My sister had told me about this when she called to wish us a happy Easter. She was very excited about it and thought I’d feel the same. For those of you who don’t read any “geek news” or avoid any conversations that don’t relate to music videos or movies: Wired magazine published an article in this month’s issue about “How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.

Today I added the Dynamic Text Replace plugin for WordPress to my blog. I’m a bit lazy when it comes to writing and hate when I cannot do something by using the keyboard only. Or when I have to type the same thing over and over. That is why I chose to use this plugin. Dynamic Text Replace “allows you to easily pre-define text replacement template strings and allow for text to be passed in.

Just as promised, here’s my screenie of netapplet and gnome-blog running on my laptop!

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.

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.

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.

My daughter is very ill. Actually, she’s been ill for a few days now with very high fever and coughing coupled with a persistent runny nose. I had to take Wednesday off from work so I could bring her to her doctor but it turned out to be a complete waste of time. He even performed an on-site strep throat test to see if that was the problem but the results were inconclusive.

My personal quest of gathering as much information as possible on the requirements to enroll into a PhD program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill continued last Friday. I was up and early for my appointments at the Department of Computer Science considering I went to sleep really late the previous night. It was my sister’s birthday so I took her out to the movies and a late dinner.

Arrived here in North Carolina last night at the Raleigh-Durham airport. My younger sister was waiting for me and as soon as we picked up my luggage we headed to her apartment in Chapel Hill. Woke up early today and went to my first (and only) meeting with the chair of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC. My sister had set up the meeting for me and I must admit I wasn’t too sure if I wanted to spend the time to talk to someone from a department that had the word “library” in it.