The book meme, because it beats studying.

"People." - 5th full sentence, pg 56, The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition, Strunk & White.

Elements lives on my desk; has since junior high when my father bought me a copy. That copy went missing in a move years ago; the current one is a replacement I bought for myself in college. It's one of four or five reference books that live next to my monitor and get consulted occasionally.

Meme HOWTO:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Finally (two whole days after release!) upgraded my machine to Ubuntu 8.10, the Intrepid Ibex (which is a kind of goat, hence my title...)

Haven't tried everything yet, but it boots faster than 8.04, all my apps survived the upgrade, and despite a glitch in the upgrade process it appears to have gone cleanly.

Some pros and cons:

• Muine is back, apparently working after two Ubuntu releases of being utterly busted. It's currently sitting on desktop #6 sucking up CPU cycles indexing all the music I've added to my collection over the past year!
• Encrypted Private Directories - awesome. This is the sort of thing that I've always wanted to try, but never been brave enough. Kudos to Ubuntu for making it so easy!
• Intrepid's wallpaper is cool, but way less cool than Hardy's heron. The ibex's horns look like they're formed from a coffee-cup stain ring on a piece of paper...
• Another boring, non-informative startup scrollbar. Seriously, Dapper got this right - scrollbar + non-threatening text scroll of what's happening to your system. I've tweaked various settings on previous Ubuntu installs, but I've never been able to recreate Dapper's perfect startup. Could we get this back please, at least as an option?
• One oddity: the grey "package manager in use" icon seems to stick around for a few minutes after you close Synaptic/AddRemove/aptitude/whatever. Is this a bug, a feature, or some quirk that only I get?

I followed my usual process of torrenting the Alternative install CD, burning that, and upgrading off it - far, far faster than waiting for Ubuntu's overloaded servers to deliver everything needed for a dist-upgrade!

So J. Random Blogowner (that'd be me) posts a blogrant about Jamendo's lack of OGG torrents and fires it into the void - and lo and behold, the first two of three comments I get on that post are both (both!) from people who work for Jamendo, who collectively say (allow me to paraphrase here):

1. Yes, they know torrents are down; it's not just OGG torrents but the MP3 ones too.
2. Apparently their main hosting provider shut down the torrent traffic with little to no notice. WTF?
3. A fix (moving the torrents to another server run by (hopefully) saner providers is in progress.
4. I'm welcome to contact either of them anytime for an update on this.

All of this within eight or ten hours of my original post - not bad considering the time zone difference between here and Europe and the general obscurity of my little blog. As the third comment on my original post put it, "Yay Jamendo power response!"

So thank you and major kudos to the Jamendo people for running a project that's both awesome and awesomely responsive!

Most of the results are in; it looks like Canada's federal election has been won (kind of) by the Conservatives. Pity. At least they're still a minority government; that's more than they deserve but at least they didn't get a majority out of this unnecessary electoral waste of time.

Locally, our Conservative MP is back in (pity, that) and the Conservatives are also one seat up on Vancouver Island, at the expense of one of the few Liberal MPs I actually liked. An even greater pity, that.

I haven't seen total voter turnout numbers yet - still rummaging through CBC's website - but I wouldn't be surprised to see them down over previous elections. I'm not the only one who things this election wasn't actually needed - pity Mr. Harper disagreed. (And yes, I did so vote. That's why I'm allowed to complain...)

Random post-election observation: CBC's comments section is giving YouTube's a race for "Dumbest Commentariat on Teh Intartoobs", it really is...

Jamendo, everyone's favourite source of excellent free music, has become slightly less excellent. With their update a while back, they introduced direct downloads, but only of MP3 formats - if you want OGG, you'll have to use the old torrent files.

Not a problem, you'd think - Jamendo used to be seeding ALL of their own stuff all the time, so even if it wasn't fast, you'd get your download eventually. At some point around the big update of the site, the torrent seeding stopped, though, and it's never restarted... so unless another Jamendo user is peering the OGG-format of the album you want, you're stuck with the MP3 version...

I've tried a couple of different torrent clients, I've re-downloaded the .torrent files in question, I've checked my router's settings... the problem isn't at my end. Jamendo torrents with peers work; Ubuntu ISOs work; other torrents work. If Jamendo went back to their old practice of seeding everything they offer a .torrent for, they'd work too. It's hardly a bandwidth issue - a torrent not being requested uses miniscule amounts of bandwidth - especially compared to the bandwidth that must be sucked up by offering the new direct downloads of MP3-format music.

Anyone know who to poke at Jamendo to get proper OGG torrent service restored?

Although it's much overshadowed by the clown show to the south of us, there is in fact a federal election going on here in the Great White North. Thanks to some oddness of the Election Canada database, I was no longer registered in the riding I've been living in for the last five or so years, so I had to go to my local riding office to re-register — best to do that now instead of election day, the chap at Election Canada's call centre said.

It's about 24km by road, round trip, a nice easy bikeride for my day off assuming the damn rain held off. Re-registering took all of two minutes after a nice ride; asking the clerk about voting lead to him mentioning that there was, in fact, an absentee/advance polling station open right there, if I was sure I knew who I was voting for...

Remembering my ABCs, I decided to vote then and there... so I've done my bit, now I get to watch the show (ours and the Yanks) and complain about whoever wins!

As a bonus, it didn't start drizzling until I was nearly home, too...

Combine very large lumps of rock and rather small aircraft; add summer weather that hasn't exactly been perfectly summery; stir carefully. If you're in British Columbia, you could well get this:

On Labour Day weekend (30th & 31st of August) I flew from Victoria up to 108 Mile House in the BC interior in a Cessna 172. My grandmother came along for the ride; we spent the night at my aunt & uncle's new (still under construction!) house and came back on the evening of the 31st. The flying was exhilarating, the scenery spectacular, and it was great to see the relatives again.

Credit where due: Corey took most of these pictures, although with my camera, so I threw them up on my Flickr stream. I was busy flying the airplane! The full set can be viewed on Flickr.

Like most pilots, I'm a weather junkie. I need a regular weather fix even if I'm stuck indoors and not flying. GNOME's Weather Report panel applet (gweather-applet, technically) is a great fast fix if all I need to know is "Is it raining at the airport right now?"

Aside from fantastic customisability, gweather has really cool icons for seemingly every combination of weather conditions. I'd love to use some of these icons in my own work (as per whatever license they're under, of course!) but I can't seem to find them on my /system files. There must be some way to coax this information out of my system (Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron) but my commandline-fu is weak in this.

So, anyone know where gweather tucks it's icons away?

Today's lesson: wireless involving old, cheap, slow routers is a waste of time.

In fact, such wireless networks are the reason Cat5 exists in 75ft lengths.

Getting old and crappy routers actually routing is for those who can't string nice blue cable...

The Good News: Ubuntu 8.04 ships with Epiphany 2.22.2, which is slick - faster than previous releases, with the same carefully-chosen set of features that really make Epiph seem like "Firefox done right".

One noticable new feature is Session Recovery (finally!). There's still no session-saving, but at least if Epiph falls over it (usually) remembers where it was.

The Bad News: Session recovery gets a LOT of exercise in Epiph 2.22.2. This has to be the crashing-est browser I've ever used regularly, and I used to run beta versions of Opera, for Dog's sake! There's no pattern I can determine to these crashes, hence the lack of actual bug reports to Launchpad... One day it'll be some random Web 2.0ish page (Facebook, sometimes Flickr...); the next some entirely basic webpage with nothing more exciting than HTML & basic CSS on it — so this can't even be blamed on screwy Javascript, as was so often the case with Opera...

Do I just have lousy luck with Epiph 2.22.2, or is this a Known Problem? Must confess I haven't even searched LP or Gnome Bugzilla yet... I'm relying on teh lazywebs this time. Why does this otherwise awesome browser crash so damn much?

The Future(tm) continues to arrive in strange ways...

NASA finds water on Mars... and announces the news through the robot's Twitter feed. Awesome, on lots of levels!