I guess a milestone of sorts has been reached with Barack Obama becoming president…. I find myself older than the President of the United States!!!! Up until now I have thought of them as older men, now, guess what? I’m the old man!!!!! Not by too much, but still it is different thinking that I am senior in age to the President.
Oh, in case anybody wonders, I am over it!
Let’s see… I am writing this 18 full days into 2009 and wondering when I will be ready for 2008!
The water heater project is done and so far so good as to being leak free. The old one is still sitting out on the deck (anybody want a slightly rusted out very leaky hot water heater? LOL).
(Just found a WordPress bug… I can’t center both the picture and caption it seems)
As to my computer hobby; the more I use Vista, the more I want to get rid of it and put Linux on the main computers!!! I installed Sun’s VirtualBox virtual machine the other night and am running SimplyMEPIS and Mint in a virtual machine on Vista. Of course I have a desktop and a laptop running Ubuntu and Mint, but the virtual machine lets me kick the tires of a new distro without having to burn a CD or DVD for a Live CD! You can download an iso (image file) and VirtualBox can boot that just like it is right on your hard drive.
I got a friend started with Mint operating as a guest in VirtualBox on his computer and am anxious for him to say he wants it actually installed directly on his hard drive. This way he gets to kick the tires without having to repartition his hard drive and undoing it all if he doesn’t like it.
I discovered it is a good way to play under the hood with a distro and if I break something, I can revert to a previous snapshot.
A second post will address issues I’ve been reading lately by some mighty clueless people who think they don’t like Linux because their information is waaaaaay out of date!
I noticed this week while driving on Interstate 64 near Crozet, VA that some trees seem to be starting their leaf color change. I guess it is getting close to that time of year…
Really, I would have expected more changes taking place at higher elevations, but much of what I noticed wasn’t that high up. A few did seem to be changing on top of Afton Mountain as well, but those didn’t surprise me.
Even in the Fredericksburg area some leaves are starting to simply change appearance, but not a real color change yet.
You know what this means (besides cold weather around the corner)… time to make sure the camera is ready to take tons of pretty fall color pictures!!
I’m waiting for my host to improve access to the database server before I get back anywhere close to heavy in blogging (not that I was a prolific blogger, anyway!).
They promise that they are adding resources for accessing the database server, and I am hoping to surf in one day very soon and see the site running as fast as it once did. HTML loads OK, it is just whatever uses teh database runs slow to seemingly not at all.
In the immortal words, “I’ll be Bach, Brahms, Beethoven…(or some other deceased composer)”!!
Remember the late 80s and early 90s and the ever famous “paradigm shift”? It seemed that (where I was at least) that phrase seemed that it would be used in every other sentence until the end of time. “Home integration” was another pet phrase destined for sentences that didn’t involve any shifting paradigms. I guess home automation was really what they meant, I don’t know, I was too busy finding a paradigm to shift around.
I was just over looking at ZDNet.com and found a few other super phrases that ought to live forever. I can just about understand “virtualization”, but how ’bout “unified comm”? Greentech ought to keep on going for centuries… No, I am not picking on ZD Net. Honest. This just hit me ‘twixt the eyes while catching up with them.
As to “virtualization”, I think technology will make that a non-player at some point. It may be the same thing, but we won’t think of it the same way we do right now.
I think today’s “paradigm shift” is “interoperability”. We’ll see how long that one stays at the top of discussions. It may not be as popular outside the beltway, but here, midway between Washington DC and Richmond, it gets bandied around pretty much by the government types that live here and commute to inside the beltway. To be fair, I can’t think of any better way to say what it means, it just seems to be a pet word of a lot of folks who must like long words while talking.
Looking at this, I realize that it is past my bedtime, so I’m off to get some groovy sleep!
NOTE:
I have some information on the Icom IC7000 I’ll share that may be be more worth while reading. There is a hidden setup menu that can make it perform even better when used right and mess things up if done wrong.
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