While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue.  Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip.  ( First entry here) ---

6 Oct 2010 0638

I forgot to mention yesterday how neat it was to see cacti in the wild.  It’d seen them in arboretums and botanical gardens, but this was the first time I saw them growing in their natural environment.  Biggest impression:  unlike cartoons, the “arms” are not even.  Some of them even have only one “arm”.

While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue.  Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip. ---

5 Oct 2010

Tomorrow I get to see the Grand Canyon!  I’ve been waiting to see it for years.  Today was pretty awesome because I got to see another thing I’d wanted to see for a while now - I saw a hummingbird for the first time.  The best part is that it was completely accidental.  We got into the rental car and, as Danielle set up the GPS, I looked up at the some flowers and saw a hummingbird.  It quickly left, so it was just being there at that exact time that allowed me to see it.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me.  Hopefully I get to see it again.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be really excited about KDE.  It’s been a while since I last looked at KDE.  Well, technically, I couldn’t really do much there.  But there’s this time I was able to look at it.  Let me just say that I no longer agree that it’s uglier than Gnome.  Take a look:

[caption id=“attachment_3694” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My KDE 4.4 Desktop”] [/caption]

At first I was confused because the desktop background was not carried over to my right monitor.  When I went to change the background I saw that they no longer put it all into one dialog.  You need to go to each screen and manually set the background.  While counterintuitive at first, it actually makes more sense this way.  You can see my micro-blogging widget, calculator widget, and some folder views.  The taskbar is looking nice and slick now.  The KDE version of the system try is looking really nice.  It has a very good slickness to it; to quote Aaron Seigo, “like something that might come out of Cupertino”.  My FAVORITE part of KDE 4.4 vs Gnome 2.30 is the little “i” i the right corner.  If you click there you can scroll back through all the system messages.  So, whereas you might miss that in Gnome if you’re looking somewhere else or away from the computer, you can easily find and review the messages in KDE.  At first the desktop was really slow and I thought “here we go again.  I’m going to have to once again write off KDE 4.x as useless.”  But it turns out that it was just Strigi/Nepomuk indexing my home folder.  It’d be a year or more since I last loaded KDE 4, so it had a lot to index.  When I also had some errors with Amarok (which I’m about to get to), I gave it a reboot in case KDE was having a fight with SELinux (as has happened in the past).  Anyway, when I came back, Strigi was done and KDE was much more responsive.  Konqueror had also been slow during the indexing, so I’ll want to test that in Part 2.  I took a look at my old friend, Kopete.  It was looking nice, if a bit cartoony compared to Pidgin.  I’ll also want to take a closer look in Part 2.  It didn’t support Facebook chat (as is supported in Pidgin via a plugin) which isn’t a killer, but it’s not good.  Perhaps there’s a plugin there too?  I’ll have to investigate that.  What I was most curious about was Amarok.  It was one of my biggest anchors to KDE back in the day and really my favorite music player.

Once again, here are the most interesting photos as selected by the Photojojo folks and flickr’s interesting algorithms from one year ago.  ( View on their site)

To finish up talking about the game I left off in my last post, I won my first civ 5 game via conquest - a new one for me.  I usually turtle and do a culture victory or science victory.  It was only near the end of my time playing Civ IV that I started to become comfortable with domination victories.  I ended up with a score of 2679, a score I have yet to best.  The way the ending is now structured makes it easy to miss the old charts and graphs they’d always make you click through.  So on that first game I missed out on finding out what historical leader I compared with.  And, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access that.  Other thoughts from this first game include that the construction pace feels a bit slower (like less buildings units built in a game) and Dan concurred once he played his own games.  Great people now make their buildings outisde the city.  This makes using them to make their special building more of a strategic process than in Civ IV.  Great artists make monuments and those could end up obliterating a farm or some other tile modification.  A final fun bit of art imitating life: in this game the Americans had taken over middle east.

I first migrated to CrunchBang Linux because they kept talking about it on Linux Outlaws. Specifically they mentioned how fast it was and, if I recall correctly, Fab was using it on his netbook. My laptop battery life was quickly dwindling so, if I wanted to be able to use it on a plane, I needed a fast-booting distro. I enjoyed Crunchbang and the neat way it was setup. I loved just hitting Win-W to launch Firefox. Conky was really neat Terminator was the best term program I’d ever used. But it was getting a little long in the tooth. The most recent stable version was at least a year old if not 18 months old. It wasn’t keeping up with the Ubuntu releases. I was stuck using Firefox 3.0 (or some other such old version) Then came the announcement they were switching to a Debian base. Even if I stuck with CrunchBang, I’d be forced to reinstall anyway. So I decided to give Lubuntu a shot. I knew Ubuntu was too resource-heavy for my crappy battery life. I looked around and Lubuntu seemed to be the lightest - even lighter than Xubuntu. Could it match CrunchBang? CrunchBang took ten seconds from login to usable desktop and about 30 seconds until wifi was up.

I feel like I may have covered bits of this here and there, but I couldn’t find it after a cursory check through my blog.  Fanaticism is fanaticism, whether it’s religious or technological it follows the same path.  Witness anyone who has just become an evangelical Christian (and it probably extends to other religions) as they return to life after their conversion.  For the first chunk of time after doing so they will likely do some or all of the following:  get a new wardrobe, get rid of all CDs/MP3s that aren’t by Christian bands, preach the Gospel to anyone within earshot, read the Bible daily, pray in public spaces (sometimes boisterously as possible), go to church every day, and other things.  With time they may soften in some of these aspects.  They may realize that, for example, it’s probably OK to listen to most of U2 and many other bands that don’t have profanity or sexually explicit lyrics.  But the biggest change anyone outside of their family/best friends will notice is that they realize it’s probably not a good idea to go around telling everyone that their worldview is wrong.  It turns out to be better for everyone if the member of the proselytizing religion waits for others to ask their opinion.  At that time, the person asking is receptive to hearing about this new religion.  (Unlike when they’re ambushed and on the defensive)

I forgot the September calendar!  (Whoops!)  Here’s the October calendar.  Click on the image for your monitor’s resolution and then set it as your desktop.

[caption id=“attachment_3659” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Oct 2010 Desktop for Square Monitors”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_3660” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Oct 2010 Desktop for Widescreen Monitors”] [/caption]

?At first I ridiculed achievements/trophies.  The idea that grown men and women (and, heck anyone over 12 years old) would care about getting these achievements enough to continue playing through their games until they earned them all seemed ludicrous.  Then, I acknowledged it was a fun way to compete with friends in games that are otherwise single player experiences.  In time I came to understand the idea behind achievements, both for compulsive people and regular folks.  From my non-scientific observations, it appears that people who play video games tend to be more likely to be compulsive people.  The video game companies figured this out and then realized that if they created trophies for all kinds of situations in a game, that most people would keep playing until they got all of them.  Perhaps this would keep them from trading in a game long enough that it would kill the market for used games.

[caption id=“attachment_3621” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Civ 5 tells me I need to set some city production”] [/caption]

Interestingly, the game appears not to pop up and tell you to choose city production, you have to notice that in the bottom right, same for science and so on…..At least it doesn’t let you skip a turn before you worry about that.  So I actually like it better.  It was far too easy to say you’d deal with something later and then forget.  And all the messages queue up there for you to read.  I used ALWAYS lose track of those in civ 4.  Especially since they used to appear when I was busy on something else and disappear before I could act on them.  And here’s what it looks like when you decide to what to build.