I went to see Syriana this afternoon. Wow. Very cool movie. I’m sure there are plenty of people that won’t like it for lots of reasons, but I loved it. George Clooney did a very good job. This movie sort of makes me want to pick up one of Bob Baer’s books. I really like how well they communicate their portrayal of the world. The only nit I have with the story is Matt Daemon’s character Bryan Woodman. I sort of don’t see much point in that character being followed or developed other than to give more screen time to explain the lifestyle and politics of the Emir and his sons. I particularly like how well they portray the recruitment of a suicide bomber. It tends to gloss over the indoctrination of hate to make the characters more sympathetic, but it definitely gets the point across well enough to illustrate what’s going on to a generally oblivious American audience.

It must seem pretty obvious by now that I enjoy both aircraft and photography (especially combined). I followed a link on a forum to a neat writeup on an airshow with great pictures. In looking around the guy’s site I came across a nice “Airshow Photography” guide. Take a look.

http://www.richard-seaman.com/Photography/Airshows/index.html

Who left the door open and let in all the cold air? As I sit here, the wind chill outside is 3F and the forecast is for it to get down to -11F tonight. We got some snow today too. We’re far from the predicted 5 inches, but we had enough to be significant. Walking home from dinner it helped cause me some excitement. I’m starting to cross a crosswalk and this idiot in a Jeep decided that he wants to get through the crosswalk before I got to that side instead of stopping. Well, he guns the engine, loses traction and promptly rotates his car 90 degrees relative to the path he’s traveling before coming to a stop 6 feet directly in front of me with the grill pointed at me (perpendicular to the direction of the road). That was just great. Dude just laughed and drove off.

I’m so lucky. So, I check my mailbox today and find a little piece of paper. It’s one of the “you have a package that doesn’t fit in the mailbox” notes. I’m not expecting anything, so it was sort of a surprise. Of course it could just be something I had ordered and forgot about (it wouldn’t be the first time). I sign for the package and I’m immediately clueless. It’s a foam lined envelope filled with something that seems relatively large (and hard). Also, it’s from Buy.com, which I haven’t ordered anything from in quite some time. So I open it up and surprise, it’s a Sony Ericsson W800i. That immediately puts me in panic mode. Did I accidently order one? After that recent $900 car repair, I had to come to the realization I wouldn’t be able to get one of these for a long while (if ever). I’m standing there in panic mode thinking I’m suddenly way in the red over a phone, and then I decide to look at the shipping invoice. I notice the ship date and realize it’s gotta be from the wife. That was really sweet. It’s in the charger now. Looks like I’ve got a whole new portable media center!

So today was the first day of using KUbuntu in production. Things work great. I started to dislike Kontact and installed Thunderbird, but later looked to see if I could tweak the configuration of Kontact to better suit me. I did. Now Kontact’s Kmail component works well enough I don’t think I’ll need Thunderbird. It’s nice to have a calendar, to-do list, weather summaries, etc all in one app like that. It basically lives as the primary app on the second screen. I’m starting to feel restricted space-wise by 2 screens. XMMS replaced Winamp (w/ Shoutcast radio stream) without a hitch. In fact, about the only real effective change to my productivity today was the fact that I could tab my shells. Once I figure out the best way to use the OpenSSH client multiplexing, I’ll have it made. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a screenshot of the desktop to update this post with.

Update 1: Here is a screenshot of the desktop from today (12-06-2005).

Update 2: I did the update to KDE 3.5. For office use, there doesn’t seem to be that big of a difference. I do see a difference, but it’s minor details I don’t think too many people would notice.

I managed to get KUbuntu 5.10 (Breezy) working on my office machine. It supported everything pretty well. I got the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse working without installing a single extra piece of software not included in the base installation. I got the video (dual DVI Nvidia GeForce 5200) working including both DVI ports, screen spanning with Xinerama, and OpenGL on both screens by installing the Nvidia drivers with Adept and a little xorg.conf tweaking. Boy is this distro polished. I haven’t installed the KDE 3.5 packages yet, due to how many bugs they seem to have at the moment (at least according to the support forums), but I’m sure those will be worked out soon enough. This next week will get to be a nice real test to see how well it works for me in production.

I was starting to get a little curious when my SP-10 would be done. Considering how quickly it has returned the last two times it was in I was odd that I hadn’t at least heard something. Well, it was came back today. Total turn around time was 17 days, including Thanksgiving week. That’s very good time yet again. The invoice says they replaced the bolt head, extractor, and extractor spring. So, this is the fourth extractor and extractor spring set in the gun. I planned on hitting the range with the AK-74M tommorrow anyway, so I’ll take the SP-10 with me. I only have 200 rounds of ammo left to try with it, though. David said he’s going to a Tulsa gunshow tommorrow and would try to bring me back a case of Wolf 9mm and a couple cases of 5.45x39mm. So, depending on how prepared I feel for finals (if I even care at that point), I might burn through another case of 9mm next weekend. Boy do I hope it works this time.

Update 1: David managed to get 1000 rounds of 9mm for me, but there was no 5.45×39 at the show at all.
Update 2: Apparently, my SP-10 didn’t return with its mag.

Well, it’s December first. We’re a month away from 2006. The countdown until the end of finals is quickly coming to an end. I’ve got 15 days until I’m finished. It’s rather frightening and I feel woefully unprepared for a couple of the exams. Let’s just see if I can get self-motivated enough to do something about it. I need to apply for my diploma too. It seems the biggest downside to direct deposit that the University forced on us is that I almost never go to the Student Union anymore. I don’t have too much time left to get my application in.

In other news, KDE 3.5 is out. Yeah, it was a couple of days ago, but this is my first real thought about it. 3.5 excites me as it’s supposed to add webcam support for MSN in Kopete. That might be just just enough for me to convert my desktops over KUbuntu now. If things stay as slow as they have been around the office I’ll probably do the conversion on that desktop tommorrow. Integrated SuperKaramba will be nice too. I bet this desktop runs it nicely (as long as I can get the dual DVI output to work right).