Monday, Monday
The rebellion first: got a cryptic comment in e-mail from the director of a neighboring library just before quitting time, to the effect that "the doo doo has hit the fan" at the Big Messed-Up Consortium. By that I take it that she means the letters of intent to withdraw, signed by the boards of multiple institutions, reached the rockheaded bigshots there. It will all come to a climax on Wednesday, when the delegates' assembly meets. I think we've already charted our course now, but we'll find out just how much it's likely to cost us to escape the clutches of these tyrannical know-nothings.
There was further amusement this afternoon when a librarian in Iowa evidently hit the wrong command in an e-mail program, and sent a message containing a list of anti-Bush bumper sticker slogans to virtually every staff member in the entire consortium. I'm sure she got some nasty replies from conservatives, because she immediately apologized, even before I was done reading aloud and chortling at the list of slogans, which contained things like "Impeachment: Not just for blowjobs any more" and "What we need is a President who speaks at least one language fluently."
I noticed on the way home that the price of gasoline in town has dropped to $1.99 for the first time in almost two years. I know it hasn't been that low since before Hurricane Katrina and I'm pretty sure quite a bit longer than that. This has nothing to do with politics, I suspect, but rather just a collapse in the commodities market. The price we pay for petroleum products is influenced more by a the whims of a bunch of yuppie scum trading in oil futures than it is by the actual cost/supply/demand economics.
The weather has been gloomy, but no more snow for now. The sun is up noticeably earlier and sets noticeably later, so the deep dark of winter is definitely behind us.
Oh, and I downloaded what may be the first "furry" Linux distro: Wolvix may not be intended to have furry connotations, but with that name and a logo that looks like a furry pawprint canted to one side a bit, I've decided that at least as far as I'm concerned, it's furry. It's primarily a Live CD type setup, based on SLAX and stripped down so you can run it from one of those little mini-CDs or from a USB flash drive. I tried it on several machines, and can say that it is properly put together and does have everything you need to get going. There's a caveat, though. It only recognizes a subset of the hardware that's out there. It failed to configure X properly for any of the monitors I had handy, for instance. This is easy to remedy, but you have to know how, and it comes with virtually NO documentation either on the disc or even on the web site. That's a nasty flaw. So... I give it a "not recommended yet" review, at least not for the beginner or the easily frustrated. If your machine and monitor are less than two years old, it may work for you. Then again, it may not until you tweak it. Sound configuration, which is not a show stopping issue but still is important to most people, failed on all the machines I tried it on. Again, I'm sure that's fixable, but I didn't try. I did succeed in getting X to run properly on all three, even the one with a year old Dell system attached to a 12 year old Compaq monitor, but as I said, not for the beginner or the faint of heart. (Thanks to vakkotaur for tipping me off to this new distribution.)
There was further amusement this afternoon when a librarian in Iowa evidently hit the wrong command in an e-mail program, and sent a message containing a list of anti-Bush bumper sticker slogans to virtually every staff member in the entire consortium. I'm sure she got some nasty replies from conservatives, because she immediately apologized, even before I was done reading aloud and chortling at the list of slogans, which contained things like "Impeachment: Not just for blowjobs any more" and "What we need is a President who speaks at least one language fluently."
I noticed on the way home that the price of gasoline in town has dropped to $1.99 for the first time in almost two years. I know it hasn't been that low since before Hurricane Katrina and I'm pretty sure quite a bit longer than that. This has nothing to do with politics, I suspect, but rather just a collapse in the commodities market. The price we pay for petroleum products is influenced more by a the whims of a bunch of yuppie scum trading in oil futures than it is by the actual cost/supply/demand economics.
The weather has been gloomy, but no more snow for now. The sun is up noticeably earlier and sets noticeably later, so the deep dark of winter is definitely behind us.
Oh, and I downloaded what may be the first "furry" Linux distro: Wolvix may not be intended to have furry connotations, but with that name and a logo that looks like a furry pawprint canted to one side a bit, I've decided that at least as far as I'm concerned, it's furry. It's primarily a Live CD type setup, based on SLAX and stripped down so you can run it from one of those little mini-CDs or from a USB flash drive. I tried it on several machines, and can say that it is properly put together and does have everything you need to get going. There's a caveat, though. It only recognizes a subset of the hardware that's out there. It failed to configure X properly for any of the monitors I had handy, for instance. This is easy to remedy, but you have to know how, and it comes with virtually NO documentation either on the disc or even on the web site. That's a nasty flaw. So... I give it a "not recommended yet" review, at least not for the beginner or the easily frustrated. If your machine and monitor are less than two years old, it may work for you. Then again, it may not until you tweak it. Sound configuration, which is not a show stopping issue but still is important to most people, failed on all the machines I tried it on. Again, I'm sure that's fixable, but I didn't try. I did succeed in getting X to run properly on all three, even the one with a year old Dell system attached to a 12 year old Compaq monitor, but as I said, not for the beginner or the faint of heart. (Thanks to vakkotaur for tipping me off to this new distribution.)