Brian's Blog

I've mentioned this recently to several friends of mine but decided to post it anyway since I don't meet everyone I know in person all that often. This video is pretty darn funny. But then again, anything that makes fun of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton kind of has a leg up in the funny department.



So, there ya go, another useless blog post.

OK, so I'm a bit of a late bloomer on this one but I've finally given an Ubuntu derivative a go and I have to say it's really kind of nice. I've pretty much been in love with Slackware since I started using Linux as my primary OS and never really gave another disto a chance. That is until I recently acquired a 2nd hand laptop. When I worked at Inova Technologies I was given an IBM Thinkpad T30 to use. It was a nice and fairly Linux friendly laptop on which I had installed Slackware 10.2 at the time. Much of it worked but I had to jump though some serious hoops to get laptopish things, such as suspend to disk, working. I recorded my efforts and if you take a look at that article you will see it was far from easy. The results were nice and it was one heck of a learning experience, but I just don't have that kind of time right now to do it all again.

I'm not going to go into a review or Kubuntu, that's been done elsewhere and a quick web search will probably bring up a slew of reviews. But I was happy to see that everything, and I mean everything, worked right out of the box when I installed Kubuntu. Suspend to RAM, suspend to disk, xorg, and wireless Just Worked© with no intervention at all.

Don't get me wrong, I still love my Slackware and will keep it on my workstation and whatever servers I choose to run but Kubuntu made for a nice quick workstation with minimal fuss. Pretty cool stuff. Linux sure has come a long way it seems, even in the short time that I've actually been using it.

I'm sure I've seen this page sometime in the past and I'm surprised I didn't blog it knowing what my view is of the War on "Terror". The page I'm talking about is www.costofwar.com. I have no way to know how accurate this is in the slightest, but the numbers seem on par with what I've read about as I recall. The cool thing is you can narrow it down and show what the war has cost your city. It claims for the entire country that the cost is $454,596,620,508 (at the moment I wrote this) and climbing fast. The cost for the State of Pennsylvania is $17,334,373,454. And the cost of the City of Bethlehem is $89,907,196.

Wow, that is a hell of a lot of money! One can't help but wonder what just a small portion of all this money could have done domestically. I sometimes wonder just what we have gotten, as citizens, as a return for our investment into this war. I haven't seen anything substantial other than costs in general rising probably due to fear and uncertainty in the market (this may be due to many other factors), my rights worn away, privacy eroded, and the constitution tossed out the window. Some may say we are safer from "terrorist" than we were, but are we currently any safer from our own government?

Perhaps I'm just being a pessimist and not seeing the good. Anyone care to point out what I'm hopefully missing?

I found this on Break. It was somewhat amusing. I guess some people have way to much free time on their hands.

I've been way behind in getting pictures off of the camera and into the picture gallery so I figured it's about time I took care of it. I've added (finally) the pictures from the Fourth of July Picnic, our day trip to the New Jersey Aquarium, my wife's garden, and the few pictures we took of Angie's birthday party that was held yesterday.

Today we had a gathering to celebrate my daughters 3rd birthday so I decided to try out some new beer on the family. Some time ago I was introduced to Victory Beer. Specifically I first tried Victory Lager and then some time later the Hop Devil Ale and found them both very good. Anyway, I grabbed a variety case of Victorys (thanks Rik) which contains Hop Devil Ale, Golden Monkey, Prima Pils, and Victory Lager. It seemed to be fairly well received by the few beer drinkers that were present. My wife's father was the only one who seemed to enjoy the Hop Devil Ale. But that's not much of a surprise as he seems to like pretty much all beer, especially the darker and/or heavier ones. I tried a Golden Monkey for the first time tonight and WOW does that thing pack a punch. It's quite flavorful but 9.5% alcohol which I didn't realize till after I had finished drinking it. Needless to say I didn't have any more of those as I needed to be coherent enough to help host.

Of course though, I didn't forget the ladies (yes, that includes you Bob) and grabbed a six of Coors Light.

I can't say to much about the party in general as it was a typical kids party. There were gifts, cake, and family. After the cake we all ran around the yard playing ball with the kids and got reminded as to just how out of shape all of us adults are.

In short, it was a good time. Well, except for the cleaning up part.