Archive for June, 2008

Its official!  The word is in and we are headed to Alaska, in the winter no less. That’s the Army for you.  Take a family used to 100+ degree weather and 8 months pregnant, then move them to -40 degree weather and have the soldier almost immediately deploy again.

So after three days of trying, I finally obtained the latest version of openSUSE.  It is definitely worth the time to upgrade.  I ended up wiping my entire drive (say bye, bye Vista) and finally organizing it properly for a Linux install.  So when I say its worth the effort, you can bet its definitely a worthwhile upgrade.  You can go and read about all the new gee-whiz stuff, but I will let you know that if you are looking for a Linux to try or upgrade to, this is it.  I even made the move to 64 bit finally.  All the necessary codecs and programs (except Bluefish) have finally been ported to 64 bit, and the video driver works awesomely with Compiz. 

Anyway, this upgrade only took me half the time as usual, and now I am going to quit neglecting my family.  Here is a link if you want to give it a try.

So I was sitting on Staff Duty watching WarGames and being all nostalgic for the days when hacking was fun.  The days of Z80’s, phone couplers, 5” floppies, and nothing but a command line, in color if you were lucky. I remember having “fun” pushing the envelope with my XT clone and its 8mhz Turbo mode and doing things “just because I could.”  My first modem was in fact a little Hayes 2400 bps deal that was considered high speed and compact because it was a full 2400 bps and only a half card slot in length!  I had been using phone couplers at 150 or 300bps before that to connect to the online world of BBSes.  I know, that dates me really well (I was, in fact a few years younger than Matthew Broderick in the movie)!

Did you know you can order pizza from Dominos via your *nix command line?  Well you can thanks to Pizza Party.  I would have to say my favorite function is the ability to batch order pizzas from an input file.  After all, us *nix geeks have some wild parties!

I remember the days when computer geeks around the world would connect to soda machines, washing machines, etc on campus with their terminals just to say they did it.  Then came the days of ordering your pizza via the web (I remember when Papa John’s first attempted this back in the mid-90’s).  Now, if you are too busy coding and need a pizza fix, just switch to a console (or SSH in) and order away without starting your browser. 

Anyway, ubiquitous You Tube video of Pizza Party in action after the jump.

I was watching the final epsiode of MASH the other night and I had a sort of catharsis.  The final epsiode, besides saying goodbye to all the characters, involved Hawkeye in a hospital for what we call “Combat Stress” these days.  He had been in surgery and gone off the deep end.  He had become impatient, irritable, and angry at everything.  He had been having a recurrent dream involving his friends, wounded soldiers, and a Korean lady killing a chicken that changed into a baby as soon as it had been killed.