But at least I continue to surprise myself with the amount of pictures I have, not only of my grandmother, but of my grandmother with my brothers and I. I have spent months dispairing that I had not taken enough pictures of her before she left us, but as I’ve gone through my old photos looking for pictures that should be on flickr, I have found so many of them. They bring me so much happiness and sadness at once that they cancel each other out and all I can do is stare at them and thank God that I took them.

if anyone can tell me the name of a group and album in which one of the tracks is simply a female who keeps repeating “eight foot fiberglass penguin”, let me know. I’ve searched google and everywhere else and can’t find it. Thanks! (I heard it on NPR, if it helps….)

As I read my Linuxtoday.com RSS feed today, I discovered a new piece of software. Songbird aims to be, in their words, “the Firefox of media players.” They seem to be on the right track. First of all, it works on all majors operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux (and by extention BSD). Second, it has taken a good, intuitive interface which appears to have based on a cross between Linux’s Rhythmn Box and Mac/Window’s iTunes. I downloaded developer release 0.2 to see what the fuss was about. Frankly, it’s doing quite well for just being a developer release!

Recently you’ve read about Linux in computers, servers, cell phones, Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. But did you know about Linux being put into a surgeon? The Oct 2006 issue of Spectrum includes a story about a team designing a robotic surgeon to allow a human surgeon to do surgery from afar. The thought is for them to deploy this in the battlefield so that doctors don’t have to be at risk of dying and to obviate the long flight to a safe base for surgery. Why did they choose Linux? Well, since they were designing something revolutionary, there probably weren’t Windows drivers for controlling a robotic surgeon. With Linux being open-source, they could see how it works and easily write device drivers for their robot. One reads a lot about stuff like this - experimental robots and automated vehicles tend to use Linux. Of course, it also is available for free and doesn’t require registration for activation. Finally, you can scale it back to just the kernel and what you need instead of the whole gargantuan OS - as in the case of Windows.

Dan and Dave, my brothers:

A couple of stories that I found interesting today.

First of all, there’s a new Red Hat Fedora Core-based disto on the block, and it’s called Linux XP. It’s meant to be a drop-in replacement for Windows users. The screenshots look VERY nice and it definitely seems like a pretty enticing distro to show your Redmond-loving friends. However, this review found the Linux XP to be lacking in some stability features.

To read an article by someone who’s pretty much been with Linux since the beginning, check out this article.

Fedora Core 6 has slipped another two days to a release date of 19 Oct 2006.

Ever since I can remember, I always thought my mom looked more beautiful on a day to day basis than when she dressed up for a special event. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the hairdo she would pick or something else. I just feel a stronger connection to the “real” person rather than a made-up idealization.

This view of the world has always extended to my photography. Sure, I took posed pictures, but by-and-large my favorite shots were those candid shots of my friends and family members. Yes, they always complained that they didn’t look their best, but what they didn’t know is that to me, they looked infinitely better than when they stood their with their fake smiles. In fact, you could always hear people afterwards saying, “so and so is obviously faking their smile.” Of course! There’s nothing to naturally smile about when there’s a camera pointed at you. The best smiles are the ones caused by the things we smile about: our children, friends, and family. This has inpsired my latest portrait trend, consisting mostly of candid portraits. I love this work more than almost any other work I’ve done recently with my photography. The only work I love more is the work where I push myself to my creative limits - whether that involves a creative composition or being creative in Photoshop (or, less frequently, in The GIMP).

In the “Technically Speaking” article of October 2006’s IEEE Spectrum Magazine, Paul McFedries speaks of a new term surfacing to counter the whole “Web 2.0” crap that’s going around. Web 2.0 always smacked of marketing to me - a way to get investors to put money into some kind of upgrade to the Internet. “Oh, we’re doing TWO-POINT-OH stuff here, none of that Web 1.0 stuff.” Of course, as my readers know, the whole point behind Web 2.0 is the blog/AJAX/flickr/etc interface where the users create and modify each others’ content. McFedries reports a few good Geeks who have responded by rebranding “Web 2.0” as “chmod 777 web”. All of my Linux/Unix readers will get this instantly and start cracking up. For the rest of you, this is the way, in *nix, where you say that a file or folder can now be read, modified, and executed by the owner of the file, everyone in his group, and everyone else. Basically, you’ve just made it into a Windows-style file.

How I spent my Columbus Day: