Today I went to the funeral of my wife’s uncle.  It was a Catholic Mass, so it was pretty interesting trying to match up the Vietnamese with what I knew from English mass.  It was also interesting to hear how the priest pronounced “amen” and “hallelujah”.  So far in my life I’ve been to two Cuban funerals and one Vietnamese funeral.  One of the Cuban funerals was a masonic funeral.  The other was Protestant.  Really the only difference in my limited experience is that the Vietnamese take photos and video to document the event.

Since apparently I’m a crazy person who thinks he has so much free time, I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month.  The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.  Oh yeah, and I waited until 9 Nov to start.  I’d heard about it on NPR and on Linux Outlaws and I thought - why not?  The website seems to have a Lomography vibe to it - just write and don’t worry about editing until later.  I love working under constraints.  I feel that my 365 Project really pushed me to learn a LOT more about photography and techniques - especially lighting.  Anyway, you can follow my progress on the NanoWrimo site here.  See if I can make it or not.  Whatever I have at the end of the project will be posted here under a Creative Commons license and probably also posted to lulu.com.

So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle.  While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt.  All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym.  I went with the iPod shuffle because it was sub $100 and I didn’t really need to spend the money for the screen in the Nano.  Not having a screen meant just listening in order and having to check gtkPod to make sure I’d listened to all the podcasts before clearing the iPod.  Let me get into my workflow and why the shuffle became a real pain.

[caption id=“attachment_3851” align=“aligncenter” width=“403” caption=“Beginning Fedora 14 Install”] [/caption]

It’s been a more than a year since I last had to install Fedora from scratch.  I’m installing Fedora 14 into Virtualbox for an upcoming blog post where I wanted to do some stuff I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to do on my main box, so I thought I’d go ahead and blog about the installation.  The default artwork is very dynamic and conveys a sense that this is an exciting release.

Here’s my latest Photojojo time capsule with my most “interesting” photos from late October to early November 2009.

Fedora 14 is out today!  You can get it from the newly redesigned website.  Expect more from me as I explore it.  Probably in a couple weeks as I’m extremely busy right now.

While listening to a recent podcast of This American Life (TAL) it made me realize the troubles that the disabled have to go through in this country.  I don’t mean the way others treat them differently, although that certainly is an issue, but rather the little things we take for granted.  The sad thing is that, from what I’ve heard from friends and family who have lived abroad, the US is one of the top countries in the way we treat those with physical disabilities.  The story on TAL, in case you don’t have time to listen to it, was about how California is the only (or one of very few) state in the USA where the disabled can sue for Americans with Disabilities Act violations and get monetary compensation.

A few years ago I started hearing about ppas everywhere.  More and more, I see developers telling people that if they want the latest of program X, they should load the developer’s ppa.  A ppa is a repository of software that is neither maintained by Canonical nor the Ubuntu community.  In some cases the software available via ppa is also available in the official repositories, just at a much slower pace since distros usually only provide major software version upgrades when they do a full system upgrade.  In between they tend to just provide security updates and bug fixes.  As usage of ppas grows, the user starts to have a system that is more like a rolling release than a snapshot of Debian’s testing branch.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, after all, a user’s system should do whatever the user wants it to do.  I just wonder if the ever increasing usage of ppas will lead the Ubuntu community to switch to a rolling release style distro.  Arch Linux users do enjoy having such a system, but they do admit that it can potentially lead to some instability if you upgrade right away when a new update comes through.

Here’s the calendar for November - I hope it doesn’t keep you drooling all month!   Click on the image to load it into your desktop.  Then right-click and you should be able to set it as the desktop background.  Alternatively, save it and then manually set it as your desktop.

[caption id=“attachment_3791” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Nov 2010 - 1024x768 - For More Squarish Monitors”] [/caption]

I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5.  He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it.  I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.

Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other.  Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software.  Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to.  I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade.  A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000.  I played that sucker everywhere.  I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go.  To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs.  So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.