Watson Family News

This is a little scary. I’ve been using Google Reader for a while now for reading my RSS feeds. All of us at work have started using the “share” feature to share items we find interesting. One day this week I was checking Google Reader and I had two thoughts about how the share feature could be better.

1. I wanted to be able to share any web article I came across, even if I didn’t find it in Google Reader.
2. I wished I could add a note to the items I shared so I could provide context for my somewhat-random choices.

I looked in the FAQ and searched the web to see if there were any hacks that would let me do this, but didn’t find anything. When I got home from work I started up Google Reader and was stunned to find that both features had been added since that afternoon! Not only can Google now read minds, but they work fast.

I just updated my Dell laptop to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) the other night. I actually just reinstalled over my previous Ubuntu partition, and everything went without a hitch. I had a few moments of trepidation as I held my finger over the mouse. My nightmare is accidentally choosing the wrong partition and wiping out my Windows system.

Losing Windows wouldn’t be so bad, but losing all my saved games would be tragic. I’m only part way through The Orange Box and I’d have to start again from scratch. Now that I think about it, replaying Portal and Episode 2 wouldn’t be so bad. So far Episode 2 is the usual, polished Half-life game, but not much of a departure from the previous two releases. Portal on the other hand is something completely new (to me at least). A great, mind-bending puzzle game with a fun, funny sequence at the end that made me want to replay the ending as soon as I’d finished it. Or I would have if it hadn’t already kept me up until 2:00 in the morning. I choose sleep and waited a few days to replay it.

Back to Ubuntu — like Orange Box, it’s pretty great. So far everything just work in a smooth and integrated way. Both my ATI video card and my wireless card worked out of the box. It was easy to download the optional proprietary ATI driver and install it. The default apps are well chosen and work just fine. Mounting Windows shares is easy and I can even mount a remote system through SHH — pretty cool. In general, the best Linux system I’ve ever used and the first I’d recommend to a casual user over Windows.

So I got a video iPod as my big present for Christmas, and I totally love it. My brother Christer couldn’t recommend it highly enough as a way to stay entertained on the commute, and I completely agree. It has totally changed how I feel about driving to and from work. I used to barely tolerate it and any time it took me more than 40 minutes to get home I would be in a foul mood. Now I hardly mind at all since it gives me more time to listen to the different shows I download to my iPod. So far some of my favorites are:

• Lugradio
• Diggnation
• The Ricky Gervais Show
• The PC Gamer podcast
• NPR: Story of the Day
• Science Friday

As a computer geek I just love playing with software. So when I heard that a new version of WordPress was out I just had to try it out. So far so cool. If you want to get to my old posts, go to http://blog.thewatsons.info:81/family.