The Headway Posse
Grant & Clay Griffiths and me are the guys behind Headway (the new version of which is now available--wait till you see it!)
Michael Martine |
The Personal Blog of Michael Martine |
Grant & Clay Griffiths and me are the guys behind Headway (the new version of which is now available--wait till you see it!)
The weather was blustery and wet, getting rain drops on the camera lens. Photographer, I am not, but these will give you some idea of what I wandered around looking at while working off steam at my crapped out internet connection. Luckily, that situation was resolved nicely by getting a different room that ended up being more like what I wanted anyway: a smoking room with a desk, so I can relax, puff on my pipe, and get some work done.
I knew exactly nothing about New York City. Seriously, my ignorance is profound. I don't know the Burroughs or where they are. Everything I "know" about New York comes from movies, TV shows, and books.
This isn't the first time I've played with Linux. I briefly toyed with it a few years ago, and put it back on the shelf as not worth the time and learning curve. I'm a geek, but I'm not a hardcore programmer-type geek. And Linux wasn't ready for prime time, then. But now, I can install it without a hitch and get going quickly. I am enough of a nerd to navigate the familiar-but-different environment, and I'm learning fast as I go. A good book helps. I know there's help online, but I still find a good reference manual to be invaluable. I'm using Beginning Ubuntu Linux from Apress.
Right now I'm running Ubuntu on an older Celeron M laptop, and it runs WAY faster than Vista did. My next step is to try it out on another laptop that had problems with Vista, and then set up my big machine (quad core, 8gb ram) to dual-boot Win 7 and Ubuntu. Then we'll see if I can get along entirely without Windows and most proprietary software at all. Something tells me it wont' be too hard. One thing that is really thrilling is all the incredible open source software out there, from games to computer animation and graphics, to office stuff (already familiar with OpenOffice).Friends have been hammering me for years to get a Mac, get a Mac, get a Mac. But I think I might just jump right down the throat of the open source dragon. No license fees, ever, and I can put the software on as many systems as I want. That's sovereignty and freedom to me. Whoever understands and controls the tech in their lives, nowadays, has a hell of a lot more freedom than those who don't. Knowledge is indeed power. <end>
You probably don't realize how wonderfully subversive and cool the new Disney computer-animated Tinkerbell movies are. Underneath all the pixie dust and magic fou-fou is a great message for children: friends matter, don't give up no matter what, and HACKING IS COOL.
That's right, Tink's a hacker. To imagine a backstory for all the fairies from which Tinkerbell came from before she enters into the Peter Pan story, Disney's writers created classes of fairies who all have different jobs. One class handles water stuff, one handles plants, etc. The tinkers (can you see it coming?) are the builders and the fixer-uppers. They take junk, natural resources available to them, imagination, and elbow grease, and they totally hack stuff and build cool contraptions.
I think that's awesome. I like that that is the message my granddaughter is getting out of this.
It doesn't hurt that the art and style are great, either. There's still so much computer animation that just looks off, somehow, but Disney's animation DNA comes through in these two (the Lost Treasure is the second movie).
Where I LOL.
