Willfe.com

The good news in recent days is that I’m managing to keep up with almost everything, except I’m pretty much always tired and ready for a nap. So far my grades are holding steady at “A” in my classes, and my pace at the office has been decent (not my best, but certainly not my worst).

I’m certainly not the first (and won’t be the last) person to whine incessantly about this, but for this kind of thing to continue happening even in the face of more and more companies publicly announcing they’re cutting this crap out and switching to some better kind of packaging just irritates the hell out of me (as always, click for bigger versions):

All that packaging, just for this little handheld gadget:

Holy crap. The past week has been hectic and weird enough that I managed not to publish any “daily updates.” Heh. Good thing I’m not getting paid for this, eh?

Fortunately not a whole lot of “interesting” stuff transpired this past week, apart from our finally getting the living room finished and getting proper dressers set up in our bedrooms. This week did represent my final week as a non-student — tomorrow evening I attend my first college class for about 15 years. Computer Science, here I come … via the roundabout way of taking all the boring stuff (US Govermnent, Macroeconomics, Freshman Comp I & II, Math for Morons, etc.) first.

It’s become apparent in the past couple of years that Drupal isn’t a good fit for willfe.com. It’s good at what it does, but I’m using very little of it, and it’s just gigantic especially for what I’m using it for here.

It’s going to be a few weeks in the making but I’m going to put together a replacement for this domain built in Django instead. I’ve found some pointers on migrating the content, so if all goes well, all my mindless blathering will be preserved but it’ll all be running on a spiffy, streamlined platform.

People are annoyed that since Picasa 3.5, Google hasn’t released an official binary for the tool on Linux (previous versions, up to 3.0, included a Linux installation). It’s time to quit whining about this, and here’s why:

• It still works just fine and it’s really easy to set up (see below)
• The reason it still works just fine is that it was originally released for Linux by way of a custom build of Wine that made it work. The customizations Google made to Wine to support Picasa have found their way into Wine’s regular upstream (that or the Wine guys have implemented those changes themselves), so you can just install the Windows version on your Ubuntu box (which is what you were doing anyway with Picasa 3.0)

Ye gods, what a busy, complex week filled with good stuff!

Of course I’ve already blathered on about the new chinchilla[^1], but BJ also gifted us a bit of cash to go snag the rest of our long-desired living room set (sofa, love seat, and chair) from Ikea. Then there’s my new camera keeping me busy reminding me how much I suck at photography (since it’s not a point-and-shoot, it expects there to be actual competence/talent at the controls, and I need lots of practice to satisfy it).

A bunch of subtle little improvements have crept into the works as well — it’s amazing how something as simple as a “smart switching” power strip can improve the home computing experience. Switch on the computer, monitors & powered speakers automatically kick on. Switch the computer off again, and the monitors and speakers go dark again. Heh. This crap’s been out there since the 80s, but now I’m all caught up

To my pleasant surprise, my buddies Shannon and BJ acquired this darling little critter this week (ahead of my schedule for getting her myself ), who will now join the circus at our apartment in Orlando:

From 2009-12-25 Leeloo

Her name is Leeloo, and she’s adorable A couple videos are available as well (I took these with a new camera I’m still getting used to, so they’re not all that great, but they’ll do for now):

• Chinchilla Cuddle
• Free-Range Chinchilla

One astute reader, @_Baylink, correctly noticed my strange but accurate usage of the word “Penultimate” in my last post about stupid Christmas songs. I’m so happy someone was paying attention

PayPal has to be one of the biggest ripoffs in modern history — all the worst features of a regular bank (slow for actually moving money, expensive transaction fees, absolutely insane anti-consumer policies, etc.) and none of the good ones (i.e. no FDIC insurance for funds stored, no real accountability since they’re “not a real bank”, etc.).

It wouldn’t be “The Holidays(tm)” without at least one rant from every jerk out there with a blog (heh), so here’s mine. As Tim Henson of the Distorted View Daily Show points out, part of the reason folks get so burned out as far as Christmas goes is how repetitive and boring the music gets.