Kango Play Center and Academy

Today I once again got to spend some time in the morning with my family at Kango Play Center and Academy. Located in Henrietta*, Kango is an indoor playground/kid entertainment facility.



Similar to The Sandbox in Fairport, Kango offers lots of fun stuff to help you whittle down all of that extra energy your little one might have stored up. There's a bounce house with giant slide, a ginormous climbing gym, electronic games, slides, trikes and even a roller skating rink. They have a little cafe where you can get kid-friendly foods like pizza and burgers and the food's actually quite good.



But, the best part for parents: where ever your kid can go, you can go. That's right, done watching them have fun climbing up to the ceiling? No problemo, head on up and join 'em! Granted, the walkways up there are designed for kid-sized statures, but crawling around up there is just as much fun as running. Trust me. Just wear light clothes, it gets hot up there.



My wife and I ended up buying a membership ($80/year for a family, but save your receipts as they'll deduct previous admissions off of that) because Maeby just loves it there. We normally go during the mornings, so there aren't as many folks there, but even when it's crowded (like this morning for the Halloween party) it's not insane.



In the electronic gaming area, they have ski-ball and a number of other easy games that little kids can do well at. You get tickets for playing which can be turned in for those ever-so-valuable-when-you're-two little rubber bugs and dice that kids love so much. I really think it's one of her favorite parts of our visit to pick out her prize. Today she got a little blue ring that had googly eyes. :)



They also do day care and pre-school, so if you have need of services like that, I have to imagine it's a great place to put your kids. The staff is always present and the owners have been there every single time we have. They really do appear to love what they do, and it shows. It's a fun, safe place to let your kid be a kid for a few hours!

*Note: it's located in the Eagle's Landing office park which is a new one across from Bowl-A-Roll bowling. When you go in into the park, stay to your left and follow the road around the curve. When you get to the main parking lot, you'll see Paychex on the left, Kango's in the building on the right.

Ya gotta let the good days just happen

Last night at work I received a frantic call from our babysitter. Her daughter had bonkered herself on the edge of a table and was bleeding profusely. Since my boss is a bit more flexible and my wife was loaded down with appointments at work, I headed out to pick up my daughter.

I arrived to find our other friend covering for the babysitter and my daughter thoroughly engaged in an episode of Wonder Pets in which the team, through teamwork, attempt to rescue a baby chimp from a space capsule before it's hit by a meteor. I won't spoil the episode for you, but it is a nail biter!

We headed out and had a good time talking and singing the Wonder Pets theme when I noticed a giant Tim Horton's cup dancing around in front of the store around the corner from our babysitter's place. Hmmm...what's that on his sign? Free...Iced Cap?!? Oh, hell yeah! We pulled around the corner and into the lot just in time to see employees heading out with a tray full of my favorite icy treat! "You want one?" they asked. Duh!

Back on our journey home, we passed by the airport. Whenever she & I are in the car, I always look out to the northeast as that's where the planes come in from. I've been waiting for a time when I could pull over and let her catch a glimpse of a plane coming in extremely closely, and tonight did not disappoint. I saw something coming in, and it looked like I had enough time, so I raced into the parking lot of the Sugarcreek and jumped out of the car. I pulled her out quickly and stood her up on the trunk of the car with just second to spare before this roared overhead:



Since it's not that clear from the photo, that's a Hercules C-130, one of my favorite military planes. This graceful, prop-powered behemoth was the perfect plane for her first close-up. She practically fell over trying to keep an eye on it and she let out a loud giggle as it roared past. I said "Wow, was that cool or what? You could almost touch it!" "I can touch it?" she asked? Maybe someday, Sweetie, when I take you to your first airshow. :-)

We got home, and once I convinced her she couldn't have chocolate for dinner no matter how many times she said it, we decided on soup. But, we didn't have any that either of us wanted. So, we headed over to my least favorite store, Walmart and grabbed a couple of cans of Chicken & Stars which we shared. Although it was fun introducing her to this childhood favorite, I think we'll wait a while before trying it again. Who knew it could take a two year old an hour and a half to get every last star from the bottom of her bowl...

After dinner, we played for a bit and then got her ready for bed. She went down easily and Daddy headed down to spend some quiet time with his computer before Mommy came home....which had its own levels of fun we'll gloss over... ;-)

Oh, and this finally arrived!!



That's a "Remembrance of the Daleks" Collector's Set. Only available in the UK, our good friend Michelle (the babysitter that started this tale) was able contact family to get it over to me. Ever since I first saw that episode a lifetime ago I've wanted a Special Weapons Dalek, and I'm pretty sure this is the only time it's ever been available in miniature form. SQUEEE!!

Taken together, each of these are minor incidents, but together they made for one hell of a good night. Probably one of the best I've had in a long time. I'm sorry Michelle's daughter had to get five stitches for it to happen, but I certainly wouldn't trade it for anything!

Console-ing myself transparently

I spend a lot of time in the command line, so it would be convenient for me to have access to a console at all times.  The only problem is it's so easy to forget not close it, plus it's never big enough, plus I don't want it in the task list/pager, etc, etc.  I've tried solutions like Yakuake and Guake, but they never quite fit my needs.

Besides, I'm playing around with Linux, right?  Might as well try cobbling together a Linuxish solution that works exactly how *I* want it to.  So, first, I put together some requirements:

- Needs to always be available.
- Needs to be unobtrusive.
- Needs to be big enough to see full lines of whatever I was working on (such as looking at logs).
- Needs to not hide the desktop.

After looking over my requirements, I decided that what I was looking for was essentially one of those cool transparent and undecorated consoles that you see in the screenshots of the really cool kids.  First, we need to install a couple of packages: sudo aptitude install wmctrl devilspie. I'll explain their uses as I get to them.

The first one we'll setup is Devil's Pie.  This is a unique utility that runs in the background. At launch, it reads in any Devli's Pie scripts in ~/.devilspie. These scripts are made up of rules that tell Devil's Pie "when you see a window launch that matches these attributes, apply these settings to it". You can set placement (such as making sure an app always launches in a particular location or workspace) or display characteristics. We're going to use the latter to remove the title bar from a very specific console and nail it to the desktop.

To start, open Gnome Terminal (you can use whatever you want, just apply similar settings). Edit -> Profiles -> New.

- On the General tab, give the profile a name. I'm calling mine DesktopConsole. Uncheck "Show menubar by default in new terminals."

- Title and Command tab, set the Initial Title also to DesktopConsole and set "When terminal commands set their own titles" to "Keep initial title".

- Background tab, uncheck "Use background settings from system theme" and choose Transparent background. Set transparency to whatever's most comfortable for you. We'll be modifying this on the fly later, but need an initial setting.

- Scrolling tab, Scrollbar is Disabled.

Apply any other customizations, such as colors, as you like and then save the profile. Now, to make sure it launches at startup, we can just add it to Startup Applications in System -> Preferences, but I have need of a little more control, so we're going to create a script to launch it with. I put all of my scripts in ~/.bin, so

joe ~/.bin/launchconsole

Into which I add:

#!/bin/sh
gnome-terminal --window-with-profile=DesktopConsole --command=screen --geometry=400x200

This launches a new terminal window that uses my custom profile and launches Gnu screen. Screen's a tool that's well worth looking in to, especially for a setup like this. It allows you to essentially have multiple terminal sessions to use as you need. We will be going into more detail about it in later articles. We'll also see a little later why I used a script to launch a single command. Hint: it's not going to be alone for long! And, though I'm spreading this console across the desktop, I still specified a geometry. For some reason, what we do next never works properly without it.

If we launched it now, we'd get a transparent console, yes, but it's free-floating and still has a titlebar. Time for a slice of the Devil's Pie. If you don't already have one, you need to create a directory in your home for the scripts (mkdir ~/.devilspie). Then, we create the script to do all of the magic...or at least most of it (joe ~/.devilspie/DesktopConsole.ds)

(if
(matches (window_name) "DesktopConsole")
(begin
(undecorate)
(skip_pager)
(skip_tasklist)
(wintype "desktop")
)
)

Each Devil's Pie script can contain only one rule. In this case, the rule is "if you see a window with the name DesktopConsole apply these properties to it":

- undecorate: Removes the title bar from the window.

- skip_pager: Prevents the window from appearing in your alt-tab list of windows.

- skip_tasklist: Prevents it from showing up on taskbars.

- wintype "desktop": I played around with quite a few different types before finally finding and settling on "desktop". When you set this property, the window manager thinks of the window as another desktop. That means you can do all of the "show desktop" things (which minimize all windows) and the console remains. It also means the console is always below other windows.

So, to verify it works, we log off and back on and are presented with our lovely desktop console:



A little small, though, huh? Let's fix that by modifying that launchconsole script:

 

#!/bin/sh

# First we need to know the screen's resolution
screenResolution="`xrandr | grep \* | cut -d' ' -f4`"

# The above command returns the geometry of the screen, i.e. 1600x900
# So, we need to split that into two numbers we can plug in elsewhere in the script
# In the next couple of lines, we're using the bash split function and putting each
# number into its own cell in an array.
IFS="x"
arr=( $screenResolution )
IFS=""
# echo ${arr[1]}
screenHeight=${arr[1]}
screenWidth=${arr[0]}

# My top panel is 32 pixels high. The below setting ensures the console fills the
# remaining desktop
consoleFullHeight=$(($screenHeight-33))

# Launch the terminal
gnome-terminal --window-with-profile=DesktopConsole --command=screen

# wmctrl is a utility that allows you to control windows and their placement from the
# command line. This command tells it to place the console starting 33 pixels down
# from the top-left corner (right below the panel), and fill the screen.
wmctrl -r "DesktopConsole" -e 0,0,33,$screenWidth,$consoleFullHeight

# As you'll see in later articles, I've got some plans in mind to make this console
# usable in a Yakuake/Guake kind of way. As part of those plans, I'll need to modify the
# transparency of the console as needed. In order to ensure we start off
# transparent enough, we'll set this in the initial launch script.
gconftool --set "/apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Profile0/background_darkness" --type float .01

So, now we save this file, log off and log back on again.



Much better this time. We're good with this for the moment, but I've got an addition in the works to share with you soon. Beyond that, I've got my screen config and what I use that for. Hint: gMail and Mutt. gMutt.

Mmmmm...McSkeptic burgers

Recently on Facebook, my wife reshared a link to a video her friend had posted that's been making its way around the Intertubes. It was apparently posted by a vegan with a vendetta against we normal, eat-meating types.

When I first saw this video, I chose not to say anything as I figured the worst case scenario is that my daughter and I would have to visit McDonalds in secret (she loves Chicken McNuggets almost as much as her Daddy). And, when my wife brought it up to me later, I pretty much gave her a non-committal shrug and a smile as I was really looking to avoid a fight over a trivial matter. But, the reality is, it's not trivial.

As Dr. Novella points out today, it really highlights how the general public really has no idea what constitutes good evidence. This is why we have a significant portion of our population who believes our current President is a Muslim or wasn't born in the US. Despite living in the 21st century and thus having easy access to all of the world's information, creationists, climate change deniers and those who still believe in a geocentric solar system (yes, they not only still exist, they have conferences) are actually growing in number. Even more ironic, it's DUE to having access to the world's information, and thus the treasure trove of ignorant blather that makes up most of it, is what's causing this disease to spread faster than it would normally.

How can this be? Simple: we no longer teach critical thinking skills. People like this choose a point of view and then find evidence to back it up. Then, and this is the critical part, no matter how much ACTUAL evidence they're presented with to the contrary, they refuse to acknowledge any of it. And, what is the amateur videographer's point of view? Well, I have to assume it's that McDonalds is some evil corporation selling you some evil meat-like product designed to ensure you'll die an early death. Since I have no evidence to the contrary, I've proven my hypothesis by simply stating it. Science is SOOOOO easy! Let's face it, McDonalds really doesn't want you to know what's in their food, right?. I mean, I had to click like three different times on their website to get the list of ingredients for all of their products! Who knows what's in this "beef" they claim their patties are made of?!

I think what I find funniest about this is the woman links to a BBC video wherein the host has done some time lapse videos as well to show what happens to food as it rots. Ironically, none of the meat in his video shows signs of mold, either. It does get eaten by larvae and flies, as is to be expected, but it doesn't mold. Really all she's done is proven she has a clean house free of flies. Good for her.

As Dr. Novella says, this is an observation, it's not an experiment. It's meaningless. When we cook meat, we do so to kill all contaminants (Yes, it's also about pre-breaking down some of the amino acids and proteins thus making them easier for us to digest, but do you really think most people understand THAT part of it?), so it's actually surprising to me that someone would be surprised that a cooked meal doesn't mold.

I don't know what the solution is, though. Ignorance is a protected right in the US, as is raising your kids to be just as ignorant. If you try to educate the kids so they won't be ignorant boobs like their parents, you're called a Nazi socialist spreading your liberal agenda. In poking around, it appears this woman's getting a lot of grief from the skeptical and scientific community. Hopefully, that'll be enough, but the reality is it won't. She's "popular" now. People are paying attention to her! McDonalds responded directly to her expose! She's a hero! Not a likely candidate for change.

In many ways, being a skeptic is tough. You have to face reality all the time. You have to listen to loved ones spout things that you know were disproven in the Middle Ages. You have to watch the US grow more and more clueless every day. But, at least in this instance, I'm a winner. I can still eat at McDonalds with my daughter because I know that their burgers are cooked and I don't have to worry about biological contaminants!

Of course, the real question is: will my wife share my post with her McDonalds-avoiding friends?

Sentences childless people are not likely to hear

"Mommy, what's this?"

"Ugh, it's a booger Maeby.  Wipe it on the napkin."

"No."

"Maeby, give me the booger!!"

"Noooooooooooooo!!!"

My semi-regular trip to the dark side

Windows, Windows, Windows...I do love me some Windows!   In 1994, after recently upgrading to Windows for Workgroups 3.11, I had a revelation.  These were the early days of the Internet.  There was no web, you used Gopher instead.  There were no forums, we used Usenet and we LIKED IT!  Broadband?  Hell, dial-up networking?  What are these?  You wanted to get on the Internet, you used something like Telix* and communicated with the world via a command line.  It was a wild time.

Where was I?  Oh, yes...anyway, one night I needed to download some massive 1 or 2 megabyte files over my 19k modem from school, but I also wanted to play this new game I'd just bought called Warcraft (no "World of", just Warcraft).  What was I to do?  I thought about risking running both Telix and Warcraft under WfW and hope for the best.  After all, this new WinG platform Microsoft was touting was supposed to make everything work smooth, right?

So, I went for it.  I got thoroughly immersed in the game for a while and lost track of time.  Not thinking, I Alt-Tabbed over to Telix to see how things were going and immediately thought "Oh, crap! There goes everything I was doing!"  You see, back in those days, Windows had a bit of a reputation.  If you tried to run more than one thing at a time, it would crash!  You certainly didn't try multi-tasking a DOS app with anything, and certainly not with a game!  "You're a fool!" the crowds would shout!

But, to my surprise, the downloads were still progressing.  I was still online with Telix!  "Wow"  I thought.  "That's weird."  But, I just KNEW my game would be hosed.  So, I Alt-Tabbed back to see the carnage....and my little peons that I had told just prior to switching to go gather some trees were just heading out to begin a-choppin'.  The game hadn't frozen...it had paused!  This made no sense...

That's when the revelation hit me: this was a fresh install of Windows for Workgroups 3.11.  That means it was at least a pretty good approximation of what Microsoft intended your experience to be and it worked...as long as I hadn't screwed around with it.  The revelation was disheartening: PEBKAC.  Like most people, I blamed Microsoft for all of my woes, but the reality is an operating system is only as stable as its admin.

Having taken the "It's Windows, what do you expect" hammer out of my toolbox, I started to really get an appreciation for Microsoft's products.  Now, I know when something's broke it can be fixed.  A person doesn't have to live with blue screens.   They are not, as one commenter once said "Microsoft's way of telling you you need to reboot".  They're error messages that contain valuable information about what's wrong!

I attest my success in the IT field to the way I approach things.  For example, I follow Microsoft's best practices as closely as possible because that's what they tested!  They know THAT configuration works and this one doesn't.  You can't support a half billion dollar/year revenue generating environment on an unstable and unreliable platform...and that's why we run ours on Windows!  But, I'm not here to evangelize Microsoft products to you or try to convince you that if you have negative impressions of them the fault is yours alone (even though that's true :) ).  No, I'm here today to tell you about my current interest episode which includes Ubuntu Linux.

"LINUX?  You think I'm going to listen to some WINDOWS guy badmouth my beloved OS?"

Nope.  You see, I mentioned earlier that my install of WfW was a fresh one.  Why do you think it was fresh?  Because I had been giving this new OS called "Linux" a trial run on my machine.   I'd been reading about it for a while on the Intertubes about how light and fast and easy on resources it was.  As I was a Computer Science major at the University of Rochester, I wanted to be one of the cool kids using Unix so I set out trying to find it.  I actually headed to the UR computing center one day with a box of 4-5 floppy disks to see if someone could put it on there for me.   Hey, I was told it was small and light, and since DOS + Windows amounted to 6-7 disks, Linux must be MUCH less, right?

After poking around, I managed to find a copy of the only distribution in town: Slackware.   It wasn't even Slackware 1.0 since the Linux kernel itself was still only around version 0.98, but I downloaded all 15 disks (15!!), wiped my computer and installed it.  And, it didn't work...Well, let me clarify.  The OS worked, but the X-Windows system that provided a GUI on top of it didn't work all that well.  I had a crappy Trident video card that could only do 640x400 (that's not a typo.  It wasn't 480, it was 400) in 16 colors and X didn't know how to do that well.  There also weren't very many X-based programs out there for it.  Basically, you could multitask some console windows, have a nifty clock window, and a pair of eyes that followed your mouse around.  Very unimpressive.  Click the link for X-Windows.  The Wikipedia article has a picture of about the best you could hope for back then at the top.  Ugly, right?

But, I used it for a while anyway.  I struggled, I fought and eventually...I reinstalled Windows.  There was no benefit whatsoever to me running this OS at the time.  In fact, thanks to my crappy video card it was much crashier than Windows!  But, I remained interested in it.  I followed development over the years.  When the kernel hit 1.0, I purchased a new machine to be my primary and installed it on the old (after upgrading that video card, of course).  Each year since I'd give the latest and greatest a test run here and there.  Sometimes they'd last days, sometimes months.  Sometimes it never made it past being installed in a virtual machine.

For a good long time, I even used Linux From Scratch as my primary OS.  In fact, I spoke at VPNCon in Toronto and Linux World Expo in Boston about using Linux From Scratch to provide my company at the time with a free VPN solution that worked wonders!  Many an article (halfway down, ignore the horrible picture) was written about the one trick this pony pulled off there.

But, while LFS was fun, it was a pain in the ass.  Each upgrade required careful tweaking and tuning to make sure I didn't break a hundred other things.  Some things never worked right, and others just never happened at all.  I became a believer in package management systems.  Redhat's yum made me happy for a while, but it was eventually trying out Debian (pronounced DEB-ian, not DE-bian.  It's named after the original author, Ian and his girlfriend, Deb.  Betcha didn't know that!) that gave me an inkling that this "year of the Linux desktop" I'd been hearing about for a decade or so might come to pass.

A few years back a new distribution that was based on Debian called Ubuntu hit the scene and really made a splash.   Ubuntu was designed to combine the ease of upgrading/installing/maintaining from a Debian system with the usability of a Redhat desktop.  They've got some good directives and history behind them, not to mention a huge fan base.  The most recent iterations, 10.04 and as of last Sunday 10.10, have been widely acclaimed as "Windows-killers".  My wife's actually been using a Xubuntu desktop for a couple of years now, and aside with some weirdness with her trackpad I can't replicate, I've gotten no complaints from her.

And, the point of all this?  About three weeks ago, I wiped my little laptop that was running Windows 7 (I really do love me some Windows 7, though!) and put the beta of Xubuntu 10.10 on.  I ran it for about two weeks during which time I installed the Netbook Remix desktop, the Ubuntu desktop, Lubuntu desktop and Edubuntu desktop on top of it....and seriously borked the install.   But, that's ok.  I was really putting it through its paces to see which install I wanted to use as a base.  I had partitioned my drive up with a 10G OS partition and the remainder setup as home, so when I finally decided to just go with the plain vanilla Ubuntu it was a 20 minute reinstall.

I did have some issues with my wireless for a while there, but I was able to work those out and have gotten down to the business of serious fiddling.  Yeah, Ubuntu's got a reputation in the community as "the Windows of Linux" because it's easy to use.  The gods forbid!  But, this is my primary machine.  This is what I use to do...whatever it is I do.  It needs to work!  Playing is fine.  Fiddling is fine, but at the end of the day when I need to do something it better be able to do with it!  And, that's really the point: I have an OS that I can use AND play with.  It's still Linux under there, and once you see what I've done to it under the hood, you'll see that.

So, the articles I have on tap detail the things I've done as well as possible plans for the future.  Could be fun!

* Seriously?  You're still SELLING Telix?  For $79.99?  You DO know DOS is kinda over, right?  Don't get me wrong, I LOVED Telix!  It was one of the most popular pieces of shareware ever and with good reason: it worked and worked well.  It was one of the few I remember actually paying for!  But...do you really still have people paying for it?

What's with the name?

"Oh, look! A chicken!"?  What the heck is THAT supposed to mean?  Those who know me know I have ADHD.  As I was only diagnosed a few years back, I've come to realize that I had been trying to make my essentially flawed brain fit models that are more suited to the general populace than me.  For example, the vast majority of the population learns very well using the standard educational model of  regurgiteachin': "teach, repeat, regurgitate".

While I generally did very well in school, it was very difficult for me as that's not how I learn.   Finding that out was a great revelation for me, but it did leave one huge question: how DO I learn best?  Figuring that out has been a personal quest for the last few years, and I have made some recent advances in my discoveries.

Like most people, I've found I do learn best when I'm immersed in a topic.  This is the generally recommended way, for example, to learn a foreign language (not that I need to do that, I'm an American, dammit!  We speak English and we do it poorly!).  Learn the grammar and syntax, but also engage the cultural side: eat the native foods of that region, read their local news, their books.  Learn their songs and art.  This is great for those who are able to maintain focus on a topic for long periods of time, but what about the rest of us?

I won't mince words: I'm a technology expert.  My primary expertise lies in the area of enterprise infrastructure.  You want a major environment setup that generates hundreds of millions in revenue and needs 25/8 availability to do it?  I'm your guy.  While I primarily deal with the Windows Server world, I'm also quite competent with Linux and other Unix variants as well.  I have a wide breadth of knowledge, and the way I've come to it is because of the ADHD.  For a few months, I might be a on a Linux "kick" and will devote a ton of time and effort into delving further into that platform.  Soon after, I might be full tilt in love with Citrix platforms or the new version of Windows that just came out.  It's tough to say where my brain'll take me next and I've arbitrarily followed it over the years.  Recently, though, I've decided to come up with a more formalized method of maximizing on this "negative" I live with.

The "A-HA!" moment came a couple of years ago when I was doing some remodeling work in our bathroom (I can do carpentry, plumbing and electrical work all due to the fact that I had a brief interest in learning how to do it at one point :) ) I had gotten everything back together and the sink re-mounted when I realized I hadn't tightened one of the screws for the shelf above the sink.  The screw wasn't critical, it's a glass shelf and this was just a tension screw that kept it from flopping around.  Where it was placed made the likelihood of that happening minimal, but I still wanted to do a thorough job.  Unfortunately, I also didn't want to re-remove the sink to get at the screw.  So, I compromised with myself.  I taped a note to myself on the bottom of the sink that said "Don't forget to tighten that screw on the shelf!  Love, you!"  Yes, I always tell myself I love me in my notes to myself.

About a year later, the sink was clogged and I had to take it off the wall to get to the pipes to snake it (it's a VERY small bathroom) and I noticed the note which I'd actually forgotten about.  So, I tightened the screw.   My wife had thought the note was a bit silly, but had to admit it had been a good idea once she saw how well it worked.

The drawback to my previous "interest episodes"  was that it might have taken me months or even years to get back into a particular topic.  As such, I would spend a lot of time during the next one reacquainting myself with the basics.  After percolating for a while in my head, that note under the sink lead to the idea of leaving myself notes when I'm interested in a topic.  Basically, everything I learn, I document.  When I do get back to a topic, I can quickly review to where I left off and just build on that.  At the moment, I'm calling this informal framework "Breadcrumbs".   Like leaving breadcrumbs to find your way back out of the dark forest, my goal is to start using the tools that are available for managing information and using that to create notes I can leave for myself to then build on to greater sums of knowledge.

I've tried this with a couple of topics and initial results look good.  The big problem I did run into is how best to organize this knowledge?  I have pages of notes that don't make a whole lot of sense at times to Current Me.  I'm sure Past Me knew exactly what he was talking about, but I just see some weird ramblings.  Since I'm in the process of migrating this blog, and I'm currently in a writing "episode", I figured what better way to provide myself clear, easy to follow notes than by providing clear, easy to follow notes to the whole world?  There's a line of thinking that says "if you can't explain it to someone else, you don't understand it yourself".  Another saying I'm fond of is "teaching others is the best way to learn".

So, going forward, I'll be writing a lot of technical articles on whatever topic I'm stuck on at the moment (current topic: Ubuntu Linux).  I hope that someone out there might get some use out of some of this.  But, if not, at least I know *I* will!

Future Me, I hope you appreciate this!

Oh, yes...the title of the blog.

 

 

 

Sorry 'bout the RSS spam

A few years ago, I decided to start establishing an online presence to help with that whole "personal brand" thing.  As I had recently setup a Windows Live account to take advantage of all that space available from Windows Live Skydrive, I figured I  would just use the provided blogging feature, Windows Live Spaces.

Alas, as even Microsoft has come to recently realize, Live Spaces was a terrible blogging platform.  Lacking easy customization features and a kludgy editing interface made me less than interested in writing posts and it just slowed me down.  Microsoft has corrected this by simply admitting that this isn't their core competency, and there's no shame in that, and moving everyone to Wordpress instead.  I like this move as we use Wordpress to managed the TEDxRochester, so I'm familiar with it and it does seem to be a good platform.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Anyway, on to the apology: as I wrote about in a series of  earlier posts, I use Yahoo Pipes to merge all of my online writing into a single RSS feed that I can then insert into other streams like my Linked In profile or at Facebook.  Unfortunately, I didn't think ahead about this and when I changed the URL from the old Live Spaces to this new blog, my vanity feed re-pulled everything I've posted to date and I inadvertently spammed those profiles, etc.  So, I apologize to everyone for not taking that into account.  I'll keep a closer eye on things going forward!