Stef’s Toshiba Satellite has been giving some issues and running awfully slow with Windows XP. She wanted to go tux on me and I decided to give in. This past weekend I upgraded her laptop to Ubuntu Badger. Within 40mts she was up and running. All the devices were found and configured including the wireless. She is using Open Office 2.0 for doc, presentations, HTML creation, spreadsheets and database; Thunderbird for mail; Firefox for browsing and Gimp for photo editing. I went ahead and installed Ruby 1.8, just in case

She is happy so far other than getting around how the programs and file structure are laid out etc. She like her new Home (/home/stef)! I will write more or ask her to post something when she has spent a month with it.

[when] there are crazy boys and girls roaming freely the streets at 4pm

[when] girls bare their breasts when its not even Mardi Gras or Girls Gone Wild is being taped

[when] you can have hearty lunch and dinner for under $15

[when] you are getting back from work and kids are waking up and having breakfast

[when] there are more coffee shops and drink places to hangout than actual sitdown restaurants

[when] every vendor advertises free WiFi

[when] you know you are getting old, looking at people around you, while you cross the intersections

I am loving every minute of UDub , living so close to the campus. I ran into some crazy folks today, walking around the main drag (called the Av). There were 2 incidents - a guy getting beaten by a girl and some dude in the middle of the street; stu*id kids setting something on fire as a prank which caused 2 loong fire trucks and 3 police cars to be within a 1/4block street to clear the smoke…

Some excitement within 20mts of my walk…

I saw thru’ my aggregator that the founder of Math Olympiad is dead. I havent paid much attention to the history of it other than being an avid follower of who has been participating and winning these events. As I took time to read about Mr.Lenchner, I found him to be quite an ordinary character who did the right things (like several other non-famous people who have had great impacts on mankind). The glory was in the work and reading his bio proved what the word “AMERICAN” meant (or used to anyway)

I have been a long [passive] fan of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). It uses xml representation for a graphic. Its way cool and I used in one of the Open Source article I wrote, couple of years ago. I also brought a SVG primer book. With life and SOA, I havent been able to flame my passion for SVG, until recently. I have been extending RSA with custom UML profiles for a customer and used SVG to create some cool looking icons/shapes. SVG is way powerful and using simple Ruby scripts I am able to create complex images that would take sophisticated art tools..I also get to experiment with my trignometric and calculus skills..
If anyone is interested I can post the svg files here or email to you directly..holla back via email or comment here.

I hate doing this.

I found out a week ago that Peter Millard of Jabber fame died April 26 due to complications from Cancer treatment. He is survived by his wife and his very young baby daughter- Zoe. Peter was instrumental (virtually) in getting me into Jabber and the underlying XML based protocol. This was about 4 years ago.

Ever since then, my interest in realtime communications protocols have been increasing. I have followed BEEP, XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE along with dozen others. It was Peter’s self-depracating web-site that started my love for these arcane stack and for chat software.

So, in this case, the death is of personal significance. I wanted to wait couple of weeks before I posted, as I am still trying to come to grips as to what this means to Christina and Zoe..

No more words other than silence…..

While in India, I didnt own or have a pair of sneakers. It was either cheap canvas shoes as part of school uniform or boots that was hand-me downs from my dad. So needless to say I circumvented (on my bike) India in pair of flip flops and was very comfortable due to the heat and humidity.

This morning, I had to get milk for the much needed latte. Instead of driving the 1.6 miles to the nearest gas station, I chose to bike. In my sandals. As I entered the gas station to pick up milk, couple of girls behind the counter were aghast that I made the ride (on my bicycle) in sandals. They couldnt possibly imagine how anyone could do that.

I was equally dumbfounded by thier naivite. The only other mexican in the gas station, waiting at the counter, understood my predicament!

Cultures and way of lives are different in each locale, and as much as I have been assimilated into the US, there are times, when my thug desi comes out to the amusement or dismay of fellow citizens..

There has been numerous articles on the web and ideas floated since vi or ASCII was formulated that simple TEXT is the best way to store personal data. Although the world is flooded with latest personal organizer or db driven task manager, a simple text file with some presentation logic is the best way to store your life happenings.

I started down this path about couple weeks ago, when I started using GTD Tiddly Wiki. I am recording my project status, weekly activities, action items and even a calendar all in one text file - using HTML markup (ofcourse).

I will report back as to how well it scales as I jot down ideas and store images, link other local pages etc. Something tells me that I can make it work for the next 60 years….

I have been following Jonathan Schwartz’s blog for a while. Last week as he took over the helm at Sun, he has stated that he will continue to blog. Might be interesting to read…

Anyways, congrats Jon!