Author: Mark

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

KDE Logo I’ve been running Kubuntu 6.06 LTS as my main OS on my home PC since it was released. Along the way, I’ve upgraded to KDE 3.5.5 and Amarok 1.4.3 and installed a variety of packages from unofficial sources. When I Edgy 6.10 was first released I looked into upgrading, but held off. This was due to all the complaints and problems I had been reading about where people had done similar things to myself (e.g. installed apps using unofficial sources). While I was no longer living on the edge, I still have been keeping up with the community by reading Planet KDE. A lot of changes and new features sounded really cool but with all the horror stories out there and Dapper being a Long Term Support release, I figured I was better off waiting to upgrade until I absolutely had to.

Last night, I decided I’d held off long enough. So I backed up all my data and started the upgrade. As expected, upgrading from Dapper to Edgy was painful. Fortunately I’ve gotten some experience with the cli and was able to work past my problems. I might still be missing a few things (e.g. Flash player doesn’t seem to work at the moment) but overall I’m rather impressed. My computer feels a bit more speedy and the fonts look enormously better. It’s really quite extraordinary how much better things look.

I’ve already started the upgrade to take me from Edgy to Feisty 7.04 and am very much looking forward to being on Gutsy 7.10 (not to mention Hardy 8.04 later this month). For now though, my eyes are burning with sleepiness, so I’ll post this and catch some shut-eye while my computer downloads all the packages it needs to upgrade me to Feisty.

Sometimes when you’re staring the bash prompt, you want to be able to see if a specific program is currently running. There are a couple of ways to do this; generally I run:
ps -ef | grep ProgramName

However I once saw a tip for doing something similar with top but I lost the link and for a long time couldn’t find it again. Truth be told, I still haven’t found that specific link but I did some googling and found the right cli switches to do it. Since I want to make sure I remember in the future, I’m posting it here:
top -b -n 1 | grep ProgramName

  • Have the dentist tell you they want to do about $2000 worth of work inside your mouth, after they’ve already done roughly $900 worth.
  • Hearing that your new dental insurance will only cover the first $1000 worth of work the dentist wants to do.
  • Take your car to the mechanic to have the brakes checked and the wiper fixed1.
  • Driving past a perfect photo opportunity and realizing your camera is sitting on your desk at home.
  • Have your wife call you the next day telling you the mechanic told her the car was done and the bill was $3761!
  • Go to the mechanic to find out your wife needs to clean out her ears as your brakes are fine and the mechanic only charged us $37.61 to fix the wiper.
  • Find out the sample data you’ve been playing with at work was the wrong file from the data provider and you’re going to have to recreate all the same work all over again.
  • See large puddles of water in your basement. Water seeping in from a side of the basement which has never gotten wet before.
  • Figure out the plastic pipe from the sump-pump outside the house has come un-clamped from the bit of pipe running away from the house.
  • Narrowly dodge a vast spray of water coming from the sump-pump.
  • Quickly re-clamp the pipes, hoping not to get soaked.
  • Watch the sump-pump force the water out a crack in the pipe, spraying down your neighbor’s fence.
  • Unplugging the sump-pump, going outside, cutting away the cracked portion of the pipe, re-clamping the pipes, send the wife down into the basement to plug in the sump-pump, standing back hoping the clamp will hold.
  • Watching the clamp still leak.
  • Deciding to go back inside anyway.
  • While putting your tools away realize one of the joints on the interior sump-pump piping is now leaking more than when you started.
  • Being told to shut-off the outside lights when you’re grabbing some slippers to go back to the switch to turn the lights off.
  • Writing 3744 fewer items in your list of 3761 ways to go bonkers.

1 The driver-side windshield wiper kept coming loose and wouldn’t wipe the windshield.

Speaking as one who has lived in both the North and the South, I can honestly say sweat tea is an unholy abomination. Unfortunately, the further one goes South the more likely it is you’ll get sweetened tea if you do not specifically order unsweetened tea. In some heathen lands of the South, there are actually places that don’t even sell unsweetened tea.

Iced tea is ideally made by placing 5 bags of black tea inside a 1 gallon glass (not plastic!) jar and set out in the sunshine until the jar is dark. It should then be taken inside, tea bags removed and refrigerated. It should be served with no more than 3 one inch cubes of ices per 8oz glass. As Jeri mentions, a slice of lemon in a glass of iced tea is acceptable; however no, I repeat NO sweeteners are acceptable.

Hot tea can have a single spoon of honey added to it, if one is sick with a sore throat. Or the faint of heart can add a small amount of milk, but only if they put the milk in the cup before the tea (reversing the order curdles the milk).

In response to Sweet Tea is an Abomination by Shawn Powers.