Back to DC for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #138 is:

I mentioned Tai Shan before. This is his father, Tian Tian. My wife is always expressing how pandas should be extinct already from having such a dumb diet. They eat bamboo, but it is so nutrient deficient that they essentially have to eat non-stop or they will end up actually losing weight by just laying around and being alive.

No #140 because it was already covered. As I write this, photo #140 has 416 views and photo #121 has 459 views. So they’re still close enough that just one view can cause a photo to jump 3 or more spots up.

photo #139 is:

Another boring night in Maryland. Another cool photo with the wife. I had been reading a book of famous photographers and there was this one guy who took photos of beautiful women, but always framed the shot so that he would be reflected in a mirror. So I decided to go with that. Danielle decided to play with kimonos Dan had brought back from his trip to Japan and put on some makeup so I could take photos. I think my favorite aspect of the photo is her half smile.

note: I wrote this on 17 April, a full week before it is published on the blog

[caption id=“attachment_4398” align=“aligncenter” width=“450” caption=“Acer Aspire One - out of the box”] [/caption]

Nearly six years ago I bought my first laptop.  I’d never seen the point of laptops over desktops - the value per dollar just isn’t there.  But I was going to be traveling for work now and again and needed to be able to get in contact with the family while away.  I got an old Acer that was on sale at best buy because it was the last one left.  A year after buying that laptop, netbooks came out.  I got my wife one of the first Asus EEE PCs because she was going on a work trip didn’t want to haul my heavy laptop around.  So for the past few years we’ve traveled with both of those so I can use my laptop to watch my movies and she can use her netbook to watch hers.  But I’m getting tired of that heavy laptop and now netbooks aren’t saddled with crippled versions of Linux and inferior hardware.  So I got myself a new Acer Aspire One from Amazon.  I’d seen the same one at Costco for $50 more (because it has double the battery life) and I’d wanted to get it for a while now.  I’m going to be traveling to Chicago for a trip soon, and since my back has been giving me issues, I figured it was the time to go to a lighter laptop.

Time again for my photojojo time capsule. It contains my most interesting photos within a two week period. This time around it’s mostly my 365 plus one of my first Holga photos.

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.