We need it to live, we need it to grow our crops and we need it to keep from succumbing to the Heat Advisory issued today by the National Weather Service. Water is going to be a huge problem in the world over the next 50 years and we have alot of access to water right here in the USofA. It’s amazing to me how quickly the proverbial poop can hit the fan when the water runs out. Physically, you need water pretty regularly — way less that gasoline or coal or spaghetti (you know fuel). Furthermore, when things heat up, it becomes only that much more critical… which takes some serious planning since water naturally disappears (via evapotranspiration) when it’s needed most. I went to the store after work and was driving home (with the AC blasting to keep out the Feels-Like-101 degree heat) when a story came on NPR about water in Montana. The water regulation guy for the Tung/Yellowstone Rivers repeated his GrandPappy’s saying on the matter:
Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.
I glanced over to check that both of my 2.5 gallon water jugs were still sitting comfortably in the back seat. That’s the kind of luxury I have: an ability to go to the store and buy as much water as I so desire. Not everybody can do this.
I decided that I’ve had enough with Microsoft on my home machine (especially since I plan on NEVER upgrading her to Vista). This evening, I installed ubuntu linux and have been fooling around with it for the last hour or so. It’s pretty slick and really manageable to install, configure and use immediately out of the box. I kicked off the download before cooking dinner, burned the ISO image to CD and installed it on a 5GB partition I had available. So far, I am really impressed. It knows how to read all the files I’ve wanted to play with. It boots up at least twice as fast as Windows ever did (admittedly, I am using an old machine) and it boasts lots of applications that I wanted. I’ve downloaded a bunch of .flac files and I love that they play in the OS’ native media player.
The real test of how much better the Linux is will come once Mary gets back from the ROC.
This whole idea was generated by Matt Cordell who put ubuntu on his older laptop and got Mary to play around with it. I would say that our use of the desktop is now > 97.3% Firefox, which is all the more reason why we don’t need 2 versions of Visual Studio anymore. Check it out when you’ve got a free evening.
Roommate (the former) sent me a cool link to a perviously unknown music search site. I’ve only given it a cursory search, but thought I’d try out one of the cooler features. You can search for, play and enqueue whatever song they’ve come across online. Oddly, archive.org does have alot of content which is perfect for this type of application. Back at the PTO, we used the way-back machine at archive.org to find prior art backdated to fit the applications we were working on (read: before 2001).
Since I know Nick would get a big kick out of such a website, here’s a link for you buddy:
See how cool this is? My prediction is that it’ll either blow-up and become totally freakin’ awesome OR it’ll implode from the powers of either the people-who-wish-not-be-found (online music sharers) or THE MAN (the big-bad RIAA).
