Month: May 2007

I can think of few things less appealing. I’ve eaten a lot of mix-in ice cream over the past year, a task that has seemed increasingly penitential as it progressed. I ordered simple French vanilla from Cold Stone; from Maggie Moo’s, a concoction called Better Batter Cake Carnival (cake batter ice cream, Twix bars, cookies and fudge); both were unfinishable. Whereas a visit to Ben and Jerry’s or Häagen-Dazs leaves me wanting more, a visit to Cold Stone leaves me wanting a salad and a shower.

Taken from What happened to plain old vanilla?

I have to admit that I’ve visited the local Coldstone Creamery a couple of times and kind of enjoyed the ice cream, but hated the store. I’m really a DQ sort of guy1. I like to be able to go in, get my ice cream and get out. At Coldstone that game plan does not work as well due to the staff singing their bloody songs and trying to make being in the store as pleasing as eating the product. Unfortunately for them it just does not work; especially as it does not distract me from how large a price they’re charging for their ice cream.

1 Actually, I am a Ben & Jerry’s fan but they do not have any scoop shops in my area. So I settle for DQ as being cheap, quick and tasty.

The title on this post is somewhat misleading. The default stylings of AnimeIowa‘s forums make my eyes blee, especially after some of the forum members have taken it upon themselves to give their words extra features ugliness. E.g. putting bright, yellow text on top of a dark blue background. Fortunately, I do 99.9999% of my web browsing using Firefox and there exists an extension for Firefox that will override any given site’s default CSS with the CSS you specify. This means people can do things like take the CSS which makes CoffeeBear.net so lovely and with a few tweaks turn this…

AI Forum Before

Into this…

AI Forum After

And all it took was the Stylish extension and this little bit of CSS:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("animeiowa.com") {
html {
color: #0F0F0F !important;
}
body {
color: #0F0F0F !important;
background-color: #FFF !important;
}
a:link {color: #D57100 !important;
text-decoration:none !important;
}
a:visited {color: #459045 !important;
text-decoration:none !important;
border-bottom:none !important;
}
a:hover, a:active {
color:#6F2314 !important;
text-decoration:underline !important;
}
table tr td {
background-color: #F1EFFF !important;
color: #0F0F0F !important;
}
font {
color: #000 !important;
}
font .quote {
background-color: #FEFFBF !important;
}
font .catbg {
background-color: #F1EFFF !important;
}
}

Don’t believe this makes that much difference? Then try it out yourself, your bleeding eyes will thank you.

First off, you need to go through a bit of a cultural shift. When you’re looking for/at quirky, little apps; you should be for the Linux version.Secondly, installing and maintaining all your apps under Linux tends to be easier than under Windows. Yes, I said easier. In Windows, you find application “XYZ” on a website. You download a ZIP file and extract it to find an EXE. You run the EXE and it installs, but the program doesn’t run. Why? You’re missing something. It might be Microsoft’s .NET, Java, DirectX, etc…. Only it’s highly unlikely XYZ will tell you in plain English what went wrong. More likely, the app will just die without reporting an error. Then you’re off to Google to figure out what went wrong. Or if XYZ will run, it has no way of knowing when a new version is available or at best it can check their website for updates and when one comes out; you have to download, unzip and install the new version of XYZ (possibly uninstalling the old version first). Since you’re used to this, it doesn’t seem like much but it’s actually a complex operation.

Now let’s compare that to installing/maintaining apps under Linux (specifically Ubuntu). First off, you should enable the extra repositories and after doing so you suddenly have thousands of apps you can install with a few clicks in Synaptic. With the added bonus of Ubuntu automatically checking for updates to every single one you install and then enabling you to update all of them with a couple of clicks. And if some app you want to install requires other packages, then Synaptic will download and install those for you automatically. For the occassional app that is not include in the extra repositories, many 3rd party developers who work on Linux will provide their own repositories which you can add to your sources.list in Synaptic, which gives you all the same benefits as apps in the official repositories. True, there are still other 3rd party developers who don’t provide repositories but for some of these there are sites like Get Deb which offer pre-compiled DEB files for you to use in installing a given app. DEB files serve the same purpose as the installation EXE you download for Windows apps. Lastly, there are those developers where all they provide is the source code. For these, you can generally find detailed instructions on how to compile the app to use it. Though, I’ve been using Linux full-time for about 5 years now and I’ve yet to find a must-have app which was only provided in source code form that I had to compile.

In reply to More Linux at Desperados Under the Eaves.

I’m sitting at the computer typing, when the dog bumps up against my legs. I look down, and she’s sniffing the floor around my feet intently.

“What are you doing down there?”

“I’m looking for steak!” she says, wagging her tail hopefully.

“I’m pretty certain that there’s no steak down there,” I say. “I’ve never eaten steak at the computer, and I’ve certainly never dropped any on the floor.”

“You did in some universe,” she says, still sniffing.

I sigh. “I’m going to move the quantum physics books to a higher shelf, so you can’t reach them.”

Myself, I’ve never had a physics course in my life. I do however have some interest in the various sciences and I have cracked open the occasional science textbook for classes I’ve never been in. Pretty much every time, it makes my brain leak out my ears and causes me to wonder why I bother. Then today while waiting for a rather incredibly slow server to finish running my SQL update, I hit up SEB out of boredom and found his link to the article on Uncertain Principles. The article both made sense and made me smile, which lines up nicely with my idea of good teaching. So thanks to Les for pointing out Mr. Orzel’s excellent article and double thanks to Mr. Orzel for writing it.

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Over the weekend, Ariesna and I met a bunch of friends at the Amana Ren Faire for an afternoon of frivolity. Overall, the faire was… decent. A few interesting vendors were there, notably: The Scots Dragon, Noble Bee Honey and the Royal Chocolatier1. On the down side, the Roast Beast sandwich from previous years had been replaced with something… else. I don’t recall what the faire folk called it, but I called it crap. It was an extremely fatty beef sandwich of some sort and throughly nasty. If more places at the faire accepted the dominon of Lady Visa, I probably would have chucked the sandwich and gotten something else. I saw a few things in the merchants’ tents that I wouldn’t have minded bringing home, but nothing in my price range. We wandered the faire with Cath and Bryon. And Laura when she eventually showed up. We watched some of the shows, though most were very lame. The joust was the highlight of the shows we watched, though it wasn’t one of the better performances I’ve seen of the joust at this faire. Later in the afternoon of the Amana Ren Faire Laura, Michelle & and I were sitting at some tables. We noticed some loose cash lying on the ground under a man wearing a fantastic Scottish outfit (see Ren Faire Attendees). Laura pointed out the loose cash to him. He thanked her and then came over to chat with us. It turns out he actually is Scottish (from Inverness) and was visting family in the area. He pointed out this pin on the edge of his kilt. He joked in Scotland, sheep are more than just a hobby. *Heh* He was a really nice guy, though with his accent2 and all the noise, I had a hard time understanding everything he said. And I’m not just saying he was nice due to the whee nip off his flask that he offered me. Though it certainly didn’t hurt my opinion of him either. 😀

Update: I forgot to mention, you can view some of my other photos of the day in my photo gallery under Ren Faire.

1 Man that was some seriously good chocolate!
2 Mind you, the Scottish accent is fabulous to hear. Just sometimes hard to understand. Especially with bouncing, screaming children nearby.