New MercyMe CD and latest software toys
Today the new MercyMe album came out "All That Is Within Me" and they seem to be competing with Casting Crowns to see who can release the shortest album! In reality they are sounding more and more like Casting Crowns minus the female vocals which is both a good and a bad thing. At least they did not put a weird hidden song on the end of this album like they did on "Coming Up to Breathe" or Casting Crowns did on "The Altar and the Door". Just ten very nice tracks and that is it. They actually post their lyrics on their own album lyrics site, but my "All That Is Within Me" lyrics page makes the words actually copyable and also adds in the "extras" as they sing them.
My latest software toys include the vmware player running on both Windows and Linux and gOS. Since the vmware player is free you can openly install it where ever you like, create virtual machines ad infinitum and enjoy the wonders of virtualization. We may actually use it for a class where students will all boot the same copy of a virtual Windows98 system with preinstalled software on it. That way nobody can complain there was a problem with their system since they all will use the same virtual setup. It's pretty nifty.
The gOS linux distribution is a Ubuntu based distro that uses enlightenment as the window manager and is set up with a very simple and pretty "Mac OSX"-ish interface for launching applications for ease of use. They had actually used the system on a $199 Everex PC sold at walmart.com, but they actually sold out of their 10,000 units very quickly. You can actually find the same $199 PC at Newegg.com now. It may only have a 1.5 GHz VIA processor and 512MB of RAM, but for most uses that is fine. I know we have users in the department with 160GB hard drives and when I check their systems they are using about 10GB, most of which is their XP, Office 2003 and various Adobe installations. And for most users, all they ever use is a browser (Firefox or IE), a mail client (Eudora, Outlook or Thuderbird), Acrobat Reader and Office (Word, PowerPoint and Excel). Running gOS on a $199 system would probably just fine for most of these folks.
My last plug today will be for a website built by someone I know from church and his friends (although I really know his parents a lot better than he). It is www.itog.com, where ITOG stands for "Is This One Good?". At this site you rate just about anything on a 1 to 5 scale and it tries to find people with similar interests and recommends other items you might like based on your picks and the picks of those folks similar to you. It actually makes a lot of sense, but unfortunately it only has about 600 subscribers so the base is pretty small. I bet its subscriber base leans towards overly educated professional types and their families in the Saint Louis area, especially those who may attend our lovely church (with a new boiler)! Give it a try, since it is free and it's fun too. Plus it appears they wrote the whole interface with Perl (not PHP or Python) which means they are true hard core geeks!
My latest software toys include the vmware player running on both Windows and Linux and gOS. Since the vmware player is free you can openly install it where ever you like, create virtual machines ad infinitum and enjoy the wonders of virtualization. We may actually use it for a class where students will all boot the same copy of a virtual Windows98 system with preinstalled software on it. That way nobody can complain there was a problem with their system since they all will use the same virtual setup. It's pretty nifty.
The gOS linux distribution is a Ubuntu based distro that uses enlightenment as the window manager and is set up with a very simple and pretty "Mac OSX"-ish interface for launching applications for ease of use. They had actually used the system on a $199 Everex PC sold at walmart.com, but they actually sold out of their 10,000 units very quickly. You can actually find the same $199 PC at Newegg.com now. It may only have a 1.5 GHz VIA processor and 512MB of RAM, but for most uses that is fine. I know we have users in the department with 160GB hard drives and when I check their systems they are using about 10GB, most of which is their XP, Office 2003 and various Adobe installations. And for most users, all they ever use is a browser (Firefox or IE), a mail client (Eudora, Outlook or Thuderbird), Acrobat Reader and Office (Word, PowerPoint and Excel). Running gOS on a $199 system would probably just fine for most of these folks.
My last plug today will be for a website built by someone I know from church and his friends (although I really know his parents a lot better than he). It is www.itog.com, where ITOG stands for "Is This One Good?". At this site you rate just about anything on a 1 to 5 scale and it tries to find people with similar interests and recommends other items you might like based on your picks and the picks of those folks similar to you. It actually makes a lot of sense, but unfortunately it only has about 600 subscribers so the base is pretty small. I bet its subscriber base leans towards overly educated professional types and their families in the Saint Louis area, especially those who may attend our lovely church (with a new boiler)! Give it a try, since it is free and it's fun too. Plus it appears they wrote the whole interface with Perl (not PHP or Python) which means they are true hard core geeks!
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Right now I'm a tad busy procrastinating. If I slip up even a little I might lose my willpower and actually get some writing done.