I just got Anberlin’s latest album, “New Surrender”.  I was pretty lukewarm about “Cities” and Danielle just about hated it.  We both loved “Blueprints for the Black Market” and “Never Take Friendship Personal”.  This album is a return to the sounds and lyrics of those first two albums.  I loved it upon first listen.  Danielle summed it up best, “It’s like their first two albums, but more mature.”  I’ve only started listening to it for the second time, so I’m still picking up the lyrics.  What I’ve heard so far continues their tradition of poetic lyrics that take a few listens to fully appreciate.  If you’ve been on the fence about this album after hearing “Cities”, definitely get “New Surrender”.  If you liked “Cities” and hated the first two albums, you probably won’t like “New Surrender”.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an article on Linux Today about Moonlight and what a horrible person Miguel de Icaza is. So I thought I’d go ahead and do some exploration of what’s going on with Moonlight and Silverlight. First of all, what’s Silverlight? Check out the Silverlight article on Wikipedia. Basically, Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. MS is pretty peeved they haven’t been able to get people off of PDF and onto their own format. They waited way too long while the rest of us realized that PDF is great if you want to make sure that the document you create is displayed the same way on everyone’s computer regardless of the fonts they have or which version of Office they have installed. (Or if they even have office installed)

It’s time once again for a Linux distro review.  This month, Antix 7.5 was included on the LXF DVD.  It’s another light distro, so I will use the same metrics I used in the Lightweight Linux Throwdown.  Antix is based upon Mepis which is, in turn, based upon Debian.  I think at one point it was based on Ubuntu, but I think they’ve gone back to being based on Debian.  So, let’s get down to it.  Here’s a screenshot of my desktop upon boot.

50 to 75:

75 to 100:

300 to 400:

The GNU Software Project to provide a wholly free operating system turns 25 today! Check out this great video showing British superstar Stephen Fry .  Thanks to rms, Linus Torvalds, Aaron Siego, Miguel de Icaza and others who have worked hard to give us a free operating system that we can tweak and that no one can ever own and take away from us.

A few days ago, I released my lastest video, " Robots".  It’s a fan-tribute music video based on the song of the same name by Flight of the Conchords.  Check it out and enjoy.

Time, once again, to unload some of the quotes I’ve recorded onto the blog:

“I always say, ‘If you can’t beat ’em …. Report them to Homeland Security. They’ll beat ’em for you’ " -Colbert on The Colbert Report 9 June 2008

?(03:25:23 PM) Danny: mom just gets pissed if we don’t eat three meals a day

“Under the Bush Administration, the value of human life has gone down $1 million” - Colbert on The Colbert Report 14 July 2008

Today I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR.  They had an economics guy on who’s now a professor at one of the University of Maryland campuses and was involved in Clinton’s economic team.  (Although he didn’t always see eye to eye with Clinton’s treasury secretary)  This guy put the current economic crisis in the best terms and framed it so well, I can’t believe that we’re in this mess.  Those stupid jackasses on Wall Street “were betting that people who did not have money to pay their mortgage would pay their mortgage.”  Just take a second and read that again.  Yeah, pretty nutty, isn’t it?  If people had just used their noggins we wouldn’t be in this mess.  “Sure,” you might say, “hindsight is 20/20.”  Yeah, but it doesn’t take hindsight to see that people who have bad credit probably aren’t going to pay their mortgage.  Couple that with the fact that Wall Street swindled them into interest only loans and variable rate mortgages, and you HAD to see that a disaster was on the way.  Again, they were betting that people who didn’t have the money to pay their mortgage would somehow pay their mortgage.  Again, in their defense you might say, “but they thought housing prices were always going to go up.”  And to that I say, WHEN has ANY market EVER gone up FOREVER?  Hello!  The tech bubble was just 10 years ago!  Nothing ever goes up without an end.  That’s just ridiculous.  Sigh!  Seriously, I don’t know how they let this happen.  These guys all have degrees in finance.  They should have known and done case studies on how whatever’s hot now won’t be hot in a few years.  And then AIG freakin’ insures the mortgages of people with bad credit?  I just can’t believe it!

So I waited until about halfway through Fedora 9’s initial life-cycle to install it.  I listed the reasons for that here.  Once KDE 4.1 was finally out and most of the complaints had stopped, I took the plunge.  I am actually very happy with Fedora 9.  I think most of the reviews you may have read criticizing Fedora 9 focused on the initial version.  That was, according to the mailing list, very buggy.  But, for those who run Fedora on their day-to-day systems, simply waiting a few months is enough to get most of the bugs ironed out.  First I’ll focus on what I have thought of Gnome since I’ve been using it since the install.  Due to Fedora’s servers getting cracked, I just got KDE 4.1, so I’ll just be giving my preliminary impressions there.  I’ve been wondering if KDE 4 would bring me back into the KDE came from the Gnome side.  We’ll see.  I intend to boot into KDE 4 for the next week or so to see how I like it.

This one goes out to all the physics geeks out there.  (Applied Engineering Physics counts too, Jing Qing)