I am against censorship. The recent news that Tom and Jerry will be edited in Europe to remove smoking scenes is absurd! So it’s not ok for Tom to smoke, but it’s ok for Jerry to electrocute him, chop him up, and all the other behaviours kids may imitate from watching cartoons. Even racist stuff has a place in our culture so that we can see what was acceptable back then, why it was acceptable and why it’s not acceptable today. I think it can be educational and also show how every immigrant group has gone through racist depictions in our multi-media. However, what I don’t like is unequal treatment people seem to give the different races and ethnic groups when it comes to apologizing. Here are two screenshots from the original Three Little Pigs.

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I don’t usually blog about TV shows, but this Simpsons episode was so bad, there wasn’t even a point in the writers even trying. They should have just taken a week off and worked on a better show. The show started off on a funny note, although we’ve seen it before a few too many times. Bart was behaving badly and so Homer and Marge took him to therapy. This time they recommended having him play the drums. Above, they used this to create a really funny parody of the White Stripes video where the drums keep multiplying as they go on. However, things took a turn for the predictable and the episode went for a downturn when Bart ends up being picked up for a Jazz band and Lisa doesn’t. She gets jealous and, predictably, that is how we get the show back to the reset point. (meaning, as in every Simpsons episode, we have to get back to where we started so that the show doesn’t need to maintain continuity -except where it’s funny)

“…and it’s September Eleven.”

Those were the first words to pop into my consciousness this morning. It’s been a week worth of tributes, speeches, and remembrances. Today’s main thought for me involved pondering if anyone from NYC actually watched any of the 11 Sept movies this year. Personally, I think it’s way too soon and too real for these events to be fictionalized. Even movies “based on a true story” lose their dramatic edge when compared to the real events. My wife told me she’d never see those movies (and neither would her siblings). I wonder how other NYers feel. Personally, I have a hard enough time getting myself to watch tragedies; and that’s with fake characters. To watch an event which left so many widowed and parent-less is just too much for me. We didn’t even watch the names being called out today.

I used to love KDE and thought it was so much better than GNOME. Especially after discovering Superkaramba, I was sure nothing could beat KDE in terms of cool factor. Later I started using more GTK applications so I gravitated towards GNOME, fluxbox, and XFCE. Also, I ended up not really using the SuperKaramba widgets that much because they were always buried under my other windows….where I was doing real work!

I went to the Maryland State Fair Monday to get some time lapse shots of the rides and various fair settings. Here are some of the highlights:

I kept referring to ReactOS as version 2.9 and 3.0 in my review, but it’s actually 0.2.9 and 0.3.0.

Ok, so with 3.0 there are still some major reliability issues. I blue screened a bunch of times just trying to get to this blog and it was quite slow. However, it did seem to work a bit better than 2.9. I will be testing installing some Windows programs to see just how far they have come. Pretty soon I’ll be able to be free of Windows. The funky-looking page has to do with the size of my ReactOS screen vs the size I normally view my blog at. Apologies for those with crappy screen resolutions who see something like this.

I decided to revisit ReactOS to see what had changed from 2.x that I reviewd before to the 2.9 release candidate. So I fired up VMWare and ran it. I was a bit dissapointed in the performance. I know it was VMWared and only had 128 MB, but Ubuntu was running beautifully VMWared with only 192 MB of RAM. It kept blue screening whenever I tried to visit this blog, for example. However, they are making really great work at binary compatibility. As a test, I went to the Mozilla website and downloaded Firefox. It installed and ran pretty well.

As I was reading the latest Linux Format Magazine, they had a great tip for a low tech way to remind yourself of different time-sensitive events. The best part is that it works under any window manager! (ie it doesn’t matter if you’re in Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, or any other) The trick is to use xmessage and at. at is cron’s little brother, for scheduling things that will happen in the future, but not be a recurring event. xmessage presents a little dialogue box with whatever message you give it. Here’s a screenshot with an example!