You Are a Little Negative...

You can be negative from time to time, but you rarely go overboard. You have a realistic view of the world, and most people appreciate your honest insights. Like everyone else, you have your darker moods. But when you're feeling super negative, you keep your feelings to yourself.

Are You Too Negative?

How do you Measure a Year in Your Life?

My music tastes have gone on a strange journey recently, and I seem to be stuck on songs from a few Broadway musicals, particularly Wicked, Rent, and Sweeney Todd. The songwriting for all of those shows is strong, and certain songs seem to speak to me. I love the underlying themes of all three shows, but today I want to point out Season's of Love from Rent. It's a song that reminds us to measure our lives in love instead of all the other insignificant things that we deal with every day. Our friends and families are more important than all that and they deserve more than we sometimes give them.

Watch the video and read along with the lyrics and allow the song to speak to you.





Seasons of Love
Original Broadway Cast

Company :
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Moments So Dear
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
How Do you Measure - Measure A Year ?

In Daylights - In Sunsets
In Midnights - In Cups Of Coffee
In Inches - In Miles
In Laughter - In Strife
*
In - Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
How Do You Measure
A Year In The Life
*
How About Love ?
How About Love ?
How About Love ?
Measure In Love
*
Seasons Of Love
Seasons Of Love
*
Soloist # 1 :
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Journeys To Plan
*
Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand
Six Hundred Minutes
How Do You Measure The Life
Of A Women Or A Man ?
*
Soloist # 2 :
In Truths That She Learned
Or In Times That He Cried
In Bridges He Burned
Or The Way That She Died
*
All :
It's Time Now - To Sing out
Tho` The Story Never Ends
Let's Celebrate
Remember A Year In The Life of Friends
*
Remember The Love
Remember The Love
Remember The Love
Measure
In Love
*
Soloist # 1 :
Measure Measure Your Life In Love
*
Seasons Of Love ...
Seasons Of Love

The New Star Trek Film

I've seen some spy shots of shooting locations, and I've read some supposed plot spoilers, but I am reserving my judgment until I see the movie. However, there are rumblings in the blog-verse that Abrams may be changing too many things.

One of my favorite bloggers, Wil Wheaton, says it better than I:

On one hand, this could be Abrams saying, "I'm going to take Star Trek and make it relevant to an audience that hasn't loved it and watched it for 40 years." That's not necessarily a bad thing.

On the other hand, it could be him saying, "Look, Trekkies, I know you've been watching this show for 40 years, but I'm JJ Fucking Abrams and if I want to 'reinvent' this thing that means so much to you, I'm going to do it. So don't get your spacesuits in a knot when I put turbines on the Enterprise, okay? They look cool!" That would be a very bad thing.

I guess we'll all have to wait and see.

Pennsylvania Tuesday

One of the politcal blogs that I read posted this today and made me laugh:

Hillary Clinton will win Pennsylvania.

Arguments over the meaning or meaninglessness of her win will dominate MSM and stretch bandwidth to its breaking point. Bloggers and pundits will dust off their favorite boxing metaphors: "Hillary's off the ropes!" "Obama can't land the knockout!" Hillbots will rejoice, Obamabots will panic, and McCainbots will watch Murder She Wrote and go to bed at six-thirty. I'll probably write a scathing post attempting to prove that Hillary is the devil incarnate. We'll all lose our minds.

It's perfectly true and funny all the way around.

How Well Do You Know Starbuck?

I'm ranked Colonel in the Starbuck quiz, created by The SCI FI Channel at SCIFI.COM's Create-A-Quiz. To create your own quiz, click here.

I missed one question about her mother's name. Oh well. :-/

Battlestar Galactica!

Battlestar returns!

And I'm happy.

Windows Vista... dismissed

Do you know anyone that is satisfied with Windows Vista? I don't, and I suspect that you don't, either. I guess Bill Gates and a few other Microsoft execs might be happy with it, but I haven't seen anyone not on the Microsoft payroll who is willing to admit it.

I purchased a new Acer laptop last year on a whim. The technical specs seemed fine for my use. Intel Dual Core processor, 1 gigabyte of RAM, 160GB hard drive, CD/DVD burner. I wanted it to use as a surfing machine, blogging, and some light word processing and spreadsheet work. It came with Windows Vista Home Standard Edition pre-installed. At first I was reasonably pleased with it. Even though the boot time was long, I liked the eye candy that Vista brought to the table. It's networking system was a little quirky, but I finally got it working with my home and office networks: printing to different printers, sharing folders, etc.

After a couple of months with the machine I started to realize it's weaknesses. Suspend and hibernate never worked properly and would often require a cold reboot to return the computer to a usable state. Then it sunk in that the eye candy was just that... eye candy. It wasn't really functional or useful. It was pretty to look at, but served no purpose. Boot times seemed to get longer and longer, but I admit that could just be my perception of the machine changing over time. Then the real issue started. Occasionally it would lock up during the shutdown process, requiring me to hold the power button to force it to shut down. Then it would complain about that on the next boot. I was getting more and more frustrated and started to read other people's issues with Vista online. There are a lot of people out there on the internet(s) that are very, very unhappy with this OS. Some even call it Windows ME 2.

I did some investigation into 'downgrading' to Windows XP. I heard that Microsoft was allowing some users to do that for free so I called to check. Of course I wasn't eligible, and would have to purchase a copy of XP if I wanted to install it on my laptop. I decided that that route wasn't for me. I feel like I've given Microsoft enough of my money, and they produced and forced new PC and laptop owners to adopt Vista, which is a broken product.

Linux seemed like a good choice as a replacement OS on my laptop. I'd installed Ubuntu on my teenage daughter's desktop PC about a year ago and it had worked out great for her. It did everything she needed and wanted, and I didn't have any virus or spyware issues to resolve for her.

After I decided that Ubuntu would be my new operating system I had to decide if I wanted to have a dual boot system or not. Part of me wanted to hold on to Vista for the 'just in case' quotient, but I eventually decided to go cold turkey, no dual boot, 100% Ubuntu.

The install went very smooth. The only hardware issue I had was the wireless adapter and I quickly found the fix for it on the Ubuntu support forums. It's now been about two months since the install and I haven't regretted it at all. I'm still experimenting with Wine to get a couple of Windows only applications working, but overall I am extremely happy with the system. It's easy to update and to customize the look and feel, and everything just works.

This is definitely not the same Linux that I tried several years ago. While I had fun playing with it on an older computer, it wasn't ready for me to use exclusively. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is a true replacement for Windows, and it's ready for prime time.

If you're unhappy with Vista or sick of Microsoft's exploitation of humanity you should give Ubuntu or one of it's derivatives a try. You would probably be pleasantly surprised.