This is going to be the first time I look at a fresh install of Ubuntu in a long while.  I first installed Ubuntu quite a while ago and then I just kept distro upgrading from there on.  Then I installed Crunch Bang Linux on my laptop.  So now I will be testing the installation.  This may end up being a pretty short review because not much has changed from the previous Ubuntu, or so I hear.  The biggest new change is the notification system.  I’ll be sure to check that out.

A few days ago, I saw the heavy boots story on digg and shared it with Dan.  To quickly sum up, in case the web page dissapears into the great bit bucket in the sky, a physics major was told by his philosophy TA that the astronauts on the moon didn’t float away because they had heavy boots on.  That prompted Dan to share this post with me again.  After leaving a Dr Horrible reference, I started thinking about this.  And I came to see Final Fantasy as one of the largest exercises in suspension of disbelief.  The most egregious aspect is with the weapons.  Because of what is often a very tedious menu screen, I usually do not sell back all of the old, useless weapons back to the shop when I buy new ones.  So, technically, my characters are running around a HUGE world map trying to save the world, while at the same time lugging around hundreds of pounds of useless weapons.  Quite ridiculous, no?  On top of this they may have as many as 99 tents, 99 sleeping bags, and pretty much 99 of any item.  Think back to the smallest you could ever fold a sleeping bag.  Now, imagine going hiking through the woods with 99 of them split up over, at most, four of you.  So, it’s 25 each for three of you and 24 for some lucky bastard - probably the girl in the short skirt with the large breasts who’s always complaining of back problems.  This is where gameplay mechanics start to mess with your mind too much if you dn’t suspend your disbelief.  Because sleeping bags are not prophelactics, you can use them over and over.  But the game makes you discard one each time you use it.  Of course, within the game thsi makes sense because you’d otherwise be able to heal up to full every time you were in the map screen.  I never questioned it as a kid.  I was just glad to have a tent or sleeping bag to heal my characters.  But when you think about it, it doesn’t make very much sense.  This, of course, naturally leads to the other problem with SquareEnix jRPGs - passage of time.  For obvious reasons (mostly related to grinding), time doesn’t pass in these games unless you’re at a milestone moment.  So while there’s a meteorite coming towards earth or some jerk has decided to use earth magic or magical-people magic to destroy the world tomorrow, you can sleep in an inn over and over.  And while the game never explicitly states you stayed in the inn overnight (except when it’s part of advancing the story - clever, clever they were in those old SNES RPGs) it does often imply it, with transition effects that seem to suggest you were there overnight.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Box”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens on its box”] [/caption]

Recently I got my fifth lens, the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, Canon’s entry-level nifty fifty lens.  This is the cheapest lens Canon makes and, build-wise, it shows.  Unlike the other lenses I own (even the kit lens), the 50mm is very plastic-looking and plastic-feeling.

SimplyMepis is a Debian-based distro developed by Warren Woodford who believed that Mandrake Linux was too hard for new users.  (Mandrake, now Mandriva, was the Ubuntu of its time).  I’ve heard him interviewed a few times on The Linux Link Tech Show and he seems to be of the realist (as opposed to idealist) school of Linux distro maintainers.  He believes users should be able to listen to MP3s, use Adobe Flash, and so on.  SimplyMepis 8.0 is based on Debian 5 stable, which I recently reviewed.  So let’s load her up into VirtualBox and see how it goes.

I recently finally moved over to my 64bit computer. I’ve been using Fedora 10 64-bit for at least two weeks now. I was having a lot of trouble with migrating my Tomboy data over from the 32-bit install. It wouldn’t start up and the error message was not as helpful as it could have been. Eventually I dug around and found out I had to delete all the addin* files/folders in my .tomboy folder. After that everything worked fine.

The Huge Mess

Danielle and I bought our first home near the end of February.  We’ve moved many times before - between semesters at Cornell, from Cornell to Tampa, and from Tampa to Baltimore.  Now we were finally moving into our own home.  And so, for the first time, I decided to thoroughly document our move.  I was partly inspired by photo blogs I’ve been reading recently, such as Jeffry Friedl’s blog.  I decided to put together a photo essay.  So I whipped out my cameras and started shooting.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Some of the equipment you need to geo-tag your photos.”] [/caption]

Recently I was listening to The Command Line Podcast and the host mentioned one way to help others is to write up a tutorial on your blog whenever you learn a new skill or task.  Since the information I needed for geo-tagging my photos was fragmented, I decided to write up a tutorial following my workflow.  I’ll break this  up into the different phases involved.

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“160” caption=“Dan, of “I Bring Nothing to the Table””] [/caption]

First mentioned in this post , Dan’s been blogging on this server for just over a year.  So how has the blog come along in these 13 months?  Very well, I’d say.  By the Google search results metric, Dan is doing very well.  He’s been driving the bulk of our Google search related traffic with his sports and video game posts.  (My posts tend to spread by word or mouth or search engines other than Google)

Jeffrey Friedl and I share a few similarities: we both are computer programmers, love photography, and enjoy blogging. Unlike me, however, Jeff is an expat living in Japan. Also unlike me, he has a great photo blog. Jeff documents his travels throughout the islands of Japan as well as his daily life in his blog.  Ocassionally, he also blogs about technical issues or new tech toys he bought or new Adobe Lightroom Plugins he has developed.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My first ever Geo-tagged Photo”] [/caption]

(I originally wrote most of this on Thursday, 21 May)

I can’t explain to you the thrill and excitement I get from geo-tagging my photos.  I don’t mean that the thrill is so large as to defy explanation; rather that I can’t articulate what it is about geo-tagging my photos that excites me so much.  Perhaps it’s the fascination of two different technologies coming together.  Maybe it’s the age-old excitement of being able to point to a map and say “I was there!”, only this time you have the EXACT coordinates and you have photographic proof.  All I know is that ever since I resolved to get a GPS device to work with my cameras, I’ve been anxious to get my hands on the device.  Officially, it’s an anniversary gift from my wife, and I think it will be one of the ones I enjoy the most.