benja22

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 π = 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.