This is over a decade old, but I just discovered it.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and Santa’s a wreck… How to live in a world that’s politically correct? His workers no longer would answer to “Elves”, “Vertically Challenged” they were calling themselves.

And labor conditions at the North Pole Were alleged by the union to stifle the soul. Four reindeer had vanished, without much propriety, Released to the wilds by the Humane Society.

…With my webcomic I’m Not Mad. Hope to get some more stuff up here soon. But it might be hard with the holidays and all.

Ever since I last wrote about Opera and Chrome, some things have changed about my browsing habits. On Windows, I’ve gone from always using Flock to always using Opera. I just found out that Flock finally released version 2.0 because I wanted to check up on my facts before looking like a dork on my own blog. So I haven’t used version 2.0 and that doesn’t figure into what I’m going to say here.

So, Wordpress 2.7 is finally here.  It’s their second visual refresh in a year and I have to say they have really outdone themselves.  When they did the last change, I thought “wow, there’s no way they could improve on this.” and “I thought their old interface was good, but this makes it look like a pile of crap!”.  But now I feel the same way all over.  There are a few things that aren’t where I remember them, but overall, I am loving the new work they’ve done.  There’s just one thing that annoys the heck out of me - the new threaded comments don’t work with my theme.  I’m going to either have to figure out how to redesign it on my own or switch themes again.  But I really like this theme and I’ve done so much customization already.

Somewhere in the middle of 2008 my wife’s computer kept making very disturbing noises upon boot up. She had told me she would move to Linux when her current computer broke. So I bought her a new computer and loaded Kubuntu on it because she wanted “the version that looks like Windows”. I new she would want KDE for the desktop and I liked Ubuntu’s user-friendliness from when I installed it on my laptop. I had a feeling Fedora would be a bit much for her. She’s not afraid to learn about her computer, but she doesn’t want it getting in the way when she wants to get work done.

My site got pounded today like a beach on a windy day when I appeared on Linux Toda y.  So I decided to install WP Super Cache.  This should display cached pages to anyone who isn’t commenting so hopefully it will help my site deal with a lot more traffic.  The traffic was so bad I couldn’t even SSH into the box.  Hopefully now it won’t be so bad.  So if anything appears wonky - please bear with me while I work out the bugs.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I went to see Mike Burbiglia on his Broadway show “Sleepwalk with Me”.  I wasn’t going to blog about it originally, but during the performance he mentioned that he gets Google alerts about himself. He used to Google himself, but then he set it up to get Google to do it for him.  Since I know that Google indexes my blog, I thought I’d blog about the performance.

About a month ago my wife asked me to get rid of the extra POS Linux and BSD computers I was using for my renderfarm.  They quite a bit of an eyesore and so I agreed.  Unfortunately, in the the group of computers I got rid of was my first ever Linux computer.  It ran Fedora Core 1 and ran the server that ran this website until I upgraded computers and moved to FreeBSD.  So it will be missed - I don’t usually attach too much emotion to objects – especially computers.  I didn’t care too much when I got rid of my old Dell.  But since that computer was what allowed me to get into Linux and learn all about libre software – which I had no idea about before.  All I have left now from that era is the computer now known as luigi and functioning as my print and file server.

If you use Fedora and you want to be able to do useful things like play MP3s or DVDs you need to add an external repository like FreshRPMs or Livna.  This is because MP3 playback is covered by patents in the United States, libdecss may be illegal to distribute, and a license agreement is required to playback DVDs.  Ever since I tried Debian, I liked their way of doing things.  The nonfree packages are in the official repos; they’re just disabled by default.

Recently Microsoft screwed themselves over.  We have MS Money 2006 from back when I was still getting into Linux and hadn’t convinced my wife completely about how much better it was than Windows.  Recently we switched to back to a credit card where we previously used to download the transactions from within MS Money.  When my wife went to do this, she was informed that MS Money only allows you to do this for two years.  After that if you want to keep doing it you have to buy another copy of Money.  So when she found this out, did she buy a new copy of MS Money?  NO!  She was extremely pissed that this important feature would expire.  So she want to MoneyDance.