Dave’s Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Coming Soon…

I’m going to be a sponsor of a local golf tournament to help raise money for St. Jude Children’s Hospital.  The tournament is going to be at Western Hills Golf Club just off of Auburn Road on the west edge of Topeka.  All of the proceeds will go to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It will take place this Thursday, August the 7th.

The fun begins at about 11 a.m., but you should try to arrive a little early.  Advanced registration is preferred.  The entry fee is $65 per person and covers for your green fees, golf cart, food (Chili’s restaurant will be providing fajitas!) and beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic).  Teams of four will compete for prizes!  Some of the prizes up for grabs include golf bags, coolers, camping chairs, and much more.  I will personally be giving away one hour of free on-site tech support to each member of the team who ranks first place at the end of the tournament.  So don’t miss out!!!

Not all things lately have been depressing, though you might think different after my last two greatly spaced postings here.  But as a matter of fact they’ve been rather uplifting for me.  Business is steady, one of my latest clients being a non-profit organization for the blind and visually impaired, as well as receiving a call from a local web developer who shares my mutual dislike for corporate policies designed to perpetuate technical difficulties for their customers.  (For example, a customer who is interested in a new computer would be talked into upgrading a current one for a ridiculous price, a price that was actually higher than a new PC).  In particular he admired my promotion of Linux, something some businesses are afraid to invest time and money in as I enjoy doing.

So my life in general and business has never been better.  My girlfriend and I are going to begin living alone together FINALLY and our relationship is fantastic.  Don’t tell her this, but I’m gonna ask her to marry me one of these days (gotta save up some money for a bad ass engagement ring first.  I want to make it a big surprise).  Though, her father began chemotherapy last week and it comes with its rough days.  My hope is those rough days don’t increase… The possibility of an early death in the family echoes in the back of everyones mind, but it is important not to dwell on such thoughts.  Doing so is a drain on energy better spent thinking about the positive here and now.  Besides, miracles DO happen.  I’m a firm believer of that.

So… just a moment ago, I came across a link to a site that I feel deep empathy for…

The website is a photographic essay by Philip Toledano of he and his father as they spend time together.  I don’t know much more background detail, but from the looks of it, a new photo is added day by day.  It will make you stop and think about life and likely bring at least one tear to your eye.  Click on the picture above to visit the site.  If it’s down, try again later.  It’s being hammered right now by Digg.com users who are flocking to see the pictures and read their captions.  I was simply lucky enough to catch it before the servers were slammed.

Hey there, stranger.  Sorry I’ve not stopped by to drop a post for a while.  Not like it really makes a big difference in the world, but at least it lets the few visitors who do come by know that I’m not in a coma somewhere due to a horrible skating-ring limbo accident…  Which would be quite rare because I’ve not been to a skating ring since I was old enough to believe that biker gloves looked really cool.  They sold them at places like that right next to bottles of vanishing ink.

As far as trends in technology lately… well, there’s probably plenty of stuff I could rave about but nothing much has really caught my eye enough to make me want to write something about it.  And I’ve been rather lazy the last couple of weeks.  To be honest, I’ve been a little apathetic.  And then, as so predicted by Joseph Campbell in that first Mythos video I saw, I’ve begun to sort of disengage myself from the rest of the current events in the world.  As much as I would love to possibly alienate you with my own political satire, I’ll spare you.  I really have a lot of other more important things to focus on for the time being…

As mentioned in my previous blog a couple weeks ago or so, my girlfriends’ father had been diagnosed with colon cancer.  Soon after I got to Missouri a discussion with an oncologist had took place, and the prognosis he gave was much more dreadful than what we were hoping for.  His cancer has spread to his lungs, and chemotherapy has been scheduled to begin next week.  His spirit and mood have remained high, odd as it may seem to some who otherwise might feel great despair and depression, if not anger.  But I perceive him to be living, in some aspects, the best days of his life as he proceeds to carefully squeeze the last few drops of it, savoring it with a grand smile.  It is actually hard to tell just how much there is left for him to enjoy, which is just the way things should be in life.  Disturbing prognoses be damned.

And of course there is plenty of room for optimism and hope.  I’m looking foward to future visits to help support him and the family that I am also a part of.  I’m also looking forward to reading more of his blogs.  By the way, if you consider yourself to be a literary buff who appreciates extensive vocabulary and vividness in the stories you read, do yourself a favor and subscribe to his blog.

I was recently visited by a few very friendly e-mails from someone who has been quite taken by my blog.  I don’t know if it’s the layout I selected, the Ubuntu tutorials I have scattered about or the clever reference to the pineal gland in the subtitle… nevertheless, they demand I write more!  They even gave me a list of things to write about so I don’t have to spend time brainstorming topics that may or may not be interesting.

So that I don’t spend too much time writing this particular announcement, here’s a list of topics I intend to write about in the very near future:

• Terminal for Beginners
  • We’re going to take a look at the Terminal in Linux.  This is very similar to the Command Prompt found in DOS/Windows.  We’ll take a look at some of the most common commands used here, as well as some neat tricks and shortcuts you might fall in love with.
• Customizing Ubuntu’s Appearance
  • This is actually a topic that I said I wanted to do quite a while ago, but kind of let things slip.  In this topic, we’re going to take a look at gnome-look.org’s collection of desktop themes, as well as look at ways to change your login screens’ appearance.
• Ubuntu Application Reviews
  • For the first time ever, I’m going to begin writing reviews about different applications found in Ubuntu.  My hope is to bring attention to applications that are good, but not very well known yet.
• Gimp Tutorials
  • Gimp is an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop which is actually quite a powerful tool for being free.  I use it to create or modify all of the graphics on my website as well as promo images that you probably haven’t seen before.  We’ll take a look at simple things like cropping, scaling, rotation, a LOT of the tools in the tool box, a few filters, and whatever else pops up along the way.  It’ll be a lot of fun!
• Web Design Tips
  • I often get compliments about my website’s clean looking design.  I have to admit that a majority of the site was the result of a template that I stole out of Dreamweaver, but all of the work I’ve put into it since then has turned it into something very uniquely mine.  In at least one blog, I will write some tips for web design based upon the things I think my website does right (as well as a few things I think my site does wrong).

If you’re new, you might want to subscribe to my RSS feed. The easiest way to do this (in Firefox) is to click Bookmarks>Subscribe to this page.  A new special kind of bookmark will be added to your bookmarks collection.  When you click on it, all my posts will fan open and you can select the one you want to read.  What a time saver!

Stay tuned.

My loving girlfriend bought me a new monitor (click for larger picture).

Before you go and call me obsessive compulsive, I’ll have you know it took me at least an hour and a half to clean all the junk and dust off of my desk for this picture.  You’ll notice in the lower right corner that I’m using my mouse that my girlfriend also bought me for our one year anniversary!  I love that woman

This morning I decided to begin work on a lot of little things on my website.  The greatest change that has taken place so far is a simplification of wording used on my Virtual Dave page, so it’s now easier to read, and some excess crap was cut out.  I also modified my Services page to reflect a few new products that I now offer, namely Dave’s Custom Ubuntu Linux PCs and Web Development for small and medium size businesses;  I’m creating new pages for each of these new services at the moment.

Another idea I had of writing up storyboards and scripts for short promotional videos I’d like to make came into mind as well.  One idea that has been on the back burner for a little while now is a new Ubuntu Linux video for the FAQ, which would showcase Ubuntu 8.04.  It is a low priority to me for the time being, mostly because new users can’t see much of a difference between 8.04 and 7.10 in a short video.  What I’d like to focus on first is a video that demonstrates Virtual Dave.  And hopefully after that another video that will focus on my made-to-order Ubuntu Linux PCs.  And then finally something more along the lines of a very clever, funny commercial (it’s already been written, but won’t be shot for a while).

Ok, time to relax.

Wow, it’s been over a week since I last posted in here.  Having been so long since I last posted, I had to muddle through over 100 comments, 99.5% of which were spam and maybe one legit comment… though it’s hard to say really because I wasn’t paying very close attention when I marked them all as spam.  So, sorry if you actually posted one recently and it didn’t end up on the site.

The Business…

I recently got my apology/bribe money from the government and I’ve been looking forward to investing that money into some business related expenses (such as advertising, because it would probably just offend someone to death if I spent it all on silly things made in China).  I’ve also been waiting on a friend of mine to declare whether or not he would be able to participate in a business venture with me, and it turns out he won’t be available.  The ideal role for him would have been project management and accounting (a boring desk job).  If I were him, I would have said no too (but in truth, he really will not have extra time to spare for it).  He’s going to be working a lot of overtime with a new employer this coming year so I’ll have to wait and see if he’ll ever be able to participate with me some time later.

On the bright side I have two other associates ready for work — one a web developer/programmer and the other a graphics artist.  My hope is to combine all of our skills to offer a new slew of online and offline services.  One project we hope to take on very soon is designing a new website for a rural K-8 school; it being the first site that shall utilize content management software.  The goal is to have a powerful interactive website that will allow teachers to administer their own mini-sites for each class, with students also able to put content on the site (provided their stuff is given approval by each respective teacher in advanced).  It is an ambitious project and we’ll have plenty of time over the summer to kick it around the sandbox.  We also intend to create websites in advanced and approach small and medium sized businesses with a site that’s more or less been designed for them.  We’ll also combine this with ready-made advertising packages which can even include original logos we custom design.  Toss in Ubuntu Linux-based office PCs custom built and serviced by me and we’ll have an attractive, versatile selection of tools many businesses will probably be interested in using.

No more CCNA?

A while back, I got into this habit of writing about wanting to get my CCNA networking certification.  I’ve lost the motivation to continue writing about this for the time being, mostly because I think it’s really boring (no, really!).  There are many aspects about computer networking that I love, but there’s also a good chunk that I don’t have a practical use for right now.  I’m not desperately attempting to secure a desk job somewhere so I can map subnets in Microsoft Visio, configure VLANs on serial interfaces, setup ACLs to filter network traffic and perhaps occasionally arm-wrestle with some absurdly obtuse/self-righteous HR department.  Computer networking is not an intimidating field of study and understanding the basics is about as complicated as understanding how the Post Office works.  But Cisco seems a little full of themselves at times.  You’ll know what I mean by this after you’re waist deep in the plethora of rediculous acronyms Cisco is continually pulling out of its ass.  Cheap excuses to procrastinate aside, I’m now more interested in web design and Linux.  The diploma I’ve already got and passing the tests necessary to get it is certification enough for now.

What’s new with Ubuntu?

I’ve been meaning to create a new video to show off Ubuntu 8.04, but very little about it stands out when compared to 7.10 (with exception to performance improvements, which are very noticeable).  One of the most hyped features, Pulse Audio, has turned out to be something of a disappointment (though this is just my opinion).  The decision to include it with 8.04 by default was likely made so as to help get the kinks ironed out before the next major release of Ubuntu in October, which is rumored to be sporting a sexy new theme that will compliment the impressive collection of special effects rendered by Compiz Fusion.  By then, the soon to be developed “glitch-free” version of Pulse Audio should already be in place.

What’s new with Dave?

Believe it or not, I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“.  The book takes a deep look at the multitude of mythologies that have existed world wide throughout human history and highlights the similarities between them instead of the superficial differences.  I probably shouldn’t comment on it further until I’ve finished reading (which will probably take quite some time).  Ancient human history is something I’ve been interested in for a few years and the topic of mythology adds an informative and sometimes entertaining layer.  After finishing it, I hope to plow through Julian Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.

Besides enjoying weather on the good days I’ve been working on the Topeka Habitat for Humanity website a little bit, making progress on a new photo gallery that will be integrated in soon.  Though I’ll admit it wasn’t what was taking up a lot of my time…

One of my best friends and I are busy with starting a new LLC, and one of the things we’re going to do is build and sell PC’s with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled and customized in advanced for each customer.  So when you get your PC, Compiz will be configured the way you want it to be, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t go into detail about right now.  As such, my priorities are starting to shift and I’ve not really felt like writing a whole lot in here recently, but I will do so more often very shortly.  Sorry if you’ve been waiting for a CCNA post to pop up, but I’ll eventually get around to writing about the Cisco IOS sometime (though it’s dreadfully boring, I have to tell ya).

My girlfriend and I celebrate our one year anniversary today! I’m pretty tickled by the present that she gave me:

I believe I now have bragging rights in the computer world (especially the Linux world).  It’s a shame she had to work tonight, but we’ll be going out for drinks shortly to relax, you can be sure of that

And if having such a super cool girlfriend doesn’t give me bragging rights of some kind in the computer world…well…. turns out I also had time to rip the guts out of my dirty old computer today (which I haven’t cleaned in years) and put all of it back together inside of a very cool looking shell (which happened to be sitting on my floor for over a year doing nothing):

There we go.  I had that sticker laying around here too.  Sweet…