Did you notice how yesterday’s “gas out” brought gas prices down?
Me either. That’s because it doesn’t work that way. Although I did my part not buying gas yesterday, it was only because I didn’t need it. What I should really do is drive my car less, to decrease overall demand (even by just a tiny bit). Next time we have a gas out, let’s make it a bike to work day or something.
Google keeps adding new features to their products (I hear some new notifications are on their way for Calendar), but Google Reader, one of my favorites, now lets you email posts to others via Gmail. Integrating features throughout their products will undoubtedly help them in the long run, and making features like this easily accessible is key as well. Just for fun, I think maybe I’ll email this post to my whole contact list just to try it out again.
I was very interested by the PBS documentary that aired last night, entitled “The Mormons”. I was very impressed with how professional the whole thing was. It was certainly interesting to see the many perspectives on some interesting points of Mormon History. PBS also hosts a companion website to “The Mormons”, which I found to be a great resource to learn a little more about those being interviewed as well as a very well-done list of FAQs of Mormonism. You can even view part one online.
My wife and I both noticed that a lot of time was devoted to polygamy and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but I think that may have been because they are both topics that are not well understood by the general public. I must admit that I only learned about Mountain Meadows a year ago, and I would certainly say that it is a topic that isn’t understood by the general population of the Mormon Church, either.
While I don’t necessarily agree with everything that was presented in the documentary, overall I was extremely impressed. I’m definitely looking forward to part two tonight.
I’m amazed at how easy it’s been to set up Ubuntu 7.04. I had broken a couple of things in the previous version, and I wanted to start over and get all the new features of Feisty Fawn that I had been hearing about. Well, much to my surprise, a lot had changed with MythTV as well. Check the link for more information, but it made it incredibly easy, especially since my Hauppauge PVR-150 card was supported in the kernel and I didn’t have to compile any new drivers for it. Crazy cool. I had a couple of minor permissions errors, but everything else seems to be working great!
A setup that took me literally about ten days to do has now been reconfigured in less than a day. This is what can happen with open source: things are just getting better and better (especially when hardware manufacturers like Hauppauge and Nvidia recognize the importance of open source as well).
As I’ve stated before, we ditched Windows on our desktop computer in favor of Ubuntu Linux. Since I’ve started using it a little over a year ago, Ubuntu really has come a long way. Ubuntu is readying its newest release, and this one looks to be better than ever.
My first experiences with Linux were over ten years ago, when loading X Windows took about five minutes so I browsed the web using the text-browser Lynx. Since then, Linux has become an incredible tool that excels at what it does. The fact that it’s free still amazes me, but I’ve come to the point where I can do things in Linux that I just can’t do in Windows or Mac OS X, though that doesn’t mean I’m giving either of those up any time soon.
The hard drive in our laptop died a few weeks ago, which was bad news for our household. We could see it was coming, so we made sure to back up our data, but after it happened we had to find a way to replace it. In the meantime our computer was without a hard drive, but it wasn’t out of service. We inserted the Ubuntu CD and and the computer just worked! I was pretty impressed. I had used Knoppix and similar boot CDs, but Ubuntu detected all our software and booted rather quickly. The other boot CDs didn’t detect our wireless ethernet adapter, which meant we couldn’t use the Internet. Ubuntu found the wireless adapter, and established a secure connection with our network. We were even able to use it to buy our new hard drive. Thanks, Ubuntu! You’ve come a long way. Be sure to check it out! The newest version even has a Windows Migration Assistant, so I may be loading it onto our laptop again soon.