More showcasing

Signed up onto Facebook a couple of days ago (so if you are reading this from an RSS/Atom feed on Facebook - hello!) partly out of curiousity. I had heard about it a couple of years ago when it was restricted to U.S. colleges. Now of course, it is the "big thing" in social networking, and is picking up steam for people like me in their 30s, who of course were the ones to really started using the internet in the early 90s. Some things I like, particularly their raison d'être, which is of course the networking. Some things thought seem limited - for example, there is a drop-down list of "political views", which carry run of the mill stuff - "conservative", "libertarian", "very liberal", etc. But I am fiscally conservative, socially liberal with a strong lean towards environmentalism in political governance. I've been voting Green the past few elections and was considering running for Green in Calgary. So where does that leave me on their list? I put "Other"...



Also, there is a note writing area with the ability to put in rudimentary html for styling - like bold or italics, but it does not allow me to use inline CSS styling, which is too bad, as that could really jazz up notes. So Blogger is a much better venue for writing my thoughts and getting some style with it.

On a final note, it is easy for me to know that Facebook is an American based site - you can put your religion in a part of you profile, which would then be used for social networking. As a Canadian, I notice this because in Canada, this would probably not be asked - Canada is much more secular a country than present day America, and we are also too worried about offending people to advertise our religious/spiritual beliefs.

My best news today is I bought a ticket for Interpol! My first live show at the MacEwan ballroom in nearly a decade... I'll feel old (especially as it is an all ages show) but it will be worth it!

Back on Linux

I finally got a Linux Ubuntu distro to work on my computer. One of my main problems with Linux is trying to get a distro to work on an AMD64 machine with an ATI card. While ATI may be one of the leading video card manufacturers, they suck at getting out Linux drivers. It should not be such a pain to get a system to basic functionallity - even as a professional in computers it is still difficult for me to get things working on Linux. So, after an hour of fighting with the xorg.conf file, I managed to get the desktop working...

Nonetheless, I am impressed at how far Linux desktop has come in the past couple of years. I used to use Red Hats Linux distros as they were easy to install, but because of their refusal to support MP3 players, I've never really thought Red Hat and Fedora were a lot of fun to use. Ubuntu, on the other hand is much more pleasant. One this I thought was really handy was the system automatically found my other hard drive that runs my Window's OS, and places an icon on the desktop that allows me to browse through it - so easy to grab pic, music, etc.

Now back to exploring what this thing can do!