Headers Already Sent

A few pics of our family get together on boxing day. Thanks Chris for taking them, they came out well!

…and one of the chef…

We had our departmental Christmas lunch yesterday afternoon which was really good fun. Not much to say other than my secret santa gift was this cool punch bottle opener thing. I tested it out last night and it works with varying degrees of success, depending on how hard you hit it, which in turn depends on how much you’ve had to drink.

Completely stoked!

I’ve been thinking about mortality and the impermanence of things a lot lately. I think as you see the change of seasons and the birth/death cycle in nature you turn inward and start contemplating your own existence (that and it’s winter so there’s naff all to do outside of work). By pure chance I found a website that deals with this called ‘Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptics Guide‘. It was nice to know I’m not the only one who agonises over little matters like dying. This site did a very good job of summing up some of the feelings many people do face when approaching these issues. It has a great quotes page too I urge everyone to check out.

Most people just seem to turn off when faced with the thought of their own end, or trust in a God to somehow continue their consciousness. Self proclaimed atheists just usually say ‘Oh, there’s nothing when you die…it probably all goes black’ and then go about their day. I don’t know how anyone can actually say that with little or no worry and think they have found the definitive answer. Anyone who has thought about it for more than about 20 seconds realises there are many many more questions which need answering, and don’t normally shrug it off so easily. A few make is their life’s work to find the answers. However, I’m betting the great irony here probably is that atheists are absolutely right.

I can’t shrug it off so easily, there’s something inside of me that won’t allow it (what ‘I’ am is another can of worms that I won’t go into here). I think I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that I’m nothing, and more importantly, understand what that means to have any sort of peace on the matter. It’s all crazy though, life is certainly very strange.

Anyway, in between bursts of shallow philosophical thought and random craziness, large amounts of beer are still consumed. Infact, beer helps with the thinking. I’ll let the picture below do all the talking. You can direct your thanks to Matt for arranging them in this smart pattern.

(Phone to PC with Ubuntu - HAL Just works!)

Well I finally did it: I ditched my Gentoo installation. Many reasons for this but I think the main one is that I don’t have enough time to maintain it. I could never get acpi/bluetooth working quite right (amongst other things), my sound broke a few days ago somehow and I didn’t want to take another weekend out to fix it, plus I was a little sick of being scared to update. I wanted an installation I could update in seconds, not hours… one that just worked and one that most definitely was not a mac. For the learning experience Gentoo was something else and it’ll always have a place in my nerdy little heart. For old systems I’ll look to it again, but for the new hardware compiling everything really isn’t needed.

Out with the old and in with the new. When thinking about what to upgrade to the choice was obvious. Ubuntu has gained a massive following over the past few years so I just had to give it a shot to see what all the fuss was about.

Wireless Just works!

I’m very impressed. Installation was a breeze and took very little time. Installing the ATI graphics driver was a piece of cake and I was reconfigured and back up and running with most of my software in about 6 hours with everything working smoothly. I tried gnome for a while but quickly realised that I still don’t like it - although it does look nicer than I remember - so I enabled kubuntu-desktop in synaptic and bang! I had KDE.

Restricted Driver Manager

I’m not going to say anything else other than it’s good and if you’re looking to change from Windows, or maybe even Gentoo, then look no further. You can grab it here.

My Sister turned 18 on Friday so I sorted her out a website.

See it at lizzielaming.com.