, rant over.

I originally got interested in checking out the Chakra project because it was based on Arch Linux. As I mentioned before, the super customizability doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t have time for that - perhaps if Arch had existed when I was in high school or college I might have enjoyed it. What I do like is that they tend to have the latest packages and they tend to keep the distro as simple as possible - with very few customizations. When I went to do my pre-review research, I found out that while Chakra WAS based on Arch, they’ve now split off into their own proper distro. (Kinda like Fuduntu and Fedora) While they still use Pacman and other Arch-y things, they’re slowly changing to their own products.

Two years ago I reviewed Arch Linux.  My conclusion at the time - great if you have to control every aspect of your system, but it’s not for me.  I later used it on my Pogo Plug to set up a file and print server and it definitely has its merits.  I know, generally speaking, that one of the best parts of using Arch is getting access to the latest software before anyone else.  So I decided to take a look at a few Arch derivatives that take the work out of getting Arch installed while still having the benefits of Arch’s early access.

An eclectic mix for this photojojo:

Looks like all my interesting photos from this time period were from Dan’s birthday.

This photo remains at the #1 Position, but #2 is coming up quickly from behind and may surpass it this year!