I completely forgot to mention about this last Thursday’s first Open Source Alliance meeting at Paramus' Panera Bread. I arrived earlier than everybody else despite the really bad traffic on Route 4 West. The place was really crowded and I couldn’t set up my laptop at the “usual” place by the conference room. I ended up going to the couch by the front entrance. Armed with a hot cup of coffee I proceeded to get boot my laptop and get some internet going… About 15 minutes later I realized something fishy was going on with the free wifi for I just could not get a working IP assigned.

Found a couple of pretty usefull and cool Gnome applets for my laptop over the weekend: netapplet and gnome-blog. Netapplet allows me to store multiple settings for different wifi access points for easy switching while on the road. Very usefull and easy to do! Gnome-blog is supposed to allow you to write a post to your blog without accessing the web interface. I say “supposed” because I’m yet to try it.

The depth of the WWW never ceases to amaze me. Every day there’s a new world out there for you to discoverer! I do browse a handfull of sites every day religiously but sometimes I crave for new material. Reading blogs have given me the opportunity to “interact” with a much larger audience with an even wider and diverse background… and tastes… and points of view… About 2 days ago I came across Stephen O’Grady's blog and was hooked to his style of writing immediately.

For all you crazy USB-Portable-Device-Lovers out there: Portable FireFox 1.0.2 has been released!!! My favorite new features are: COMMANDLINE PASSING - The Portable Firefox launcher now supports commandline passing! That’s right, you can drag an HTML file onto PortableFirefox.exe and drop it and it will open it right up. You can even manually set PortableFirefox.exe to be your default browser in Windows and it will open up URLs correctly. It will only pass in one commandline parameter and it is expecting it to be a URL.

No, I did not get hired to work for Pixar. [sigh] I just wanted to point you to this interesting article describing the working environment there. A lot of the animators decided early on that they didn’t want cubicles, so instead, Pixar found these groovy little cottages that they bought for them. Walking through the animation department is like walking through a neighborhood for dwarves. Lots of little houses laid out along â€Å"streets,â€Â?

What a week this has been… and it’s only Monday!!! After putting up with a lot of infantile abuse from my upper management things seem to be heading South. I used to feel that the entire organization was plotting against me and wondered if it was just me. But now, I have definite confirmation that my sanity is still somewhat intact! My new co-worker (and I think she was also hired to be my supervisor) has been experiencing all the abuse herself for a few weeks now and seems to be in the brink of walking out of here!

Lately I have found myself hanging out at #ubuntu on irc.freenode.org, mostly listening and lending a helping hand whenver I can. It sort of reminds me of what I think Open Source and Community really means! I have personally gotten insulted in the past by some pretty lame IRC users who assume that everyone is an idiot and who can’t say anything helpfull but repeat “rtfm” to every enquire. But I will not go off on a tangent here and rant about all those “newbie basher” loosers out there.

Following up on a previous post, my good friend Steve Goguen has officially registered The Northern NJ Open Source Alliance. It will be an attempt to bring all the other “geeky” MeetUp groups from Northern New Jersey together into a an unified one. We should hear back soon from some of the other MeetUp organizers and work something out. I think the goal is to schedule all our individual meetings to coincide on the same dates.

This past Monday I hosted the monthly Northern New Jersey Linux Meetup at Panera Bread. It is the 7th meeting I have organized ever since taken over the group back in September 2004. I managed to get there earlier than usual and took advantage of the extra time to write down some ideas I had for a new pet project of mine and get some good coffee. One hour later some of the frequent attendees arrived.

Been really enjoying my SeaGate Portable Drive. I managed to upload all my 13 GB+ of MP3s and Oggs together with a bunch of usefull applications and code I was carrying with me on a couple of CDs for quite some time. Having a central and portable repository for all of my music, documents, and code is something I’ve wanted for the longest time. I have also started to use the portable version of Firefox, which contrary to the “normal” version runs off of a portable device and not a (non-portable) hard drive.