'nough said!

About 2 weekends ago I had the privilege of meeting up with my good friend Supertoadman at a diner! He had come down to my neck of the woods to visit his “special friend” and managed to take some time off to hang out. We mostly talked about our last camping trip and, as expected, about computers! He ended up picking up the tab, which made me wish I had order the filet mignon!

I meant to post this early this weekend but had too many things happening simultaneously and didn’t get a chance. I’m an avid reader of several Open Source blogging “planets” and religiously read them every day in order to keep up with new developments or just to pick up a few things here and there. I’d say that most of the time I really enjoy the posts that get published but every now and then come across a few posts which I find inclined to post a reply.

Imagine yourself off on a bus going on a business trip at some far away place. This being a far away place, you eventually fall into a very heavy sleep and loose track of time and direction. Several hours later (or maybe even days?) you are awaken by someone who, speaking a different dialect seems to be telling you that the bus has reached its destination. Still a bit groggy from the sleep you shrug off this incident, grab your bag and step out of the bus and… To your surprise, you realize that the bus station seems somewhat odd and different from what you had expected… and when paying closer attention you also notice that every thing, people, stores signs, even trees, look different.

Yesterday, following the announcement that the folks behind the Opera web browser were giving away registration keys (the FREE part is implied) in celebration of their 10th anniversary, I too took the time to download a Linux version to see what the big deal was. Opera is yet another web browser that is freely available for several different operating systems (Linux and Windows included) with a small caviat: The un-registered version has a toolbar-like banner displaying adds while you browse.

While telling a co-worker how I managed to listen to my private *.ogg music files, I was asked if my music collection was “legal?” Having never spent much attention or time trying to understand what the music industry’s peeve with music swappers, I started to think out loud what the answer should be to his question. The logic I used was as follows: All of my current music files were originally encoded from my own, store-bought CDs… I have pretty much gotten away with keeping the real CDs at home because [lengthy explanation followed here]… and decided to keep a digitized copy stored in one of my many external hard drives.

My good friend from `The Land of the Rum <http://www.ogmaciel.com/?p=166>`__ has spent the last 4-5 days attempting to install iWhax Linux onto him Windows XP laptop via VMWare 5. If I remember correctly, there weren’t a lot of usefull information “out there” in the web and the few posts we (I also did some googling on the side for him) came across were either inacurate or not very newbie friendly. I remember that I borrowed his laptop this last Friday and tried some of the “recipes” but the automated installation script (don’t remember the exact location in the iWhax menu) failed miserably every single attempt.