Folgers Commercial

In the new Folgers commercial, the guy coming home from Iraq / band camp / two years of living in a diner drinking nothing but old dishwater spiked with soy sauce / all of the above, exclaims happily when seeing a canister of Folgers: "Real Coffee!". Enough said.

Be careful what you wish for

Home with a cold

And looking for something to read. Maybe Chaim Potok's "My name is Asher Lev". Wish I had an unread Pratchett book.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala a slow starter

So I updated from Ubuntu 9.04 to the latest release code named Karmic Koala, 9.10 in numbers. The process of updating, as opposed to reinstalling, went by without any hick ups. This is just a short list of mostly cons but also some pros.

So let's start with the cons:

1. It's a lot slower to boot up. Not sure why this is but the 9.04 release had a boot time that was pretty impressive. The Karmic Koala on the other hand is a real slow starter.
2. The default colour scheme is ugly. Sure you can change the theme, but that initial brown is just plain old ugly.
3. I've had several weird crash reports so far. Not a big issue and I'm sure it's being worked on.

Ok, enough with the complaining. So what do I like?
1. The sound. Pulse Audio has finally come through on it's effort to create some kind of centralized sound support for Ubuntu. Thank you. I'm currently running my Turtle Beach Riviera sound card with digital out to our Onkyo receiver and it sounds good. For you that are still running plain old analog output: sure it works and you'll get decent sound, but the digital out is so much nicer! Trust me.

Another Year

So it's time to add one more year on top of the other 31. When I was in my early 20s it seemed that life would end, or at least go down hill rapidly, at 25. I was wrong.

Ps. I had oyster shots yesterday. And yes it was just as horrible as you probably imagine.

Who You Fight With

One of our neighbours, Larry, said something interesting yesterday as he was talking about his time in Oslo. He had noticed that while Americans fight with each other as they get drunk, Norwegians (and I would say Swedes as well) seemed to wrestle with themselves in a similar intoxicated state of mind. He mentioned that they walked around screaming but that there really wasn't any actual fights. I wonder if this is part of the Scandinavian mindset, to be more self-critical and in a constant wrestling match with yourself. I guess you could argue that Scandinavians when they drink gets too drunk even to fight, but that seems a bit far fetched.

Update

After a few months working part time I'm back up to full time again. It's good news, even though I've gotten used to the hours.

In the office and having my first coffee of the day in a Santa Maria that is overcast.

Still going to get certified in Java even though the book is as dry as really dry stuff. Been reading up on areas like Hibernate, Spring, JSP, Servlets and Stripes. Stripes is a pretty nice little web framework that, although it lacks some of the name recognition that other frameworks have, it still seems both powerful and easy to use.

Time to go.

Boogie Boarding at Jalama

So we went to Jalama Beach this weekend and Domenic and I did some Boogie Boarding. We saw dolphins and at one point a sea lion was a little bit too close for my liking. It was fun and lots of hard work. Note to self for next time: keep the mouth shut when being hit by wave.

Yes We Can

I had a nightmare last night. Part of it was a really big shark. But I will not let this deter me from starting to boogie board. So there, it's said.

Now I just need to find a decent wetsuit for a decent price.