benja22

Patty and I just returned from столовеour trip to Idaho to witness the marriage of Ian Cambron to Luna-Michelle Strasser. The wedding took place just outside of the mountain mining town of Atlanta, Idaho in the shadows of Graylock Mountain.

Ian is a wonderful young man. We are very pleased to welcome him into our family. Luna-Michelle is Patty’s daughter and my step-daughter who we love very much.

rent a car bulgaria

Click Photo for More Pictures

The wedding took place at 2:00 p.m. on a warm day under the pines next to a cold mountain river. A circle of chairs in a circle clearing broken only by the flower laced arch where the vows were to be spoken made a gorgeous setting all by itself. The love and peace of the witnesses gathered in this place lifted the heart and added an unseen beauty to the entire service.

The ceremony was preformed by Ian & Luna-Michelle’s friend, Grasshopper, who returned from a recent sojourn with his wife, Lavender, to Laos and Thailand. He preformed a lovely service which made Patty and I think back to our own wedding in the trees some ten years earlier.

After the ceremony was completed we moved one hundred yards to a large open area where tables were filled with food and drink. Much to my surprise, considering we were in Idaho, I found that one of the dishes was a delicious gumbo made by a man named Miner John who had spent much of his life in Louisiana.

Also, much to my surprise, a pretty good local ‘Bluegrass’ band had set up and was playing “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms”.

We all ate our fill as the keg was tapped and the beer began to flow. I watched as barefoot hippies and youngsters sat and shot the breeze with anaesthesiologists and Intel engineers. It was quite a sight.

Luna-Michelle joined the band for a while and played guitar as she sang a song she had written for Ian. Soon others joined the band for improvisational performances as well. We were amazed at the conglomeration of talent in the crowd.

We wish we could have stayed and partied into the night with these interesting and eclectic people but sadly, we had to break camp early the next day for our trip home.

We saw in Ian and Luna-Michelle a love that we wish they will carry with them always. I personally believe their love-light will shine on. After all, they have an eternal light in Sky.

July 17, 2008 8:30 AM MDT

Greetings from Laramie, Wyoming

This is my first entry from away from home. I’m like Jack Kerouac! Or not.

Patty and I are on our way to the small mining town of Atlanta, Idaho for Michelle and Ian’s wedding.

We were going to leave Lindsborg, Kansas early Thursday morning but because I had slept a good part of the day away and Patty was home from work early, we decided to take off at 5:00 Wednesday afternoon. We were surprised to make it to Laramie in eight 1/2 hours. Now we have some time to kill.

I’m sure Laramie is beautiful. My first view of it as I stepped out of the Days Inn was of a dilapidated trailer court. As I walked around to the front of the hotel I could see the mountains that we will be travelling into. Mountains look much better when you are actually in them.

Patty and I woke up earlier than we set the alarm for and are ready for the day. We plan to travel to Ogden, Utah and then follow the Great Salt Lake northward into Idaho. We will try to take some pictures which we will post. I will add to this ‘live’ blog the next time I have internet access.

July 17, 2008 1010 PM 2008

Greetings from Twin Falls, Idaho

It was a great day for travelling. Sunny, not much wind or traffic.

Western Wyoming is beautiful to drive through. Sadly, along I-80 there are very few scenic lookouts or signs pointing to anything of interest. Utah is even worse. In Utah we did not see a single sign pointing to The Great Salt Lake. We saw one sign which said “point of interest next right”. Since that was all the information and we didn’t want to veer off course see the shack that the 5 time quilting bee winner lived in or some other bummer, we continued on. Utah doesn’t seem to understand what it has or how to sell it. A tourist travelling the major highways through the state will pass by the gold mine that many spots in Utah could be.

Idaho, on the other hand, proudly points travellers to points of interests. After several hours through Wyoming and Utah it was refreshing to see signs pointing to sites such as the Snake River Canyon,

Snake River Canyon

an impressive site that when seen in person, convinces you that Evel Knievel was truly insane. A few miles more and we were pointed to Shoshone Falls. A miniature Niagara Falls in Idaho. I’ll post pictures of those sites in Idaho when I have enough battery power left in my camera to download them. I also have some pictures of orange highway construction barrels from the drive through Utah. I doubt I’ll post them.

After a stay in a Comfort Inn (Better than the Days Inn in Laramie in every way except toilet paper quality) here in Idaho Falls tonight we begin the treacherous climb into the rugged mountain roads to Atlanta Idaho for Michelle and Ian’s wedding. We’ll be camping in that area for two days. It’s a remote (pack your water and food in from 75 miles away) area. Sounds like fun. Afterwards, we will be going back down a different mountain road to Boise to hook up a U-Haul to bring Kelly back to Kansas with us. I’ll be posting again as soon as I have wi-fi access again. Probably from Boise.

Shoshone Falls

Friday, July 18, 2008

Greetings from Atlanta, Idaho

(from hand written journal)

We pulled out of Twin Falls on Friday morning and headed north into the mouantains. The highway was good through Gooding and we began to climb, then the road began to curve. After a pleasant, scenic climb into the mountains the road began to descend into a rocky valley. As we came around one final turn, the view opened onto a spectacular Anderson Resevoir. It was truly breathtaking. Sadly, our camera was out of commission at the time.

The nearby town of Pine, Idaho was our last chance to stock up on last minute supplies. After visiting with some of the locals, who were all very nice folks, we grabbed an extra cooler of ice, water, soda and beer. We found later in our trip that Fix-a-flat, tire plugs, and an air compressor would also have been nice things to have.

The road from Pine to Atlanta is called James Creek Road. Google maps lists the drive as 32.7 mi – about 2 hours 7 mins! It actually took us 3 hours and 30 minutes to make the 32.7 mile trip. This is not a road for a Chrysler Town & Country mini-van with 4 ply tires which is what we were driving.

Half way up this treacherous mountain road we were accompanied by the occasional dirt bike. As we climbed higher, even the dirt bikes disappeared. To our right was a steep drop over cliffs that were hundreds of feet down. To our left was the wall of the cliff that was hundreds of feet up. I kept the drivers side rear view mirror as close to that wall as I could as we went around the twisted ash covered and rocky one lane road.

We were rewarded near the top for our troubles with a water fall that was near enough to the road that we were able to get out and stand next to it. It was a beautiful site. Too bad our nerves were too shot by this time to truly enjoy it.

After reaching the top of the mountain we descended along the same road into the valley and at last reached the gold mining town of Atlanta, Idaho. A town with a population of about 50 people. In the winter the population dwindles down to 35 people.

A few short months ago, Atlanta, Idaho had a lodge, a general store, and a bar. The local gold mine has recently been purchased and all the public accommodations as well. The public could not make use of the store or the lodge or the bar. There was no cell phone service. We were in one of the most isolated spots I’ve ever been in inside the continental United States. It was beautiful.

We flagged down the first local we came across and were not surprised in a town of 50 people that he was able to direct us to where Ian and Luna-Michelle, whose wedding we traveled here to see, were staying. Five minutes later Patty was was hugging her daughter for the first time in over two years and meeting her grand-daughter, Sky, for the first time ever.
We were soon joined by Ian’s parents, Scot and Joyce Cambron, who have a cabin in town and were the most wonderful and hospitable people you could ever hope to meet. The kindness they showed, not only for Patty and I, but for everyone who made the trek up the mountain made us feel so welcome. They are truly special people.
We set up our tent and made our camp as homey as possible in the shadow of Graylock Mountain and near the cold, shallow and rocky Boise River. It wasn’t long before young people began showing up from everywhere.

Graylock Mountain

Some were ill-prepared for two nights camping in the mountains. Many bare footed, dirty and tired. A dip in the nearby hot springs soon refreshed many body and spirit. Ty, a young friend of our son Mike, hitchhiked from Portland for the wedding and arrived in bare feet. Oddly, he was wearing a suit (with no shoes) on the day of the wedding.

As the night went on we found ourselves happily sharing our food and beer and fire and extra blankets with many of these young people. They shared what they had as well.

Mike and Mark and Kelly arrived from Boise in Mike’s Ford Taurus with their friend Drew and Kat (Cat?) who spent the evening with us as well. Mike soon discovered he had a ruined tire and a small spare tire that was short on air. I made the discovery that I had a tire losing air on the van at about this same time. It would truly be an adventure limping back down the mountain for us all.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Atlanta, Idaho

I think even the locals were surprised at how cold it had become in the night. Patty and I slept in the van. One of us would wake every hour or so to start the engine and turn on the heater. The outside thermometer in the van showed the temperature to be 34 degrees. I felt somewhat guilty using the heater while knowing others nearby were huddled in tents and under blankets next to campfires.

We all survived the night and breakfasted on fruit and trail mix.

Patty and I explored the area and took a nice walk along a trail that parallelled the river. We dipped our feet in only briefly to confirm that it was indeed as cold as it looked. It was a lovely day in the mountains, if not too warm, compared to the night before.

The wedding, which is another post entirely, took place at 2:00 p.m. in a circle of friends with a mountain for the back drop. It was a magnificent outdoor wedding.

Afterwards we danced to a bluegrass band and ate and drank our fill. Hippies stood shooting the breeze with anaesthesiologists and Intel engineers eating gumbo and listening to music as a pack of amazing well behaved dogs played around them. It was a sight to see such camaraderie and good will in celebration of Ian and Luna-Michelle’s wedding day. It truly was a beautiful thing.

As night fell, knowing we had to break camp early, we staggered back to our campsite across the road.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Greetings from Lindsborg, Kansas

We woke and broke camp early Sunday morning. Mike’s tire was ruined. He would be leading us back to Boise on a donut spare tire. My tire was flat. It had a slow leak from a small split in the tire. It could not be repaired but could hold air for a while. I put the donut on and went in to town. Scot and Joyce fed us a nice breakfast and I enjoyed several cups of coffee. I hadn’t had coffee since Twin Falls and it was fantastic.

Scot and Joyce must have fed about 20 people. We hung around and visited for over an hour enjoying the company. After several attempts to find someone with an air compressor, we were taken to a local residents house and filled up my tire and Mike’s donut. I got back to Scot and Joyce’s cabin and quickly put my leaky tire on and it was time to go. I can’t thank the Cambrons and everyone else in Atlanta enough for their hospitality and kindness.

Google maps lists the route from Atlanta to Boise as 103 mi – about 3 hours 54 mins. That’s if you don’t miss the turn to Idaho City. We did. The route we took, as far as I can tell was 113 mi – about 4 hours 19 mins of much rougher road.

This road was not the treacherous one lane winding snowmobile trail we took up from Twin Falls. This was a slightly wider winding, climbing, dropping 113 miles of washboard hell. It was a true teeth jattering road.

Shortly after starting down the road our speedometer and tachometer stopped working. We were going slow in low gears anyway so it didn’t matter that much at the time. To say we were following Mike down the mountain really meant that we were within a half hour of them. It was impossible to stay within site of each other as we each crept down the road.

After an eternity we came to a wide spot in the road where there was a small bar/store and a dumpster. We pulled over and dumped the trash we had packed away from camp. That is when Patty heard the air coming out of the front tire. So now we have two tires losing air and one losing air too fast to make it down the mountain.

The store had fix-a-flat and we bought two cans at $8.00 a piece. I put a can in the tire and we took off as fast as we could. The washboard road be damned. Twenty minutes later we caught up with Mike and the others. They had pulled up at a beautiful spot along the river and were working their way down to the beach. I rolled down my window and told them I couldn’t stop because I was losing air. No longer able to be of any help to them due to our own predicament, we proceeded down the road wishing them luck.

Two hours later we pulled into Boise and found the house that Mark, Mike, and Kelly were renting. The U-Haul place was due to close in ninety minutes but Patty could not stand another minute without a shower now that one was available. She luxuriated in the shower for a full ten minutes. By this time Mike, Mark, Drew and Kat arrived safely at the house. Patty and I left them to move Kelly’s belongings out to the street while we went blindly into Boise to find a place to fix a tire and to get the U-Haul. We found the U-Haul place and they sent us to another U-Haul place in the city. We were pretty happy about that, but we found it easily enough and were soon hooked up and moving.

Not yet comfortable with either Boise traffic or pulling a trailer, I gave up on finding a tire repair place and decided to pick up a plug kit and a 12 volt air compressor at an AutoZone store. We made it, after a few dead end tries, back to the house where the kids had a chicken dinner waiting for us. After a quick meal we went out into the 99 degree heat to load the trailer and plug the tire.

The plug held and we began our 37 hour dead run back to Lindsborg. We judged our speed by mile markers and stop watches. Since the cruise control worked this was only a problem in the infinite number of construction zones along the highways in July.

Ogallala, Nebraska is where the plug finally gave out. Only an hour lost.

We made it home at midnight and, too tired to sleep, hopped in the pool and swam till 3:00 a.m.

Some might consider this to have been a terrible trip.

I loved every minute of it.

Thanks to a re-fi on our mortgages, Patty and I had the opportunity to completely transform our back yard into our little paradise.

We were thinking of getting a pop-up camper trailer and began researching them on the internet. By the time we added all the options we wanted, commode, shower, AC, etc. we were in the $18,000.00 range. After discussing how many times a year we would realistically use the camper (4 or 5) we decided it was just to much. “Heck,” we said. “We can get a swimming pool for that!”

We shopped around and found a nice above ground pool, thirty three foot by eighteen foot oval for a very reasonable price and bought it.

If you have a pool, of course, you also need a fence. We decided on a six foot cedar picket privacy fence. We got a reasonable deal on the materials and bought them as well.

construction zone video

Sadly, the driver at our friendly next town over hardware store managed to blow out a knee and was unable to make deliveries. I recruited the help of my friend Larry and his son Joe. I recruited my nephew Kenny and his F250 3/4 ton pickup truck. My son Harold jumped right in to work as well. I even put the old 92 Ford Aerostar van back into action to haul 1200 lbs. of concrete mix. My friend Mike had a skid loader which he loaned us for the week and Larry Hall loaned me a trailer to haul it back and forth.

The pool installers wanted to charge an extra $4,000.00 to set up the pool. Out of our budget entirely! We began reading PDF files on pool installations and watched a video or two and decided it wasn’t worth anywhere near $4.000.00 to install. After discussing the situation with Larry, and after he watched a video on the subject, we decided to do the pool and the fence ourselves.

If you plan to do two huge projects at once, plan to work yourself to death. Plan to work your friends and relatives to death. If you are going to do it in July, plan on going through a case of bottled water and a case of Gatorade every day.

Larry, Joe, Harold, Kenny, Patty, Brenda and Sarah all pitched in and I can never thank them enough. Joe and Harold put up almost 600 cedar pickets in just a couple of days. Larry was terrific on the skid loader getting the pool area leveled out. It was a huge project and everyone pitched in and did whatever was needed to be done. They came back the next day, and the next, and the next just to work and sweat and see the project done.

Thanks to good friends and relatives Patty and I now have a great back yard. Thanks to their unselfish hours and hours of work we saved thousands of dollars, and though the work was hard and often frustrating, I’ll always carry fond memories of those days when we turned the back yard into a construction zone.

It’s been a busy spring here so far.  I haven’t even had time to blog lately.  Hopefully this will be corrected in the next couple of weeks.

We received a visit from my father in-law and his wife for a few days.  They left the snows of Wisconsin just as we had our first spring days here.  Temperatures in the area went from the mid 30’s to near 80 degrees while he was on the road.  I felt like they thought it had been like this for weeks and I have just been neglecting my yard.  It was (is) a weedy, patchy mess with all the debris and junk that you find the first time you go out to do yard work in the spring.

It was a nice visit though, and I continued to neglect the yard until the following weekend.

I spent two days trying to get the riding mower to start.  I’m afraid it’s done for.  I mowed 2 weeks in a row with the 20 inch push mower and then hired a kid.   I don’t mind mowing but I do mind wasting a Saturday or Sunday on the project so the $25.00 is well worth it to me.

I’ve read 2 books that I want to write reviews on.  One I like and one I did not like all that well.

I registered with a website;  компютриfindagrave.com and volunteered to get photos in the area.  I guess it’s like community service.  I’m not much for working in soup kitchens etc. but my wife and I really enjoy these little jaunts.  The cemeteries are close enough that we can still afford to go with the current gas prices.  I’m not a good photographer but I can manage to get a picture of a slow moving tombstone given the proper light and the several tries that can be attempted with digital cameras.

We enjoy the rides into the country with a goal or a mission.  Once at the cemetery we are like a couple of detectives.  Trying to find out where someone is buried isn’t always easy.  Even with section, block, lot, & plot information in larger cemeteries,  it can be quite a challenge.

We like the small cemeteries most.  They are usually out in the country on some dirt road.  No lot or plot numbers there.  We just split up and walk the rows until one of us calls out that they found it.  We get the best picture we can and then we see what the day brings.

When we get home, I edit the photo a little.  Crop and resize.  Then I post the photo to the site using the fulfill request option.

I always get a nice email from someone somewhere else in the country thanking me for the photo which makes me feel good.  It’s a nice unselfish act yet a nice excuse to get out of the house and take a ride in the country.

Sometimes you just have to do things the hard way. I’ve mentioned before that I love to waste time but this time I believe I may have over-done it.

One of the things I like to waste time on is my other blog, http://www.ben-armbruster.org/blog/mandriva It’s more or less dedicated to the Mandriva Linux operating system. I now find myself stuck for the next year or two with a laptop that has the Ubuntu Linux operating system installed. Mandriva and the Dell Inspiron 1525 are just incompatible. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Now that I’ll be learning about this operating system which I only like a little bit (Mandriva seems to have more life. I haven’t found the soul in Ubuntu yet), I decided I may as well blog about it as well.

Not wanting to set up another wordpress blog site with it’s own seperate MySql database, I decided I’d just add a catagory to my Mandriva site and write about both operating systems there.

Now that I’ll be blogging about two operating systems I couldn’t very well call it by it’s original link address. http://www.ben-armbruster.org/blog/mandriva had to be changed to something else. I wasn’t real sure how to go about doing this tricky little maneuver. I realized that all the individual posts had their own links. To be able to click on them, either directly at the site or through a google hit or trackback I needed to do some serious redirecting.

I know a little about the .htaccess file. I know that I can somehow put a 301 redirect in there so that shouldn’t have been a problem. I didn’t realize that there were going to be three of them in the path from http: to /linux and another in /mandriva but I figured I knew enough to dive in.

In the spirit of “neo-geeks don’t CLI” I decided to forgo the secure shell to log into my host server in california to create the linux/ directory and then ask the server to please mv mandriva/ to linux/. No, I decided instead to open up a double paned file manager and ftp into the server from both sides and thus copy my files in splendid graphic user interface glory.

Did you know, that I am able to type these words, save them, and publish them for you dear reader, as the result of the care taking of seventy-three directories and two thousand five hundred and sixty three individual files? Well, had I known that, I wouldn’t have moved my blog two grooves over on a hard drive in California via a double paned ftp connected file manager in Kansas.

I decided to use my file transfer time to read up on the .htaccess files. One of which is going to need some reconfiguring. The manual for htaccess goes something like this;

• DESCRIPTION

This module provides an object-oriented interface to Apache .htaccess files. Currently the
ability exists to read and write simple htaccess files.

• METHODS

new()

my $obj = Apache::Htaccess->new($path_to_htaccess);

Creates a new Htaccess object either with data loaded from an existing htaccess file or
from scratch

save()

$obj->save();

Saves the htaccess file to the filename designated at object creation. This method is
automatically called on object destruction.

I decided to check the internet.

Ahh! Simple enough. Edit .htaccess with:

Redirect 301 /blog/mandriva http://ben-armbruster.org/blog/linux

I saved and closed the file and clapped my hands together like a satisfied gardener brushing the dirt from his hands at supper time.

My work was bearing fruit. My “301 Redirect” directed me straight to a “404 Not Found” but it was something.

I moved my sure fire command from .htaccess file to .htaccess file. I must have edited at least half a dozen of them. Somewhere, there must be a porn site or two that keep coming up 404 Not Found as a result of my efforts on that California Server.

I did some more research and found some other commands that I tried. RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ and RedirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ looked promising with a bit of rework but still no dice.

I was a little tired but I managed to type redirect wordpress into a google window. Know what I found out? they have plugins that’ll do that for you. Yep.

I tried two of them. They offer the benifit of letting you edit the .htaccess file by typing your command into a nifty little window. They do put the commands in the correct directories .htaccess file though so that was at least a clue of where I should be digging my hole.

After about two hours of not getting these marvels of gtk frontended text editors to work, I dumped them and went back to Google.

Did I mention the sun came up? Yeah. The sun came up.

After scratching my head and trying to come up with the sure fire google search criteria it came to me. I snapped my fingers and typed “moving wordpress”, and there it was. My salvation on the wordpress.org site of all places.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress

Want to move your WordPress site to another URL? another directory? another host? Yeah okay we can do that for you. Click here, click there, click that.

“You’re welcome.”

What a bunch of sissy geeks. Wouldn’t know BogoMIPS from Babelfish.

So I went ahead and did it myself with no help. I’d explain how but it’s complicated.

So anyway. If you want to visit my other blog it’s now residing at:

http://www.ben-armbruster.org/blog/linux/

Or if you want you can click on:

http://www.ben-armbruster.org/blog/mandriva/

Or

http://www.ben-armbruster.org/bog/ubuntu/

Either way, It’ll redirect you.

Whenever my friends and I get together at my house for food or drinks the conversations are fairly eclectic. Perhaps “indiscriminate” might be a better word. At some point during the evening someone is going to say something that is just wrong. It’s often something they have known with out a doubt for their entire life. You’re going to have to prove it to them.

Perhaps they were singing along with the radio. “I shot the Sheriff, but I didn’t shoot him dead you see.”

DUDE!

It’s “but I didn’t shoot the deputy”

Perhaps there is an old re-run of “Night Court” on the television and someone tosses out, “did Markie Post do anything besides ‘Night Court’?”

“Wasn’t she in “There’s Something About Mary”.

Whaa???

Sure enough. She is.

So my goal is to make the most perfect reference PC I possibly can. Something that will give the answers to our life’s questions in the shortest time possible.

It had to be a laptop because I never know where we will be when these conversations take place so It needs to be portable.

Most of the time it will be in my basement bar because that’s where the ice and glasses are. I have a 15.4 inch Dell Inspiron 1525 N with Ubuntu Linux installed on it. For the bar, a better choice may have been the Asus eeePC which is a smaller and much cheaper laptop. At under $300.00 it wouldn’t be the end of the world to have a beer spilled on it. I can’t see owning two laptops though and I needed a much larger HD than the Asus so I went with the Dell.

Linux let’s you set up user logins which can be broken and removed very easily. Someone can mess up the user account without messing up my user account or the operating system as a whole. I set up a user account that I let all my friends have the password for. It really doesn’t need a password at all but I put one on to help prevent any online attacks. The user name and password has to be easy to remember. With my friends that would be something like User: Bud Password: weiser.

The number one thing required for settling bar bets is a web browser. I dragged mozilla-firefox icon to the desktop and set the home page for Google. Half of all bar bets will be settled with that alone.

Mozilla-Firefox has a nice little bookmarks toolbar just below the address bar. It has a link to Mozilla and to BBC News. You can right click on these links and remove them. You can easily add links to this toolbar by grabbing the icon in the address section to the left of the http://www address and dragging them down into the bar.

I placed five quick links into this bar:

• The Internet Movie Database. This is a great site for looking up movies and actors. It is great when watching “Fargo” and you can’t remember who that guy is. William H. Macy or Steve Buscemi? You can even do some quote look ups. “Top of the world ma” will tell You It’s from the 1949 movie “White Heat”
• Song Lyrics. Drag you favorite lyrics site to the taskbar. There are quite a few out there and some do better in different musical genres than others. http://www.lyrics.com/ is good. I prefer lyricsmode.com because they try to offer a youtube link to a performance of the song.
• Wikipedia. Many people don’t like or trust Wikipedia because it can be edited by anyone. I know because I’ve done some minor edits on there myself. Sometimes kiddies will get in there and joke edit. These are usually removed quickly. If you are not researching to write a book, but merely trying to find out how to tie a marlin line spike hitch knot or if you need to see a picture of an African Impala, or a Chevy Impala for that matter, Wikipedia is a great online tool.
• Google Maps. Not really much use for winning bets but it’s a great help for getting someone to the party by giving directions over the phone. “Where are you?” “Dallas! I said Houston!” “Just a sec, okay. Get on I-45 south and drive for three hours and forty-two minutes and call me back.”

• Phone Book. There are a couple of good phone book sites out there. Switchboard and Anywho are both good. Both sites also offer a reverse lookup which allows you to search by phone number to see who that missed call was from while the music was up so loud.

Once Mozilla-Firefox is set up there are a few more applications that are useful on the desktop. With Ubuntu or most other linux distributions these are pretty much one click installs. They are available on the installation disks or the online repositories. Just click on the package in the Synaptic Package Manager or use apt-get.

• Calculator. A must have application for those nights when you tell your friends you are going to concrete the lawn and never mow again. Someone will invariably want to know how many yards of concrete it will take to carry out the task. The Gnome and KDE desktops for Linux let you have a second panel (taskbar) which I placed on my Gnome desktop. Simply right click on the panel and a menu appears which gives you the option to add items to the panel. A small applet icon appears which works just like an icon on the desktop without all the clutter. I chose the gcalctool calculator. It offers basic, advanced, scientific and financial views. Basic view is usually good enough for the bar.
• Dictionary. I chose the gnome-dictionary-applet which is also on the panel. It puts a little window on the panel which you can type words into and gives you definitions. Very nice, quick and easy. I also added gnome-dictionary to the main desktop in case someone doesn’t see the applet.
• Weather. When you are hanging out in the basement you might need to know if you need a jacket to go out for a smoke. You might decide to throw a BBQ tomorrow. A weather applet is always handy. I chose “Weather Report” which is part of the gnome-applets package.
• Thesaurus. gaiksaurus is a nice thesaurus. Even in casual conversations you sometimes need to find the right word. “Do we have eclectic conversations?” “umm. indiscriminate is more like it.”
• World Clock. Sometimes you just need to know what time it is somewhere else in the world. I often want to know the time in Baghdad or Kabul. When the news is bad you want to know things like how many more hours of darkness must the tsunami victims have to endure. Kworldclock is a nice graphical tool. Running the mouse over the map of the world will display times in the location your cursor is over. The map also shows what parts of the world are in daylight and which are in darkness. gworldclock is also a nice, but less graphical tool for getting times from regions of the world and may be better for you. The new version of kworldclock that is being put in the new KDE desktop promises to be even better so gworldclock will no longer be needed.
• A Bible. Yes, even heathens sometimes argue about biblical things. BibleTime is a wonderful tool for searching the bible. It offers several bibles from AP (the apostles bible) to YLT (Young’s Literal Translation 1898). I chose KJV (King James Version) and AKJV (American King James Version) and BBE (Bible in Basic English). I also chose to add “Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary” Now you can prove to your friends once an for all that pi Ï€ = 3 (I Kings 7:23)

I’m sure there are more things to add to my bar users account but most bar bets can be settled with what I have so far.

Happy arguing.

I finally received my laptop a few days ago.  I ordered it originally on February 26th.  In a fit of frustrated anger I cancelled the order after a month of delays.  That is without a doubt my biggest gripe about this laptop.  Dell has a really lousy distribution division!  After looking around at other laptops I found out that the one I really wanted was the Dell.  So, with new found patience I re-ordered it.  Much to my surprise, it shipped on time.

I’m fairly happy with this machine.  The 15″ screen seems to have good resolution and is easy on the eyes.  The graphics card was my biggest concern when I purchased it.  It’s not the greatest in the world and uses shared memory but I can run several applications and play your basic tetris, breakout, tron type games.  I’m not going to use this thing for heavy gaming.  I have my doubts that it could handle  Castle Wolfensteins Enemy Territory.

The laptop feels solid and well built.  The hinges are good.  There is no latch but once the lid is closed it stays shut.

I like the keyboard.  The keys are solid and make just a slight clicky sound which I like better than the softer quiet keys on some keyboards.  There is no real number pad.  The num-pad keys are integrated in the J,K,L section and work when num-lock is pressed.   I don’t do much math so that is fine with me.  When I type numbers, I use the method Mrs. Gunnerson taught me on the Underwood typewriters in my freshman typing class.  I use the top number keys.

The touch pad mouse works well enough.  It is a two button job with a finger pad.   I had to learn to not rest the heel of my hand in that area but I am typing this review on it now with no problems related to the mouse buttons.   I don’t care for finger pads so I purchased a USB wireless mouse.  It plugged in and just worked.

I have been holding the Dell on my lap for over an hour and there is very little heat.  There is absolutely no discomfort in that area.

The speakers leave a bit to be desired.  The quality of the sound is fine but they don’t put out very much volume.  The headphone jack works great

The 1525 N comes with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.  This is my first experience with Ubuntu,  I normally use Mandriva Linux on my desktop pc’s,  Ubuntu is dead easy to use.  Like Mandriva, Ubuntu Linux is now easy enough for anyone to work with.  Linux isn’t just for geeks anymore.  I have re-installed it a couple of times (see next paragraph) and the only thing I had to change was my tmei zone location.

My attempt to install Mandriva Linux has been unsuccessful thus far.  I’ve had to revert to the original configuration using Ubuntu twice already.  I’m closing in on the problem though. The sound card driver is the biggest issue.  Dell must have paid for a license or something.  I’ll have to get the driver another way after the install.  I’ll have to disable the sound card before installation to prevent the speakers from screaming at me on the first boot.   I also used an unstable development version that was being heavily patched at the time I attempted to install from the net.   Another problem is that I haven’t learned the Debian (read Ubuntu) way of doing things well enough to get all the configurations and specification information I may need.

Overall,  I have to say I’m really pleased with this machine and wouldn’t mind recommending it to anyone that isn’t planning on using it for gaming.

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Children that were about to finish 8th grade were going to enjoy one last summer before they had to throw off childish things and enter the oh so grown up world of “High School”.  Those children are now done with that experience and dying in the blast furnace heat of Iraq.

Those that will be entering Junior High have no true, realistic memory of a nation not at war.

I find it hard to imagine that people that think that “The Tonight Show” was always hosted by Jay Leno are now wearing body amour and sitting in front of 50 caliber machine guns.

The war goes on.  Twelve to eighteen months at a time it continues.  Twelve to eighteen months to set up a working government.  Twelve to eighteen months to end the insurgency.  Twelve to eighteen months to bring down the violence.  Twelve to eighteen months to “let the surge work”.

General David Petraeus will be speaking before congress soon.  He is likely to say that he will need time to do an analysis of the possibility of drawing down  the troop size to pre-surge levels.

How long will it take?

Oh,

probably twelve to eighteen months is my guess.

So happy birthday war.  I’ll be here with another candle next year. an the next, and the next, and twelve to eighteen months after that.

I almost lost a very good friend today. I guess I always knew that he was one of my rare, truly good friends. It took a near tragedy to bring it home to me.

A blood clot entered his brain as I slept.  I don’t know what time it was when he had the stroke.  The ambulance was on the way as I pressed the snooze button on my alarm for the first time. I knew he wasn’t at work. I knew it involved a hospital. I assumed he was kicked by a horse while doing his morning chores. I wasn’t concerned.

I got the call from his wife at 8 o’clock in the morning while I was at work. My friend had a blood clot in his brain and had a stroke. Her breaking voice told me that a life-watch helicopter was taking him to a larger regional medical center. I heard her say “paralyzed”. She called me because she didn’t know who to contact at work. “I don’t know what to do.” She sobbed into the phone. I told her that ‘work’ was taken care of and not to give it another thought. Helplessness washed over me as soon as she hung up the phone.

I went to tell my boss the bad news. Between us, I found another friend. I couldn’t let my boss make an announcement over the intercom without her knowing. I’ve never touched her before so my hand on her shoulder may have startled her. I like to think that it steeled her for the news. I know it did not. She was shocked, then heart broken, then lost, just like me. Sick and close to tears I went to my boss.

I went back to my area dreading the telling of the news. All I knew, could be, and would be said in a sentence. Further questions would go unanswered. My boss on the intercom relieved me of my duty.

I thought of the wet-eyed co-workers who gathered around our area after the announcement. It occurred to me (or I knew all along), that although my friend and I worked together every day, he had learned the names of all these people days before I had. Everyone of them considered him to be special.

I spent the day in a fog. I thought of the twenty years we have spent working side by side. The great moments, and the memorable not so great moments.

I spent some time being selfish as well. Thoughts that now make me feel ashamed. Hoping not to be asked to eulogize my friend at his funeral. Perhaps I would be a pall bearer. I need a haircut. In what condition is my suit. Most of my time however, was spent in fervent, agnostic hope that my friend would be okay. I wished for him to be okay, and I wished that anyone of faith that knew him would pray for him.

At four o’clock I finally allowed myself to make the phone call I wanted to make yet dreaded all day.

It was the best possible news that could be expected.

“The MRI showed the blood clot had left the brain.” his step-daughter said calmly over the phone. I’ve never heard her not be calm. “He can feel his arms and legs and everything.”

Though he could not move one leg yet, it was expected that he will have nearly full mobility in it within twenty four hours. He is expected to be discharged from the hospital within a couple of days!

He never ceases to amaze me. He’s magic or something.

So, instead of writing a eulogy for my good friend, as soon as I’m sure he is out of the woods, I will write a roast of him instead.

But I’ll never again forget what a good friend he is to so many of us, and I’ll never forget how I felt this day.

I ordered a laptop computer from Dell yesterday. It’s expected to ship on March 6th.

I know, I know. After my last Dell ordering fiasco, you would think I would never go through that again. The word on the street is that those problems were because Dell had a lousy paint shop at the time and couldn’t keep up. School was just starting and they couldn’t get the pinks and reds to look right.

So, I decided to give Dell another chance.  This time I ordered it in Henry Ford’s favorite color; black. You can’t go wrong with the default.

One of the biggest reasons I chose to go with Dell is that I don’t use Microsoft operating systems. So, anytime I buy a computer with Vista or XP pre-installed, I feel like I’m paying a tax to Microsoft for a service I will never use. Dell offers computers with Ubuntu Linux installed. There are other companies that put linux on laptops but they are usually high end, thousand dollar computers or low end, seven inch screen computers with wind up cranks. The one I ordered, the Dell Inspiron 1525 N, is on the low end of half way between those.

I would prefer to not have anything installed. The free Ubuntu installation will be removed and replaced with my GNU/linux choice, Mandriva. It’s nice to know that all the hardware that require drivers will work under linux though.

Another reason for choosing the Dell was the price. It’s a low end box, but everything in it was “good enough”. The worst thing on it is the graphics card, or, more precisely, the shared memory for the card. This is not a gaming computer.

I’ll be reviewing this laptop here in the next few weeks. I have not been able to find a review of it with any other operating system beside Ubuntu Linux. That’s not counting all the reviews with XP and Vista of course. There are plenty of those.