Sunday, December 31, 2006

Terry Paragliding

Launching for a a quick sled ride from the microwave towers here in Kamloops.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

XGL + Compwiz = WOW

I have been fooling around with some new Linux distros lately. Namely Open Suse 10.2 and Mandriva 2007. Both ship with the ability to run XGL and I have to say it's very cool. I will attempt to post a picture of it in action but if you want to see the real deal go to Youtube or Google Video's and type in XGL and watch a demo. I have been having a ball with all the effects but I also believe that this can be a productivity tool as well. Having four desktops available to you and being able to use them with little effort is a time saver. I tried Mandriva 2007 Power Pack first and was delighted to have a painless install and when it came time to finish my setup it asked me if I wanted to install a propietory driver for my video card (Nvidia 5200) I clicked yes and off it went to find download and setup my card with Nvidia drivers. Wow that was easy! After my first boot into the OS a quick look around the menus brought me to a "enable desktop effects" button. One click later XGL was running on my old hardware. I spent a day checking it out then did the Open Suse install. It was a smooth process also but installing the Nvidia drivers took a lot more work. But I prevailed and then enabling the desktop effects was a one click affair. Both OS's are very nice but I think the nod goes to Open Suse for it's clean look and sharp clean fonts. Don't get me wrong Mandriva is very nice also. I will spend some time with these two and let you know how it goes

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Something to think about

A quote from a song I heard on the radio.

"The more we take... the less we become."

I have thought about this a lot lately seems God wants say something and I have come to understand that when he speaks to me I need to listen, but more than that I need to act.

Saturday is here again

It's been a long while since my last post. Saturday afternoon is here and I am taking a break from chores. I just finished a little housekeeping, cooking and repairing our phone jack. The Internet has been making us a little nuts, one minute fast the other painfully slow. I found the phone jack was seized and the cord stuck. It would seem there was paint in the jack and hence problems. All seems well since I changed the jack out. The cold spell that hit us is over but we have a lot of snow left over. Derek said the launch has been plowed but only to the microwave tower. So.... still no flying. Perhaps in the next few weeks we can get a sleddy in. All is well here looking forward to Christmas. Just a few more things to get ready. Work is extremely busy but that is normal for us this time of year. Kris is coming to be with Jackie and I for Christmas and I am really looking forward to seeing her. We have been apart since she moved and I miss her. Thank God for the Internet and web cams I get to see my children and grand kids online. While it's not the same as in person it is nice. Jackie got herself a new laptop. This time she bought a MAC. I have looked at it a bit and found it similar to Linux but different enough where I feel lost. She is running Parallels software on it and is able to run windows at the same time as Mac OSX so it's kinda groovy. I am still playing with Linux and both my laptop and desktop are running dual boot with WinXP and Ubuntu. While the idea of a free OS and free software to run on it are appealing I think the average user will still find Linux a bit of a challenge. But with that said it is getting very close to being a viable desktop replacement in the very near future. Well the ham is bubbling in the pot and it's time to get some soup made.