Sparse Random Thoughts

Well, I’m back from a nice little vacation out to Breckenridge, Colorado. I went snowboarding a couple of the days and snowmobiling one. All in all was a very good trip. In fact, I’m now looking for people to fund my next journey out there. Please let me know if you’re intrested, I’m willing to ditch the wife and kid to make it cheaper (just kidding, please don’t beat me again A (kidding again)). Here are a few pics A took out there.

Yes, I'm choosing to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". I feel that I'd like to include people that might not celebrate Xmas in my greeting. Some of you may say "You're just being politically correct", well what's wrong with the things that you label PC? Is it that they try not to make people feel like they are people and not persecute them for what they are or think? Yes, this is an awful thing. I mean Jesus wanted us to make people feel like they needed to change before they could come to him right, he wasn't into accepting people where they were at and making them feel loved at all.

Oh, and those of you concerned that by writing Xmas that I'm taking the Christ out of Christmas, a little Greek will do you good. ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ, transliterated as Christos, is Greek for Christ. During the 16th century, Europeans began using the first initial of Christ's name, "X" in place of the word Christ in Christmas as a shorthand form of the word.

Hmm… I think it's time to give you all some more links.

First off, let me mention the Folding@Home project by Stanford. This is a distributed computing project, this means they use the processing power you're not utilizing to do research. They do a much better job of explaining things so I'll let you check the page out. Though I will mention that you should fold for Team Firefox (Team ID: 39299), since you got Firefox after my last links post.

Next, lets take a look instant messaging. I use GAIM because it seems like everyone I know uses a different IM client. While GAIM doesn't have all the bells and whistles, it does connect to a slew of messaging services allowing you to run only one client. Now with my recent fiddling with Linux I've found it handy to use IRC chat rooms. The client I choose to use for this is X-Chat or when in Windows this version.

Now I'm going to clump together a handy tool for picking colors, a nice wysiwyg web authoring tool, and graphic viewer. For whatever reason you're trying to match a color on screen, the tool to use is Visual Color Picker; I love it when making sites, but am saddened by the fact that it's the only program mentioned in this post that is Windows only. Another tool I've recently found handy when working on this template is NVU, the aforementioned web authoring tool. And lastly XnView a great graphic browser that made me forget about ACDSee.

What is it about me posting on snowy days about being distracted? I'm actually going to confess that I've been distracted for over a week now. The object of my distraction is Linux. I'm not even sure what got me back to messing with it, na wait it was proabably finding some older cds I had burnt with different distros when cleaning the desk. Anyway, I've been playing around installing different distos on the laptop and checking them out a little.

So, far I've only encountered one that needed very little prodding to work with the built in wireless, that being SimplyMEPIS. So, it earned it's self a longer lasting spot on my harddrive. That leaves me one other partition that I've been swapping diffrent distros in and out of. Currently holding that spot, and what I'm in currently is Blag. But I'm not making promises that either will be there in a month. An interesting project that caught my eye earlier is Symphony OS, but I think I'll give it some more time to mature a little.

To download a lot of these I've been using LinuxTracker.org a great site for Linux BitTorrents. While you're at it you can check out LinuxFoo, for a Linux community site, and they can't be too bad they put up with me on their IRC last night.

Oh well, that's enough for now, guess I should try to get some homework done.