Isolationism

I apologise for a quiet couple of days here on the blog; I’ve been busy doing a bit of maintenance on my desktops.

While I was eventually successful in upgrading Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft, I experienced frequent lock-ups for no good reason (while the machine was doing literally nothing more than playing music in Amarok). It goes without saying that if an OS can’t be trusted to play an mp3, I don’t want to depend on it for anything more important (which is just about everything).

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A recent article on Digg.com suggests that a number of Ubuntu users are experiencing difficulties upgrading from Dapper Drake to the recently released Edgy Eft.

I took the plunge myself yesterday, and spent a hair-pulling day coaxing Ubuntu to install all the packages by apt-get, then by the GUI upgrade tool (several times), then by apt-get again. Eventually, after a number of tries (including one user-aborted attempt because of ridiculously slow downloads and several installation failure aborts), apt-get didn’t want to install anything else and I rebooted and—gratifyingly—everything came up fine, and all the upgrades appear to be present.

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Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical Ltd. (the creators of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution) posted on his blog today that he feels that skin-deep beauty is what Ubuntu desperately needs right now (before rambling on about something a little less to-the-point—maybe it sounds better when you hear it in from him in person).

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Not that Digg is exactly my favourite news site—I think its’ “unedited” approach allows far too much chaff through the nearly non-existant filters: Myriad duplicate stories, bad (or non-existant) writing, too many exclamation marks, rampant use of superlatives, all caps, etc. (e.g.: “OMG WORST SITE ON THE INTERNET!!!” being an accurate summary)—but it would be a shame all the same to see it tumble under the likes of News Corporation, that entity which is ‘famous’ for Fox News, and their moderately recent online acquisition, MySpace.

Rupert Murdoch is evidently catching on that the Web is a potent medium and is buying up assets quickly (although Digg has some respite for now as nobody was willing to lay down the 150 million they were hoping for)—but I find myself wishing he would leave it alone.

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…or:

Why I Won’t Be Buying Vista Or Any Software From Microsoft Ever Again

I’ve had a frustrating couple of days trying to get my old copy of Windows XP up and running inside the free VMWare Player package using Ubuntu as the host operating system; getting the player up and running was easy; I just marked the package for installation in Synaptic and a couple minutes later it was ready to run.

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In case you’ve been living in a dungeon (a particularly crude dungeon without internet access) and have just stepped out into the daylight, Firefox 2.0 has been officially released less than a week after MSIE 7.0 went gold.

You can download it now from Mozilla’s official server. You can also check out the Slashdot discussion on the topic, which is bound to be both extensive and entertaining.

Allow me to join the celebration in congratulating the Mozilla team on another milestone release of their fantastic product. May the best browser win.

Gavin over at Machine Lake makes some interesting observations for the possibilities of environmental/ambient audio from perspectives besides my own (my interests are primarily for entertainment purposes as well as a sleep aide and treatment for some mild forms of depression), focusing on modern practical and branding applications.

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This is the first post in what will hopefully grow to become a small series about recording sound effects (especially the natural variety) with a special focus on use in environmental audio simulations. The reason for this little series is directly related to my hobby of designing such simulations using Boodler, an excellent, undervalued, and largely unknown piece of software for doing exactly that. My hope is to spread the word about this great piece of software to everyone from the casual listener to the sound professional in the hopes of meeting other enthusiasts to learn and share with.

The best way to get sounds for use in such environmental audio simulations is to record them yourself; while other means exist of collecting sounds, they may be of inferior quality, inappropriate for some reason or other, and sounds from other sources are probably use- and copy-restricted—After all, part of the fun is being able to share the fruits of your labour with others!

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I once heard an apt description Ottawa in that it has two seasons: Summer and Winter.

I was out at 8:00pm tonight to barbeque some venison burgers (kindly donated from Becka’s friend, Sandy, some months ago—they were delicious, thank you Sandy and Scott) and the barbeque cover was welded on with ice even though the temperature at the airport even now (at nearly 1:00am) is still one degree above the freezing point.

I don’t hate the winter, but it’s definitely not my favourite season. Here are a few things I’d like to try (and one or two I try to do already) to beat the winter blues.

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A letter from—and a phone call to—two dear friends yesterday reminded me of how dearly I miss those close to my heart who have moved abroad, be it for a change of scenery or pace, an exciting new career, an opportunity to discover new places or potential hidden within, or to be closer to family.

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