Well I'm here in "the big apple" and once again enjoying my trip having arrived in time for a christmas lunch courtesy of my friend John Burridge. It's funny how similar and yet how different american society and culture is compared to Australia's. As an example just after the plane touched down at Newark, all the americans on board immediately burst out into rapturous applause. Aparently it's an american custom to applaud the captain of the plane upon a successful touchdown. Well as you can imagine there was a look of startled confusion on the face of almost every non american on board the plane. The second thing that struck me about america, and maybe this is just particular to the NY region I don't know, is how hopeless the cab drivers are at finding their way around. In this day and age I expect all cab drivers to have GPS satellites, but apparently that's a little too advanced for most, still though I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a cab driver would know where he is going, or at the very least to have a map to refer to if they had absolutely no idea. Of course none of those things would be the case in NY. So far I've caught about 14 or so cabs including my last trip and this one, and not ONCE has the cab driver even had a vague idea where Brooklyn was, let alone the street name I give them. They think it's odd that I can't direct them!
Another thing that you notice is just how sweet everything is over here. I remember when I first visited, ironically enough, John in London (at the time I was living in Berlin) and what struck me was just how salty everything was in England. Truth be told I still notice it everytime I come back from a stay of a week or more anywhere else. In america it's not the salt that you notice but the sweetness. I ordered a coffee this morning and asked got asked if I'd like sugar in it, to which I replied affirmatively and was shortly thereafter given said coffee. The coffee was undrinkable, not because it was too hot, or burnt coffee, but because it felt like I was drinking some sugar with just enough hot water to melt it. All of that said though I really do like it here, everyone, for good or bad, is open and inquisitive and very likely to strike up a conversation with you even as a complete stranger. It'd be the perfect trip if only I could find a way to get the live cricket without having to hang out in an Aussie bar ;)
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Monday, December 25, 2006
'twas the night before christmas ...
and all through the net, not a thing stirred, not even a mouse.
Well i'm sitting here counting down the hours till I hop on a plane and head off to New York. The heavy fog that caused chaos at Heathrow had me worried for a while, but as it cleared up over 48 hours ago, I'm hoping that they have got through the backlog, or at least got things back on schedule for my flight out at 0900. So as I have packed my bags and done all the things that need to be done I thought I'd have a look around the net while I had some spare time and write up a blog.
It's rare that I get excited about something in GUI land (graphical user interfaces) and it's even rarer when i havn't heard of it before stumbling onto it, but that was the case with Beryl. I had read some vague articles a year or two back about "composite window managers" and thought to myself that it would be good to have something decent for linux, but had then consigned it to the back of my mind. Of course in recent times (though the hype seems to have died down a bit of late) Max OSX has made lots of headlines about nice, friendly usable unix AND, most importantly, it's gorgeous GUI. Us linux users on the other hand have been stumbling along with KDE and Gnome for years thinking that while it's not that pretty, it's very functional and stable (my desktop at work, arguably one of the most abused machines in the world, has been up and stable without crashes [well at least not self induced ones] for about 8 months). We'd long since given up on actually playing games, well all the sensible ones had, there are of course a bunch of die hard Linux users that like to spend five times longer trying to get the game to run under cedega then they do actually playing the game, but hey it takes all types right? Personally the ONLY reason I have a windows partition at all on my desktop machine at home is to play games on and that's been the way since I left my amiga's. So you can imagine my surprise when crawling around the gentoo wiki I stumbled upon some screen shots of what looked like a REALLY sexy GUI. Further investigation wasn't to let me down and I was shortly examining Beryl in some detail and then installing it on my new home desktop. I'll side track here and say that I recently decided that I needed a new desktop at home, primarily because I bought a new Dell 24inch widescreen monitor and it's native resolution required a newer graphics card then what my old machine had. That in turn meant that I needed a new motherboard ... one thing led to another and the next thing I know I've spent a small fortune on what is comparatively, the best machine I've ever bought. By comparatively I mean that, I normally buy the 3rd or 4th best of each component on the market, that way you seem to hit an optimal point of performance and cost. At this point in my life though, I'm not constrained by the cost anymore and so I decided on getting something a little better ;) Needless to say I now have a machine capable of running a small supercomputing lab and my spare room (or my computer room as my ex liked to call it), now has a strong resemblence to a wind tunnel.
So here I am with a brand new machine running linux at a pace that I didn't think was possible AND a new, incredibly sexy yet functional GUI. Santa seems to have visited me early this year.
Well i'm sitting here counting down the hours till I hop on a plane and head off to New York. The heavy fog that caused chaos at Heathrow had me worried for a while, but as it cleared up over 48 hours ago, I'm hoping that they have got through the backlog, or at least got things back on schedule for my flight out at 0900. So as I have packed my bags and done all the things that need to be done I thought I'd have a look around the net while I had some spare time and write up a blog.
It's rare that I get excited about something in GUI land (graphical user interfaces) and it's even rarer when i havn't heard of it before stumbling onto it, but that was the case with Beryl. I had read some vague articles a year or two back about "composite window managers" and thought to myself that it would be good to have something decent for linux, but had then consigned it to the back of my mind. Of course in recent times (though the hype seems to have died down a bit of late) Max OSX has made lots of headlines about nice, friendly usable unix AND, most importantly, it's gorgeous GUI. Us linux users on the other hand have been stumbling along with KDE and Gnome for years thinking that while it's not that pretty, it's very functional and stable (my desktop at work, arguably one of the most abused machines in the world, has been up and stable without crashes [well at least not self induced ones] for about 8 months). We'd long since given up on actually playing games, well all the sensible ones had, there are of course a bunch of die hard Linux users that like to spend five times longer trying to get the game to run under cedega then they do actually playing the game, but hey it takes all types right? Personally the ONLY reason I have a windows partition at all on my desktop machine at home is to play games on and that's been the way since I left my amiga's. So you can imagine my surprise when crawling around the gentoo wiki I stumbled upon some screen shots of what looked like a REALLY sexy GUI. Further investigation wasn't to let me down and I was shortly examining Beryl in some detail and then installing it on my new home desktop. I'll side track here and say that I recently decided that I needed a new desktop at home, primarily because I bought a new Dell 24inch widescreen monitor and it's native resolution required a newer graphics card then what my old machine had. That in turn meant that I needed a new motherboard ... one thing led to another and the next thing I know I've spent a small fortune on what is comparatively, the best machine I've ever bought. By comparatively I mean that, I normally buy the 3rd or 4th best of each component on the market, that way you seem to hit an optimal point of performance and cost. At this point in my life though, I'm not constrained by the cost anymore and so I decided on getting something a little better ;) Needless to say I now have a machine capable of running a small supercomputing lab and my spare room (or my computer room as my ex liked to call it), now has a strong resemblence to a wind tunnel.
So here I am with a brand new machine running linux at a pace that I didn't think was possible AND a new, incredibly sexy yet functional GUI. Santa seems to have visited me early this year.
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