Via the excellent, take-no-prisoners Pharyngula, Richard Dawkins on some basic methodology differences between science & religion. Funny, and very, very true.
More Hawai’i
It’s taking me longer to go through the photos from the trip than the trip itself took. I apparently shot 90+ photos per day (about 680 in a week!), and poking through them a bit at a time pads the return to reality a bit, at least.
Updates, Lucid, Oahu, Etc
Haven’t blogged in over a month – so much for regular updates and such. Oh well.
New version of Ubuntu is out, haven’t upgraded yet due to lack of hard drive space – still haven’t done the warranty RMA on my big, but glitched, 500GB drive. Maybe next week. I have played with Lucid on my brother’s machine – WTF is the thinking behind the wandering window control buttons? I stopped playing with Ubuntu/GNOME themes several releases ago – the defaults worked fine and looked OK – but wandering window buttons are irritatingly stupid, especially on an LTS release. Reverting to the older, saner (browner…) theme will have to be the first thing I do once I do move up to 10.04.
I already get rid of the multi-user-switcher thing and the seperate power-management widget as useless panel clutter on this single-user desktop machine; possibly my perferences for the ideal Ubuntu appearance fossilized several releases ago?
In more personal, cooler news, just got back from a week in Hawai’i. Never been before, and I loved Oahu, despite Honolulu’s traffic! I’m still going through several hundred photos, but here’s a few favourites from the first couple of days of the trip!
Quick Links to Amusing Things, 31 March 2010
8-Bit NYC. This is why you open data, so that people can do very strange & awesome things with it.
Snow (1963). Trains, an English winter, and some experimental filmmaking. Very neat.
Imperial Leftovers
The survival into the modern era of random bits of the colonial/imperial era has always interested me.
Bagpipes are also kind of cool. When outdoors.
Thus, The Bagpipes of Palestine from the BBC. Amazing what survives against long odds, isn’t it?
Project Creep In Action
"The flying saucer originally started as a proposal for a raiseable platform."
Ladies, gentlemen, and the rest of you: The British Rail Flying Saucer (via Wikipedia).
Yes, really.
(hat tip to Corey for the URL).
Feb 12 1935: USS Macon crashes
…and on Feb 12 2010, 75 years later to the day, the US Gov’t declares the big dirigible’s wreck site a National Historic Monument.
The Macon and her sister-ship Akron were unique amongst dirigibles – they had an embarked air wing of six Sparrowhawk biplane fighters. This is pure pulpish awesomeness – flying aircraft carriers! Except for the part about them both crashing in storms, of course…
Lucidity
There’s still search engines out there other than Google? Really?
Foggy Holiday
One photo and a photo-panorama from December 24th, just because I haven’t posted anything in a while…
The panorama was six photos originally, stitched in Hugin. The flat grey foggy background seemed to cause Hugin some issues – notice how obvious a few of the vertical join lines are in the centre of the image. Odd.
I had someone email me a few days ago about my Nov. 25th F-Spot blogpost and it’s long discussion thread. I’d planned to do a followup post in early December, but holidays and reality obviously got in the way, and I’ve got WordPress set up to automatically close commenting after three weeks to frustrate the spambots a bit. I’ll do a proper followup F-Spot post this week!
Hope everyone had a satisfactory, safe holiday season.
Exciting Olympic Links, Round 2
Apparently the City of Vancouver and/or VANOC (the Vancouver Olympic Committee) are gunning for anti-Olympic graphics again. More links on that BoingBoing story, but the ongoing efforts of the BC Civil Liberties Association during this runup to the Olympics have been heroic.
This collection would cause VANOC to collectively crap themselves, especially the VANOC logo redone with drug paraphernilia.
Over on the other side of the country, the Mounties in yet another attempt to quash more anti-Olympic sentiment. Because we’re all supposed to be happy and joyful that we’re hosting this corporate greedfest disguised as a sports event, haven’t you heard?
Previous Olympic excitement here.