Once again I was pretty excited to find that I had been aggregated onto LinuxToday for this blog post. The funny thing is that I almost didn’t make that blog post as I was contemplating it for over a week and usually if I wait that long, the blog post doesn’t get written.

For what I think is the first time, I was dugg for my Xfce article!

A few days ago I finished The Fellowship of the Rings.  Things picked up in the second half of the book and they accelerated in the last quarter.  I’m enjoying The Lord of the Rings a lot more now that Tolkien has gotten Tom Bombadil out of his system.  In the Wikipedia article, even Tolkien seems to understand how much Tom annoys the crap out of people.

“Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment.’ I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in The Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”

3/4ths of this XKCD strip explain exactly how I feel about having kids.

I am just sharing this because it’s about my alma mater, it’s a little funny in a geeky way, and I like Mark’s blog.

Check out this story about CIT and Cornell labs.

For the past week to two weeks I’ve done something I had’t done in years - I switched my default desktop environment in my GDM login screen. I’ve been logging into Xfce instead of my usual Gnome. There are basically three reasons why I’m loving Xfce over Gnome.

First of all, I love the theme. I know it’s just Bluecurve, Redhat’s theme, for the Window manager, but I just love how it looks compared to Gnome. I can’t really explain it, but there’s something about the share of blue they’ve chosen and the way it blends with the White of the letters and min, max, close buttons that’s very, very pleasing to my eye.  It’s definitely one of those subjective things and I’m sure there are others who will disagree with me, but I think it’s beautiful.  There’s something about the shades of blue they use that I just love.  (For the curious, the theme of the desktop environment is Clearlooks, their newest theme, but that’s not available as a theme for the Window Manager)

Back in High School I got The W’s Fourth from the Last album and one of my favorite tracks was titled “Hui”.  I thought that, like some of the other songs on the album, it was just a nonsensical song and that calling the thugs on the beach “The Hui” was just because it sounded really funny.  Well, I finally found out that the song was about a real-life gang of surfers called Da Hui.  They get a brief mention in the Local Surfers section of the Surfing article in Wikipedia.  Interestingly, The Offspring also wrote a song about “da hui”.  Well, I’ll certainly think of that song differently next time I hear it!

The top ten are mostly the same photos they’ve been for a while now, but the bottom ten have changed a bit. It’s very, very intersting (to me, at least) that every digital camera I’ve ever used is represented in the Top 20.

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I’m uninstalling BitTorrent 5.0.9 from my Windows computer because every time the computer starts up, if I don’t exit from the program, all of my internet-related programs lose their connections. This is way too misbehaved and I’m sick of it. I’m moving to Transmission or one of the other ones that aren’t crap. I can’t believe the original program has been surpassed.

As I’ve mentioned before, although I think it was on It’s A Binary World 1.0, a Cornell education does something strange to you.  Like seeing vectors when speeding up and slowing down your car.  Or in the way in which you explain why Dan will be escorting two bride’s maids at Phil’s wedding:

?(09:00:29 PM)Danny: and here’s what this one guy had to say about it(09:00:38 PM)Danny: Also, I would like to concur with Dan’s sentiments. Given Dan’s unique relationship status amongst our fraternity of groomsmen, it would be logical and just to assign him the surplus of bridesmaids. However, giving him three would stretch the bounds of the reasonable. It would be awkward and contrived. Naturally, six bridesmaids would be pigeonholed amongst four groomsmen in the currently arranged manner: 2 would have 1 each, 2 would have 2 each. Perhaps Margot would appreciate the subsequent metaphor. Since the current combinatorial arrangement is the natural consequence of an application of the Pigeonhole Principle, we can liken the current circumstance to that of the most stable or lowest-energy state. Although I am sure Mr. Mesa’s propensity for being an attractive nucleus for members of the opposite sex is considerable, keeping three bridesmaids in an orbital around his personage would undoubtedly require a good deal of energy on his behalf. Also, let us consider another physical fact. As Margot has indicated we may likely be in “arm-in-arm” contact with our respective bridesmaids. Based off my prior observation of Mr. Mesa, his anatomy appears nominal in that he possess, as do most members of our species, two arms. A third bridesmaid would have to reside in some outer orbital and would have a greatly increased probability of being snatched by another groomsmen to fill his inner orbital. As such, this arrangement is unstable.