Recently I was listening to Fresh Air’s interview with David Weigel.  The occasion was a book he had written about how the Republicans are shifting what their party is about.  Frankly, I’m a bit concerned.  The party seems to be less and less about small government and big business and more and more about courting religious fanatics.  Seriously, a lot of these people sound just as bad as the Mullahs in Iran.  There’s nothing wrong, of course, with courting religious voters.  For some people they don’t care if their government is going to have financial policies that will harm them as long as they try to make abortion illegal again.  But religious fanaticism is wrong whether it’s Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, or any other religion.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Kinda like this. Only with wires and computers and, really, having nothing to do with clouds.”] [/caption]

I previously blogged about cloud computing and, as you may remember, I am no fan.  Recently, while listening to The Command Line Podcast, I came across yet another reason to stay away from the cloud.  Cmdline mentions Bruce Schneier’s recent post on file deletion in the cloud.  Bruce’s main point is that you can be reasonably sure on your own computer that a file is gone when you’ve deleted it.  This is not the case with cloud computing.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“Just barely beat the sun getting our bird feeders up on the first day”] [/caption]

Almost since we moved into our house we’ve been fascinated by the birds we have seen in our front and back yards.  Both the wife and I love birding in general and I love photographing birds.  So, after a bit of discussion we decided to get a bird feeder.  We ended up getting two of them to accommodate different birds and different seed types.  Then I dug a hole and attached the bird feeders to a stick we had in the garage.  I read a few books on birds and expected it might take a while for the birds to discover the feeder.  I was extremely delighted the following day to find birds at the feeder when I got home from work!  These little guys would flit out of the woods, peck a bite, and fly right back out.  So it was very hard to get a photo, especially with the sun beginning to set.  At the end of this post is the best shot I got.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Creative Entrance”] [/caption]

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[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The Maid of Honor Toast”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Best Man Toast”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“First Dance Married”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“All the men in the wedding court”] [/caption]

Here are some of my favorite photos from the group portraits session.  Some of these (mostly when it’s a group photo) were me “stealing” a setup that the official photographer had already set up.  Many of the shots with one or two people are quick shots I grabbed while others were being shot by the official photographer.  This is one of the reasons why people who have photographer friends are so lucky.  I was able to capture tons of shots that the photographer couldn’t because she just couldn’t be in two places at once.

From the time I started listening to podcasts until about two months ago, I had been using Rhythmbox to manage my podcasts.  When I first started using a Linux music application, Banshee ran hideously slow on my computer.  (As did most mono-based products)  As time has passed I’ve acquired a more powerful Linux computer and the mono code has been made more efficient.  But it was too late, I was already ingrained into Rhythmbox and it had all my music rated.  So I continued to use it.  On Linux Outlaws they kept mentioning how much they loved gPodder.  I checked out an early version and I didn’t see the point.  But after upgrading to Fedora 11, I decided to check it out.  It is so much better for managing podcasts than Rhythmbox and that goes to the Unix ideal - have your program do only one thing and do it well.  Banshee, by the way, is the opposite of that.  It seems to be moving in a Windows Media Player direction, recently gaining the ability to play videos as well.  So, here’s a comparison of Rhythmbox and gPodder and you’ll be able to easily see why I switched.  First, here’s the podcast interface for Rhythmbox.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“This happens later, but it was a great photo to open with”] [/caption]

And so the ceremony began, starting with the couples approaching the aisle. I was able to get some great shots because I was using both my Rebel XT and Rebel XTi with the EF 28-105mm (and the lens hood to help mitigate lens flare) on one camera and the Tamron 55-200mm on the other.  This allowed me to get close up shots no mater where the subjects happened to be standing.

Don’t worry, this blog isn’t about to become some weird fan tribute blog to Braid.  It’s more of a case of trying to make sense of the game I’ve just played.  There’s really no reason to make sense of The Beatles Rockband.  You are one of The Beatles playing music.  There’s nothing to “get”.  But finishing Braid has left me with more questions than answers.  Braid has the potential to leave you frustrated in the same way you may end up frustrated at a particularly dense painting where you see that there is a table of objects, but can’t figure out the significance of the objects.  It just looks like a cluttered table until the docent explains that the book with a skull on it represents that man will never understand his world until he dies.

This month finds me with getting two asian photos in my inbox from Photojojo.  Either an amazing coincidence or they have some great code going on the in background.  Interesting, the first one is a product of racism while the other is a product of love.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Yeah….racism….it’s great for selling stuff.”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“From Lisa and Pawel’s Wedding”] [/caption]

warning:  The following contains many spoilers about Braid.  I, personally, feel that your enjoyment of the game will be greatly reduced by reading this ahead of time.  You have been warned!

I finished Braid last night.  I did cheat a little.  Of the 60 possible puzzle pieces, I used a walkthrough to get about 10 of them.  Each of the ones that I used the walkthrough for (and I did not do this until I had spent a good chunk of time trying everything I had learned up to that point and even afterwards (since you could revisit worlds) were puzzles I would have NEVER solved.  For example, the puzzle piece that is accessed by moving around the giant replica of the puzzle in the level would never, ever have occurred to me.  Someone of a certain type of mind would surely have realized that the puzzles would not exist in the world if they did not have a purpose, but I could not figure this one out.  And the fact that most of the puzzles are one-offs means that you never do this again.