Tech Frustations and Observations
I have been saving up on a few of these for a while, but I have not really had enough to make a decent post until today and it seems that it boiled over today. Funny that I have all these vacation things that I plan on posting, but I have yet to get to those because of all the things that I am finding that I am wanting to say right now. I am sure I will get to that and to the massive amount of pictures that I need to work up for both myself, my wife, and to share here on the blogs on occasion as well. One quick note before I get started on the frustrations – I have removed some of the inactive blogs from my ‘other thoughts’ links list and will be looking to find a few to put back in their. Let me know if you have one that fits in some way. Anyway, on to the observations and frustrations.
- Blogging since 1990 is something I saw on a weblog the other day. Fact is, I was hesitant calling the site a blog, as it was in fact much more a commercial endeavor then a blog anyway. Caught a second site that made some sort of similar early 90′s claim. The thing that really struck me and that I found so frustrating is that blogs, blogging, and even web logs did not exist back in 1990. Back at the time we were starting to evolve toward the web we know today from the previous generation of bulletin board systems with threaded forums and such. A few people were even manually updating on a regular basis something of a personal journal, or similar for some journalist, or something more likely called when not personal a web-a-zine or just zine. The term web log did not come into practice until late 1997 and the shortened blog was more like 1999. Even then though, there was not the rabid adoption and only a few ‘bloggers’ existed up through the early 2000′s. Guess those folks blogging in 1990 were also on Al Gore’s staff when he invented the Internet.
- Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx has become my favorite operating system since its release back in April, which given my preference for such I am sure that comes as no surprise. I rarely boot into Windows on my daily user laptop at all and usually that is because of some proprietary (read ASP website) software or to test something in Windows 7.0. However, I do have one – well really two – big gripes with the updates on Lynx. I have finally realized that GRUB made some changes and it automatically pulls information into the boot menu from select locations. However, every time it updates I get a new pair of entries for the main Lynx install I have, at the top, pushing everything else down the screen. Very aggravating.
- My second Lucid Lynx Linux update gripe, every other time the CUPS (printing) system is updating it seemingly wipes out my defined printers. Not such a big deal if you have one printer at home you use, but I go to three different offices using six different networked printers on a regular basis. That is getting old quick.
- A much-needed theme update is order for here at Mephistos. I had thought about pursuit of such previously but had decided to hold off until have WordPress 3.0 came out. Since then, I have just not been able to make the time to work it out completely, but have most of my ideas down now. Oh, I did mention that this is going to be a custom designed theme, right? I am not sure if it will get completely done this weekend, pending what the weekend holds, but that is the tentatively plan. And please bare with us as we make the changes, but I think the crisp faster loading theme with the options I want will be there. And do not worry, while I plan to release it to the public, it will maintain a GPL license structure.
- Speaking of technical plans, I still have on the to do list the job of getting the old forums from the old Eligius site converted over and placed online in some format. Basically, I have to convert up through two versions of PHPBB and then over to BBPress (as I think that is the proper way to incorporate them at this point and time. If nothing else, it will be a good mental/technology exercise.
- Dropbox is starting to annoy me a little bit. Some how my monthly fee has been charged against my account, but they are not acknowledging that fact. And trying to get information about it has been like pulling teeth. I am not completely ready to McAfee them (write them off completely) but I am getting closer to that step.
** – image from website Spicy Mustard
