jr conlin's ink stained banana

i've been spending parts of today watching screencasts and presentations from GDD07 and i can't help but compare it to hackday06.

GDD07 was full of presentations about new features and tools all intricately woven into existing services and easily hosted on dedicated servers.

hackDay06 featured folks gathered together making really cool items and aided by folks who can help.

That kinda highlights why i work here and not there.

Google: My, Look how clever we are!
Yahoo: My, Look how clever you are!

Few random things since i'm feeling particularly cranky today.

1) Sure, it's a cool toy and it's fun to virtually drop acid and drive around San Francisco, but i didn't find A9's (since removed) or Microsoft's implementation all that useful either. Stuff changes, and i don't think they're going to be sending trucks around doing updates every couple of weeks.

2) i'll wait for the fully open source version, thank-you-very-much. Sorry, i don't trust google. They're an ad agency that also does search and reading the terms of service scared me. (Like the fact that i can't reverse engineer the code to determine if it's sharing stuff back with the mother beast when i don't want it to.)

3) Don't mess with my chocolate. (Granted, i tend to not buy from those folks anyway, but c'mon…)

4) To think, back in 2000 or so, i used to like John McCain.

5) And finally speaking of things i used to like, i'm getting more than a little tired of Sprint mobile. The heavily restricted phone i have now (which continually nickels and dimes me for services that i should be able to get for free, like play mp3 ringtones i download from non-Sprint stores), has been running low on juice because my signal has been getting progressively worse over the past month or so. Yeah, i work next to a swamp and the nearest Sprint tower isn't exactly next-door like it was back in Mission College, but it's one more thing that's ticking me off. i'm starting to think about switching carriers and eating the "early termination penalty". At least i would every other mobile service didn't suck just as bad. (Seriously, Verizon? Cool phones, HOLY MOTHER OF SCROD YOUR RATES ARE INSANE! Cingular,SBC, ATT? i'd have liked to check you out EXCEPT YOUR FRAGGING SITE IS DOWN. About the only service that doesn't look at me the way Bill McKinney looked at Ned Beatty is Helio.

Dammit, i'm having a cookie.

Oh yeah, i changed the recipe, and the new one results in even better cookies.

New Recipe:

This afternoon, i realize that yesterday was not, in fact, Sunday, even though it felt like one.

No, today is indeed Tuesday, meaning that i managed to completely forget to post up something for YCoolThing, leading to me scrambling around for an hour looking for something reasonably post worthy. Fortunately, the fine folks at Y!Real Estate helped me out by officially announcing their new Home Values thingy. (It collects info about homes from three sites, compiles it together and lets you see what kind of money people are plunking down for their pads. And yes, "thingy" is the technical term for that.)

Since that was kinda dry, i wanted to spice it up by finding a nice, ridiculously priced abode somewhere, so i picked Malibu. Poking around a bit further i discovered this delightful nest-egg that sells for three times what other homes in it's immediate neighborhood. Mind you, that's not some hyper-inflated estimate price, but what someone agreed to fork over pacific real-estate as of 10/03/2006. Dude, i live in California, and that's flat insane pricing for a supe'd up beach bungalow.

So i started doing some investigation to figure out what sort of uber-rich patsy bought this joint.

First thing i did was a search on the address: "23324 Malibu Colony" which lead me to this page to see that Michael Klein was the owner (well, was when the 2004 election was on at the least). Figure a guy like that buying a home is going to make a ripple somewhere on the net, and sure enough searching for "michael klein" malibu home got me an article talking about how he bought it from a Ted Field for $22MM, who had bought the lot from Michael Landon for about $6MM.

Of the three of them, i'd say Mr. Field was the definite winner, having bought a beachside joint for $6MM, sunk $2MM in renovations into it and turned it around for $22MM. Apparently, it ain't Zathura: A Space Adventure and Kazaam that's payin' all the bills.

So, quick tip for all you future real-estate tycoons. First, produce Revenge of the Nerds, then sink that cash into the lot once owned by someone from Little House on the Prairie before turning it over to a financial guy that's bought at the wrong time.

Profit!

At what point did someone get so hungry that after sitting amidst a bunch of 5 foot tall, exceptionally pointy thistles, he decided to forge into said thorn and spike covered bush, lop off a bud, drop it in boiling water for around 18 minutes and eat it?

(Mostly since i want to know where i can send the thank you card.)

Mmmm… artichokes.

Naturally, folks have been buzzing about:
a) Dell offering Ubuntu on their PCs (and adding a $50 discount since they don't have to pay for a license)
b) Walmart reportedly selling them.

Also naturally, i'm willing to accept that the biggest purchasers of this will probably be the folks that would strip off windows to install a linux distro anyway, but what about the sorts of folks that would buy a deeply discounted dell from a place like wal*mart?

They'll probably be pissed that they can't run their favorite games on it (well, not easily at least if they don't have WINE installed correctly), and they may complain that some of their fine e-lec-tronical devices (like that iriver clix they got at the discount bin) don't work with the new computer anymore, but all-in-all, they do get a fairly workable machine, mostly because it's a thin client for applications running remotely anyway.

Unfortunately, even though i've got kubuntu installed and purring on my main server, and use CygwinX to run happy KDE programs on my workstation, i wanted to see if it really was something that could work (i can't really run KMoney remotely since it crashes my X client, and while i can run Quake2 and IE6 in a Wine window, Jardains throws errors.) After tossing the "recovery" disk in favor of a Kubuntu distro, i poked around to see if it's ready for the desktop.

You know what? i think it may be.

Granted, i'm still probably not going to switch over anytime soon. Things currently holding me back are:
1) ATI card and dual screen monitor (the ATI linux drivers don't work for the X600 i've got)
2) Y!Music (which currently requires MS DRM and doesn't work under WINE)
3) that's it.

No, really, that's it. Just those two and i know how to solve both of them if i really wanted to. OpenOffice (or the various office like apps out there), Mozilla, and Xara Xtream all work just fine under Ubuntu. Yes, there's even a mess of open source software i'd happily pony up cash for. Most every form of media i wish to create or consume also works under Ubuntu, and for every task i want to do there's an application that i can use.

Oddly, i also realized something in the process. Linux Desktop is good for folks with lots of experience and know how to get things to work the way they want, or very little experience and don't have behaviors they have to unlearn. Granted, most folks tend to fall into that middle ground area, but that's being actively resolved.

We're definitely hip deep in interesting times.