Dear Amazon and Valve,

I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems.  The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation.  Let’s start with Amazon.  The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music.  Back in the analog world before commerce became a Wonderland distortion, if I bought a book or CD, any member in my household could access this item.  It didn’t matter if I bought the book or my wife bought the book.  We could both read it.  The same went with a CD.  Either of us could grab the CD off the shelf and put it into our portable CD player.  But now go to the Kindle (or any other e-reader system) and Amazon CloudPlayer.  Sure, either of us could pick up the e-reader to read a book.  But what if we both want to read a different book at the same time.  How can we access each other’s libraries?  What about if we each want to listen to the same music library from Amazon CloudPlayer on our smart phones or other devices?  For various reasons, like Amazon recommendations, it makes sense for us to have different accounts instead of a family account.

I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified.  Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop.  Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will be using tablets more and more, but some of us have real work to get done.  We need to do photo editing, programming, video editing, 3D modeling, and other tasks that require something more than a glorified smart phone.  This is where KDE excels.

A few weeks ago, I upgraded to KDE 4.6.1 in Fedora 14 from KDE 4.5.  The first login after reboot dumped me into Gnome.  What the heck was going on?  Apparently, in GDM, the entry had changed from KDE4 to KDE Plasma Desktop.  Once I logged in that way, I was able to see the new KDE.  The biggest change I saw was that notifications looked much nicer.  It’s hard to quantify in what way they looked nicer, but something they changed about the appearance is makes it more appealing to my eyes.  Also, the way it animates really helps a lot.  For example, when two of my contacts sign into IM networks at the same time, the second notification is smaller so that my desktop is not overwhelmed with notifications.  If I mouse over the second one, it grows and the first one shrinks.

Now that KDE 4.6 has finally landed in Fedora (KDE 4.6.1, to be precise) I can properly test activities.  I spoke before of how I planned to use them back in this post.  So let’s see how well it works in practice.  I think for my first activity, I will setup an activity for programming because it will have the least adverse affect on my current way of working if things go wrong.  So I click on the KDE cashew on my left screen.  I click on the activities button.  Here’s what I get:

Over to DC for this Top 200 Photo.

photo #141 is:

This terrifying photo is from a bee box in one of the Smithsonian museums. It was scary being so close to a box stuffed with bees. I just kept thinking about what would happen if they got loose.

Once again we return to Cornell for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #142 is:

Until I went to Cornell I didn’t really know anything about Indian culture other than that they were Hindu and had some elephant god. I ended up discoverying Bhangra, Diwali, and Holi. This photo is from the celebration of Holi. We (Danielle, Lisa Lau, Dina, and I) just happened into the court of Annabel Taylor where the celebrations were taking place. Basically it involves throwing colored powder onto each other. That stuff took quite a bit of time to wash off. But, as you can see here, it does lead to some pretty awesome photos.

Back to the 365 Project for this Top 200 Photo.

photo #143 is:

Nearly everyone who does a 365 photo project ends up doing an interpretation of the Seven Deadly Sins. It tends to be really fun to figure out how to depict it. Most people never do the Seven Virtues. This was my depiction of Lust. I want to include here the text I have on the description on flickr.

Back to Cornell for this Top 200 Photo.

photo #144 is:

One thing that all Cornellians should make sure to do is climb the iconic Clocktower. It’s so great to just look out over the entire campus that you spend all day navigating. I climbed it about four or so times and each time I enjoyed looking out over the campus.

To New York City at Christmas time for today’s Top 200 Photos.

photo #145 is:

In 2006 I went, for the first time ever, to go see the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center. It was crazy to see so many people there given how cold it was. My takeaway was that the tree always looks bigger in photos and on TV than it does in person. I had a great time during that trip seeing NYC all decorated for Christmas.

To Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn for today’s Top 200 Photos.

photo #146 is:

One of the main bonding activities between my father-in-law and myself (and other members of Danielle’s family) was going fishing. Danielle’s father has almost always owned a boat and used fishing as his method of relaxation. For quite a number of years, I joined him on his Fourth of July fishing trips. Usually along for the ride were Anh Dat and one of Co Sao’s sons. For the most part, no one spoke and we just fished. It’s only because of weird conditions in recent years that I have stopped going. The penultimate time I went, it was actually freezing on the 4th of July (but only over the water). I had to borrow a sweater and I was still freezing. The water was also very choppy and it was the first time I got seasick. The last time I went, the water was so choppy that even Duc started getting seasick. So I skipped a year or two and then he sold the boat, so I haven’t been fishing in a few years. This photo is a panorama of the area where he docked his boat. It was near a movie theatre, Jodan’s Lobster Dock, and a TGIF.