And it is hilarious!  So Dan finally got around to updating the blog I created for him on my server.  He gave it a pretty witty name “I Bring Nothing To The Table” which is a great pun on our last name.  (Although I recently found out he saw it on a T-shirt, so, while still cool, is not worth as many cool points as before)  If you read nothing else on his blog, you MUST read this post in which he gives his British friend some tips on Americanisms.  It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard come out of Daniel’s head.  So go and check it out and laugh out loud…

I’ve been very happy until now with drqueue. Developed by Jorge Daza, it’s a very nice render farm management software with a nice GUI. It worked relatively well for me for “Jose’s Dinner” and " Schrodinger’s Cat". However, there were two big kinks in using drqueue. First of all, Windows support was so sketchy it might as well be non-existent. So my most powerful computer was left out of the render-pool. Second, with the latest iteration, it no longer works on BSD computers. I tried for a few nights to make it work, but to no avail. So I turned to FarmerJoe.

As you know, unless you’ve been living under a rock, the US Government (USG) wants to give us all rebate checks to spur the economy along.  All you have to do is file your taxes and you’ll get up to $600 if you’re single or $1200 if you’re married.  What hasn’t really been publicized in the mainstream media, however, is the drastic measures the USG is willing to go to make sure you spend your rebate and to help the economy.

Two major Linux distributions will be making releases this month and since I use both of them, I’m pretty excited!  First up will be the Debian-derived Ubuntu. This distro has been the darling of users and Internet media alike for the past few years.  It stole the post from Mandriva, the previous Linux distro that everyone recommended to new users.  Although Mandriva was the easiest distro for new users, it also had a reputation for being so bleeding edge it was unstable.  Ubuntu, however, is very stable and tends to work on more hardware out of the “box”.  In fact, it was Ubuntu’s ability to work on laptops, long the Holy Grail of Linux distros, that led it to such prominence.  That is the main reason why I chose to install Ubuntu onto my laptop even though I’ve been a Fedora user since I first got into Linux about five years ago.  Ubuntu 4.08 aka Hardy Heron will be flapping its way to you on 24 April.

edited to add the tags I used

That collage was created by a program. I certainly don’t have the patience to arrange all of those photos one-by-one!I told the program to download all of my pictures tagged with Eric Danny David and Danielle and create this collage.

But does that make this any less of a work of art? I think the answer is no. The artwork was just created procedurally instead of visually. To argue that this is less artful is to say that the The Lion King isn’t art because the wildebeast scene was created procedurally. Of course, in this situation I don’t see myself as the artist, but the guy who wrote the program is the collage artist. It’s his procedures which created the art. His name is Jim Bumgardner and he’s a really nice guy who helped me fix up the script. I copied it from his book, Flickr Hacks, but unfortunately, as the code he relied on has changed, it didn’t work as posted. In fact, here is the fix you need in his program, makeCollage.pl :

On Hardball on MSNBC they were talking about Barack Obama’s poor bowling performance during his campaigning in Pennsylvania.  One of their political commentators quipped, “Perhaps he should have stuck to shooting hoops.”  I absolutely couldn’t believe they would say something like that on the news.  And it wasn’t some random yahoo, it was someone that I’ve seen on MSNBC making political commentary in the past.  If it matters in how you think of this, this commentator was white.

Since Wordpress 2.5 supports Gravatars, I discovered them and have enabled it.  Gravatars are images that appear next to your comments next to this blog.  To get one, go to http://en.gravatar.com/ and register one with your email address.  Then use that email address when you leave comments on my blog.  Right now I’m only allowing images rated up to PG, so keep that in mind.

It’s really funny because my brother just asked me to create a blog for him on my server and I was thinking, “Man, if Wordpress 2.5 is coming out soon. I’d hate for him to learn the 2.3 interface and then have 2.5 come out right away.” But I set him up with a 2.3 blog yesterday and went on my merry way. Well, today I login to my blog and don’t see any changes. Then I went to Wordpress Planet and I saw this blog post followed by this one and this one. (That last one is especially comprehensive of all the changes)

I’ve noticed for some time now (yet, despite what I thought, have not blogged about) that when I listen to all my music on random, it doesn’t appear to really be random. It’s mostly random, but not random enough as I noticed some songs coming up more often than they should. At first I chalked this up to the fact that humans are horrible at figuring out stats and how often things should occur. But then I had somewhat concrete proof, I had some artists with lots of songs and those artists were being played less than artists with just a few songs. Recently I found the culprit - when Rhythmbox plays random songs, it weights the songs you like heavier so they appear more often.

Today I was reading an article about protecting kids from seeing bad things on the Internet. The author pointed out that there’s bad enough stuff on Conservative Fox News and pointed to this link.