Dealing with the snow by being inactive as possible.

Ever since I put up the bird feeders (and even before that) I’ve been trying to get good shots of the cardinal.  With my Sigma 120-400mm and some patience I was finally able to succeed.  These guys are really skittish.  If I come outside when I see them, they run away.  So I need to already be standing out there for them to ignore me and come out and let me take their photo.  This photo has been increasing in views rather quickly.  I’m a pretty big fan of it myself.

Rather than pile up my daily photos whenever I forget to post them, I’ll just post them one at a time and build up a stream of photos.  I haven’t been in much a textual blogging mood recently.  Perhaps that’ll return eventually.

Whenever I’m in Oahu, I love eating at this ramen joint.  If your only experience of ramen is cup o’ noodles, you haven’t had real ramen.  Check it out next time you’re in a heavy Japanese neighborhood.  This place has good price and service and the food is pretty filling - especially if you get the rice and dumplings.

Even though I gave up on reviewing Linux distros a while back, I keep getting mountains of hits on here for people who who want Linux reviews.  Since my Slackware 12.2 review was the second-most commented post on this blog, I decided it was a good distro to revisit.  So, when Slackware 13 came a few months ago on the LXF magazine, I decided to throw it into Virtualbox to see how it has changed.  One difference this time around is that I now have the dual core machine so I am running Slackware on that machine (especially since it has hooks for better virtualization so it should run better)

I’m going to be moving my domain over to a new registrar in the next day or so (edit 14 Dec - I got extremely busy this weekend, so expect the possible change next weekend.  At least this way there’s more warning time) and this site and other sites on this server may go offline temporarily while everything is sorted out.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“It’s either warmer or not. Read the thermometer.”] [/caption]

Because of the upcoming talks at Copenhagen, everyone’s been talking about global warming recently.  The news even featured  a member of a Commonwealth government claiming that global warming is not true.  In my own country, Republicans like to say that global warming isn’t true.  The opposition parties in both countries disagree.  Look, this debate is over the wrong question.  There can be no debate about whether global warming is happening.  It either is or it isn’t.  That’s not up for debate.  Are average temperatures higher year over year compared to the past?  Then we have global warming.  The globe is getting warmer.  End of debate.  If not, then we don’t have global warming.  What we really need is debate over whether it’s human caused, human exacerbated, or neither.  After all, the planet has been warmer and cooler than its current temperature.  So we need to figure out if what we’re doing is enough to make a difference.  If it is, we should probably knock it off so we don’t make things worse.  If it is solely our responsibilty, then we need to stop right away.  But if it’s going to get warmer no matter what and our activities only matter in the thousandths of a degree, then there’s no point in doing anything.  So this is where we need to be and this is what we need to figure out.  Stop arguing over whether the planet is getting warmer or not.  It’s like arguing if the sun came up today.

It looks like the theme is cake.  Along with Kayla and something MS is famous for.  This cake, by the way, was made by Dina.

I was looking at my flickr 20 most interesting photos and I realized that a healthy portion of them were taken this year.  Six of the top 20, in fact, were taken in 2009.  Here they are:

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“La Palma Latin Cafe in Hialeah, Fl”] [/caption]

I took this photo with my cell phone while I was in South Florida for my cousin’s wedding.  It was just on a whim because I wanted to show some of my family what had changed when I wasn’t looking.  Below is what I wrote on the description on flickr along with a little more exposition:

Innovation is one of those things we pretend to want and then complain when it happens.  It’s like women who say they want sensitive men who understand their feelings and then always fall for the bad boy.  In the technology world, everyone always views copying with disdain.  “Where’s the innovation?” they decry.  Case in point, everyone is always yelling at Microsoft for stealing copying Apple’s GUI interface with Windows 95.  (Everyone seems to forget Apple stealing borrowing from Xerox)  When they try to get innovative with Vista or Windows 7 everyone complains they can’t find anything because it was moved around.  Linux is not immune to these complaints.  On the one hand, everyone mocks Linux for co-opting technologies from other operating systems.  “Oh, you have a dock - why do you always have to copy the Mac?” or the ever-present “If Linux really wants to take the lead, they’ll have to stop copying Windows and Mac and start innovating on their own.”  But then, when Linux improves upon something from the leading OS all you hear is, “Why is everything so different?  Until Linux is easy for a Windows user to just jump over to without relearning things, they’ll never succeed.”