Random Thoughts

I installed Picasa on my Ubuntu box today. It uses wine! For those who don't know what wine is, 'wine is not a (windows) emulator' for Linux. I used to hate wine. I had tried to run Kazaa way back in the day to get things off the internet and believe me, I got it to work, but with many hours of painful configuration. Linux has come a LONG way since then. I ran a ps --forest and viola fatherted 8569 1 3 16:12 ? 00:00:11 /opt/picasa/wine/bin/../lib/../bin/wineserver fatherted 8721 1 0 16:12 ? 00:00:00 c:\windows\system32\explorer.exe /desktop fatherted 8959 1 0 16:12 ? 00:00:01 PicasaMediaDetector fatherted 9198 1 71 16:12 ? 00:03:18 c:\Program Files\Picasa2\Picasa2.exe It runs everything in wine. And I didn't have to d...

Friday, I went over to Jon's house in the middle of suburbia. Serious suburbia in Virginia somewhere by the way. A place where houses dote the landscape and there are no sidewalks and no way to get into or out of unless you own a car or like risking your life on a highway of some sort! Jon has this little critter called Luda at his place... its under 5 pounds in body mass but it sure puts on quite a show. I think I spent a few hours playing with that little critter and I absolutely envy every dog owner now. Jon mentioned that he wished he had a dog growing up. I guess a lot of people refuse to let their kids get dogs for various reasons. My family isn't like that thankfully. I was born into a house full of dogs. From German Shepards to Pomeranians to daschunds to 3 generations of English Springer Spaniels, dogs have been part of a good chunk of my life. Every day that I lived in India/Africa, there was a dog in the house. Literally, aside from the time spent in cars/buses, tr...

So, a couple of weeks or so ago, someone showed up in DC. He was an old man. They call him his holiness. Or the pope. He came to see his followers in the new world, to say hello and to create a buzz. Guess what? He did. The pope's visit out here seems to have been quite a successful venture for the Catholic church. He addressed probably the one big taboo that no one really thought he would... or perhaps he would brush it by or pretend it didn't exist or something else. But, refreshingly, he didn't do any of those. He took on the issue head on. He apologised for it. He prayed. He met with the victims of abuse. He apologised again. He told his flock to do better. I am impressed. While I am not sure if it was an elaborate ruse to put the sceptics off or not, whatever the case, he pulls it off without sounding smug or looking down on the rest of us. I fully would have expected those two options. But, he seemed genuine. And he reiterated it plenty of times. No, I am not about to...

It has been 7 months since I was last in Vancouver. It is quite hard to believe that I have been away from my beloved little city for so long. While it is true that I was not born there, nor did I really grow up there (well, I moved there when I was 15, so I guess I did a bit of growing up there) Vancouver is, for most intents and purposes, my home. The only other place that I would consider home is India... It is amazing how much I miss that place. I miss the rain terribly. I miss the greenery, the mountains, I miss the good food, my good friends, the transit system... the sensible design, the politics of Canada, the TV... the list goes on. To the casual reader, the obvious question that has no doubt crossed the mind is, well if you miss it so much, why the heck are you not there? I don't know how to answer that except to offer sub par excuses... like, I need money to go there. Well, don't you work? Sure I do. Well then, why not just take a week off and go home? I don't k...

A while back, I blogged wondering about getting HD over the air. A bit after that, I saw a deal on an antenna: the Philips MANT940 from buy.com for a somewhat reasonable $30 or so after shipping was added. I got it. It took a while to get to me, and once I got it, I was ready to set it up. I live in a basement suite and as you can probably guess, getting signals of any sort can sometimes be a problem. DC is relatively flat, so you don't have the problems I experienced in the past with antennas in Vancouver where my location on a hill (on the wrong side of the hill) didn't really help get decent signals. Anyway, I opened the box, took out the 4 pieces, plugged in the antenna (which looks very different from the rabbit ear types) with the provided cable, the signal amplifier and the little piece that connects into the coax outlet on the TV. I put the antenna by my TV and let it search for channels. Soon enough, it picked up about 30 or so channels! I was impressed. A couple of...

I've been running Firefox 3 beta versions for a while now. It comes as the default browser on Ubuntu and my new Vista box runs Firefox 3 beta 5. I have my own list of Firefox plugins, the most useful ones I use are Forecast fox and that's probably it. Well no. I use a plugin called Adblock Plus and a companion of that, that has lists of ads to block. You never really know that it is even in play until you stop using it. At any rate, neither of those plugins work on Firefox 3 beta 5. Yet. As a result, every page that I visit (including the BBC of all places!) has advertiesements galore. You know those things that blink in a multitude of colours getting in your way of reading whatever it is that you're trying to read. Facebook is littered with them, many of the blogs I read are full of them, pretty much any page I searched for on google ends up having these darn things all over the place. I hate web ads. I don't think I have ever bought anything from the web because of a ...

It happened. I fell sick. I rarely fall sick. I rarely see physicians. Not because I have anything against them or a fear of needles or whatever, I am general not unhealthy and have so far gone without health issues. It started with a fever. I thought it was a one off. Maybe I imagined the fever. I woke up the next day, I felt a bit tired, this and that hurt but whatever, its a Wednesday, what do you expect. Well, it got worse at work. I sat there and I felt tired. I felt hot, I felt my head hurt, I felt like throwning up, going home, etc. I went home, fully intending to do my taxes only to barely make my way home and crash in bed. I took an asprin and I went to bed. I woke up a few hours later and thought I felt a lot better. I probably did. For a bit. The next day was worse. I woke up sweating. I took a shower, had some breakfast and thought I felt better. So I headed off to work. I had many reasons to go. I don't like missing a day of work. I thought I could make it through the ...