Steven Reimer (.com)

Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
-- Hermann Goering

Thoughts on Things

view all | search
    page: 1 of 62    

Intrepid Ibex

November 04, 2008 17:23
comment (2)

I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I have high hopes for this version as it has benchmarked well and with the improvements to CPU usage. My biggest problem with 8.04 was how often my fan turned on (it wouldn't be such a big deal if it wasn't so loud) and how my hard-drive would spin constantly. So far the fan has turned on as much or less than it does with XP and the hard-drive spin issue seem so to be resolved as well.

I have one beef so far: VPN support in the network manager is broken out-of-the-box. It took most of today to get it figured out. Settings wouldn't stick when editing my VPN connection, saving my password resulted in a random error and a needed refuse-EAP setting was unavailable. This was all eventually resolved with much searching and reading. It is frustrating to have something that worked so well in a previous version completely changed and broken in the next.

That said, I am happy to have a Linux installation on my laptop that's not so CPU intensive. As I write this entry, top shows CPU usage under 10% whereas in 8.04 it was usually up around 15%.

More thoughts on Intrepid Ibex to come later.

Microsoft Hat

October 27, 2008 07:37
comment (2)

Those of you who know me may know that I am slightly opposed to Microsoft products. This stems mostly from my anti-institutionalism and fondness for the open source community. Really, it all started with price. So you could say that my Mennonite heritage is what has produced my technological stance.

With that said, for the next several weeks, probably months, I will be donning a Microsoft hat for a project I have been assigned at work. I will be setting up a Sharepoint Intranet for one of our clients. This is as Microsoft as you can get. I will be working with all things Microsoft: MS Office, MS Projects, Active Directory etc.

I am approaching this with an open mind. I am actually interested in seeing how this turns out and learning a bit more about the world of Microsoft. It's definitely something that would look good on the resume. As I have said to a few people: "If it comes to the worst, at least I'll have a reason to not like Microsoft."

Pie

October 19, 2008 20:56
comment (0)

Pies are great! Today we had meat and pumpkin pie with Dan and Christina. To steal Dan's phrase: "I like pie!"

Page loaded in: 1.467300s