So I was digging (as in liking not as in, oh never mind) Ubuntu 6 and it kept pestering me to "update" to 7 so I did. Big mistake, version 7 is actually quite nice(I am writing on it currently). It's just that the "update" screwed up badly and needed a fresh install to work again. My intuition told me that was the route to take in the first place, but I didn't listen. Ubuntu 7 is even more user friendly if that's possible. Now shows at least the first partition of your windows drives in the list of available drives. But you need to use the admin password to actually mount it, and it mounts read-only which is a good compromise. No command line unless you want to mount an extended partition or mount it read/write.(I never need to)

I learned a new cycling term, "double century". As you would expect it's a bike ride of 200 miles. They have one that goes from Seattle to Portland. Wow, that's crazy, thankfully most people do it in two days, some can finish in a single day. Part of me would prefer that, since imagine riding a 100 miles, then waking up the next morning early to do it again. Oh man, the suck of that first couple miles on the second day would be high on the suckiness scale.

I finally got Ubuntu to install on my computer, and me likey. It's definitely a good flavor for "normal" people, or people like me who are lazy. I plugged in my camera in the USB hole and it popped up a little dialog box on how, and where I want to import my pictures. Some users would hate this type of thing, but "normal" people expect their computer to do this. It of course doesn't come with non open stuff like mp3 decoders, or flash player, which normal people will be a little confused about. However it's not too difficult to intall stuff like that though. I like the synaptic package manager. You can add most of the codecs ands apps to play mp3s and DVDs, etc in there. The true test will be to see how long I can go without booting back into XP.

Wow, if you ignore the year, my blog looks sorta continuous, as the last post was 3/10. I'm too lazy to type this dream I had up, so I'll post the audio instead. Some people call this podcasting, but not me, it's my audioblogbit. BTW recorded with my Dash, which didn't record in mp3, but at least in .wav so it was easy to convert.

PS. I need to try another adjective besides "weird".

I've been bemoaning the lack of local online news because the Dallas Morning News website sucks in general, and requires a email address and password in particular. That's the only newspaper in Dallas, so I moved on to reading the local TV stations websites. Sometimes it's better to be ignorant of local news and instead know everything that happens in San Francisco because of boingboing. At least then you can pretend that people are computer saavy, smart, and creative. Instead we have A woman suing Wal-Mart for injuries due to a police shooting. Ah she must have been shot right? No. Maybe hit by a ricochet, or at least injured by the officers during the shooting? No. The police went in after a carjacker/kidnapper, the guy pulls a gun, police shoot him. This lady, on a different aisle mind you, hears the shots and falls to the ground "injuring" her knees. Why sue Wal-Mart? Maybe they should cover the floor with padding in case of such an instance?!? I mean come on, you injured yourself, admit it.

Researchers in Italy are reporting that loud noise coupled with MDMA causes more deleterious effects than ecstasy alone. This is interesting, although they claim the rats "experienced a slump in electrical power of the cerebral cortex for up to five days." What do they mean by electrical power? Also they reported using a control group with no loud noise(which showed less "slumping of the electrical power") but didn't mention the other obvious control group, one with the noise but no MDMA. If true however, a rave or any club really, seems like a particularly bad place to use MDMA. Previously we've seen the excessive heat makes dehydration more likely and MDMA caused down regulation of 5-HTP receptors more pronounced. Now the noise is bad for your brain too? I guess people should drop, turn off the stereo, lie on a refrigerated bed and not think too hard.

I listened to gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman on Lance Armstrong's radio show, which wasn't half bad by the way. It was live from Austin and consisted of them drinking beer watching the superbowl. Anyhow, Kinky wants to legalize gambling to pay for schools, outlaw the de-clawing of cats, appoint Willie Nelson as his Energy Czar and Laura Bush to help on education. HIs campaign was just humorous at first, but I think he is coming along at a very good time to run as an independent in Texas. Many people are very dissatisfied with Gov. Perry, and the Texas democrats are in shambles(yes partially because of the redistricting, but also due to the same general lack of cohones as Democrats on the national level) I predict Kinky has a chance to make a serious showing this year.

If your local news left out the book recommendation from his last speech this is it:

If you (Americans) are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book "Rogue State," which states in its introduction: "If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all."

Acutally I thought he might have been referring to the Noam Chomsky book of the same name, as I see OBL as a Chomsky reader, but whatever. The hardest part of the whole image was removing the "Copyrighted Material" watermarks that amazon puts on all the large images of their book covers. Probably so people don't do what I just did. Parody is fair use right? So uhh sorry Amazon, Oprah, Osama Bin Laden, William Blum, Adobe, that centipede the other day, etc...

Jim Schutze tickles my funny bone with the new cover story in the Dallas Observer. It relates to that guy caught putting his own dried feces on bakery items at Fiesta. Here's a good bit:

The doo-doo man occupies a horrible sweet spot in the collective Jungian fabric. He is the primal demon who pops out of the doughnut display at us all. The shit trickster.
I don't know about you, but the whole thing undermines the hell out of my own confidence in modernity. If this is how it's going to be with the doughnuts, then I'd just as soon go back to a hunter-gatherer society.

I finally upgraded to Firefox 1.5 and while I was at it I looked at the extensions again. I found a couple great ones(well one great one, and one OK one) IE Tab adds a little button to your toolbar that lets you switch to the Internet Explorer rendering engine from within Firefox. Like I don't have flash installed on Firefox because I hate it. So when a site requires flash or just requires IE for some ungodly reason, I have to copy the address I am at, then open IE and paste it and then go. Now I just hit the button and I'm in. Works great although It didn't put the button in my bar automatically, so you have to right click and goto customize then drag it on. Just remember to push the button again or you will be surfing in IE inside Firefox all day and that would be just weird.
The other extension I got was called AJAX Yahoo! Mail and is only useful if you use Yahoo! mail. It adds a little + sign next to each message so you can expand it and read it quickly without actually leaving the inbox list. Would be cool, but a little buggy. Sometimes the plus signs just aren't there and you have to reload the page to make it happen.