Ubuntu Linux: generally inpressed thus far. After upgrading a box at home to Fedora Core 3, I've finally become tired of the pain of dealing with RedHat's free distribution. Free as in decreasingly useful, I'm afraid to say.
Some of the pain experienced - Gnome eating various user prefs alive, for example, aren't Fedora's fault of course. But such gems as failing to recreate the boot sector via lilo correctly meant everything started badly and went downhill from there.
The final straw was the pain with apt - I've been using the ports of apt from RH 8 through to FC2 on various systems, and I've generally been pleased. Even more so when I started using Yum which is, buy comparison, slow, unreliable, and seemingly only written as the result of a pathological refusal to accept anyone else's tools, which has culminated in active hostility towards making apt available, and the maintainers of apt repositories of RPMs. Just use apt, guys. It already works better. Perhaps that would inspire the Debian team to use anaconda instead of their own NIH installer.
Gnome upgrades are a mixed blessing. As noted before, shunting from an older version of Gnome 2 to 2.8 (as is in Ubuntu) caused no end of pain, eating all matter of panel and Nautilus prefs and spitting the dummy. Moreover, Evolution 1.2 to Evolution 2.0 simply crashed the included conversion process; fortunately I have a system with Evo 1.4 lying about, and 1.2→1.4→2.0 worked. On the other hand, the newest versions of gnome-pilot and Evolution now offer slick support for Palms, with proper contact and appointment syncing. The file and memo management is, I'm told better than the native Palm Desktop.
Ubuntu's had some shortcomings, though: it doesn't detect and cope with some hardware (like a graphics tablet) as gracefully as RH 9, for example, but it's still streets ahead of Debian 3 on that front.
So, it looks like the household Linux boxes will be on Ubuntu in the future.
Apparently I'm in Google's top ten pages for people who want to know about “paris dog shit cleaners.” I'm not sure why anyone searches on this, and I am amused to discover I'm an authority on the topic.
The About a Girl exhibit Maire, Grant Buist and Rachel have put on pulled in a reasonable number of people for the opening day on Saturday—not packed solid, but enough that it felt like an opening night, and not the artists and three of their mates.
It's going well so far, with a few works selling, and it occurred to me today that it's my first art exhibition too, since I have credits on a couple of the works (for taking the photos later used for mixed-media work).
I got a Philips GoGear MP3 player. Nice toy, but has some shortcomings.
I've also been upgrading Canon's photo extraction/management software for my G3. I should have known better. They must hire from the bottom of the barrel over at Canon, because their software releases give every sign of being managed by complete fuckwits. Every upgrade changes the naming conventions for downloaded images in new and annoying ways, and it seem to be the case that they're actually physically incapable of having every application work with network shares—the last round of releases broke the PhotoPrint software, the current fixes that problem, but the tool for downloading images from the camera itself will only pull photos onto a local drive. Hopeless.
Went to Lower Hutt yesterday for a car service—yes, the local Toyota dealer has been so crappy to deal with I'd rather drive out there—and took the opportunity to swing by the Dowse Art Museum.
It had half a dozen exhibits on; several (Kapa Haka underwater, audio tracks of youthful reminiscences) didn't really make any impact on me, but two did: New Alchemists and a collection of skateboard art.
New Alchemists was a promising concept; recycling trash into art. There were a few items I enjoyed: a collection of beachcombed glass lit up; a screen made from salvaged plastic spoons melted and reworked into a lattice; a quilt. At the other end were big balls of plastic and the like, which left me cold, because they demonstrated neither any particular craft value, or much in the way of artistic statment beyond simply being in the exhibition. On balance it was pretty dissapointing.
Not so the skateboards. Running from work from 9 year olds to work by Dylan Horricks and there was a broad range of topics and style, with some clever narrative work as well as simple images. Well worthwhile, but I hope the people buying the boards actually use them, rather than just hanging them as art objects.
I was browsing through a collection of pictures (NSFW) of the (in)famous Luba, and I was struck by three things: the woman has a superb figure; the photos are often do an amazing job of presenting her (and sometimes her equally stunning sister) in a way that is, at best, indifferent and at worst unappealing; and in terms of the technical aspects of the photography, they're often crap, with blowouts and the like. Seriously, they're sub-porn in terms of quality.
All of which goes to show: you can make a living as happy-snap quality photographer if you have a gorgeous wife who's happy for you to publish your happy-snaps of her naked. It doesn't matter that you don't know how to pose your model attractively, weed out the crap photos, or get the exposure right.
That must really irrate the serious photographers out there.
If a Death with Dignity law comes to referendum in my state, I will vote for it. I do not know if I would ever use it myself. I remain seated through the credits of movies, even those I didn't much like, and after I've finished my drink, I chew the pulp from the lime. I suspect I'll want to stay for the duration. Perhaps I'll not mind terribly if someone offers me a hug.
But the pertinent question here is not what I will do on my deathbed but what I am prepared to permit others to do on their deathbeds—a distinction that the right is notorious for trying to blur—and on that question I am clear.
A thought-provoking piece from Harper's magazine.
Questionable garden ideas: an English style garden maze, with vegetable, herb, and fruit patches within the garden. The entrance butts onto the house, and the most commonly-used utilitarian foodstuffs (rosemary, basil, carrots, and so on) are at dead ends close by the entrance. The further in you get, the better the stuff (raspberry canes, fig trees, and the like).