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.

Wow!!! It didn’t take me a long time to come up with a pretty good list of some slick programs you can run off of a portable device! Here’s what I’ve come up with so far: Portable Firefox Portable Sunbird Portable Thunderbird Portable NVU Trillian Anywhere I’m still missing a good media player!!!

musikcube Originally uploaded by omaciel. After reading about Musik Cube on two different places today I decided to give it a try. I downloaded it at work from one of the many mirrors and installed it in less than 1 minute. After the initial import process by which Musik Cube extracts and populates itself with the information from your media files, I was pleased with the simple and clean UI look.